Google Announces Android Studio 4.0 with Jetpack Compose

Google has announced Android Studio 4.0, the next version of its Android app development software. In it is Jetpack Compose, a way to create a user interface for an app faster.

Jetpack Compose works with Kotlin APIs and is a toolkit to create an interface within Android Studio. In addition, developers see a live preview of changes in the image and the intention is that thanks to Jetpack Compose less code needs to be written to create an interface in an app.

Jetpack now also supports CameraX, with which the camera software of many Android smartphones works. As a result, it should take less effort to write code that works with the cameras of many smartphones. Studio 4.0 also includes support for Java 8 libraries and a new Motion Editor. Android Studio 4.0 is available as an experimental Canary version. The stable version of Android Studio has version number 3.5, while there is a beta of 3.6.

Google announces the new Android Studio at its own Dev Summit. There, the company also said that 60 percent of the apps in the top thousand now use Kotlin. The support for this has only been in Android for a few years.

Earlier this week, the search giant said that developers who want to develop apps for cars with Android operating systems can download an emulator that includes access to the Play Store. Earlier there was already an image for an emulator, but it did not contain the Play Store.