Tor Norbye
@tornorbye.bsky.social
1.4K followers 360 following 74 posts
I lead engineering for Android developer tools and libraries at Google. Opinions my own.
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Here's another episode of the ADB podcast! There's been a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about Android's new developer verification requirement, so I spoke with Matthew, Patrick, Raz and Naheed to dig into what it is, what it isn't, and how it works.

youtu.be/A7DEhW-mjdc
Android developer verification
YouTube video by Android Developers
youtu.be
Compose 1.9 is now stable!

android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/08/what...

On top of the many new features, there are significant performance improvements (which you can configure further, see the prefetch API for LazyList), and for debug builds, you can turn on richer stack trace information!
What’s new in the Jetpack Compose August ’25 release
The Jetpack Compose 1.9 release introduces features like advanced shadow modifiers, new visibility modifiers, and enhanced rich styling capabilities.
android-developers.googleblog.com
We have a new episode of the Android Developers Backstage podcast up -- this time @chethaase.com and I are talking to Melba Nuzen and Ralston Da Silva from the Compose team about Autofill!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb6b...
Autofill in Compose
YouTube video by Android Developers
www.youtube.com
The math seems to check out - it's 0.1%, which rounded to the nearest whole percent is 0%. Is there a good reason to instead say "less than 1%" ? For 27.2% should it say "less than 28%"? Or "more than 27%" ? (Really asking, I don't understand the ux principle..)
Sorry, it looks like the bug tracking component itself was misconfigured; that's been corrected now and the bug (and any others in the same category) should now be accessible externally.
We have a new episode of the ADB podcast up -- I'm chatting with Siva Velusamy and Sandhya Mohan about the new features in Gemini in Android Studio -- the new agent mode and the upgrade agent!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlh6...
Bot to the future: Two years later
YouTube video by Android Developers
www.youtube.com
Yes! Just file it in the normal android studio category (available from the Help menu) and it should be routed appropriately
We've definitely heard the request; nothing to announce yet though.
I recommend setting up an API key (check the Gemini settings in Studio); that switches to a model which seems to do a better job with function calls. If not you sometimes have situations like the following :-)
We have a long list of improvements and fixes we're working on (along with expanding the set of available tools of course), but given the strong interest we also wanted to make it available to start experimenting with!

I'm already finding it quite useful.
The new agent in Android Studio is enabled in yesterday's canary build!

This build doesn't have all the tools hooked up that I showed in the I/O demo last week (agent here: youtu.be/KXKP2tDPW4Y?...), such as the Gradle awareness -- and it also doesn't have the Upgrade Agent yet. Hopefully soon!
My favorite "hidden" feature on Android is turning on the screen zoom by long pressing both volume keys. I use it all the time to read tiny text when apps don't properly support or limit zooming...
A File is also not a file 😀
Yep - this is issuetracker.google.com/issues/62121... - we'll have more documentation soon. @ducrohet.bsky.social, want to add anything?
Our annual "What's new in Android Developer tools" presentation is now online! Most of these features are already available, but though the upgrade agent and the general agent are baking a little bit longer, should be out very soon if all goes according to plan!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXKP...
What's new in Android development tools
YouTube video by Android Developers
www.youtube.com
Paging @fabinou.bsky.social , the tech lead for adb who did a lot of the work. Studio isn't enough, I think adb is the most important part, you may need OS improvements too for the standby listening thing; Fabien, what are the minimum versions?
It only started working properly a few weeks ago so not a lot of experience yet; I deliberately picked very simple examples for the demo to get the point across, but it seems to generalize to larger codebases too (it also has access to grep tools etc). But local codebase awareness needs more work.
Gearing up for Google I/O next week. The team is super hard at work putting the final touches on things for @jamaleason.bsky.social and I to present. Hope you can tune in!

io.google/2025/explore...