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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tornorbye.bsky.social
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
tornorbye.bsky.social
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
tornorbye.bsky.social
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
tornorbye.bsky.social
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..)
tornorbye.bsky.social
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.
tornorbye.bsky.social
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
tornorbye.bsky.social
Yes! Just file it in the normal android studio category (available from the Help menu) and it should be routed appropriately
tornorbye.bsky.social
We've definitely heard the request; nothing to announce yet though.
tornorbye.bsky.social
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 :-)
A screenshot showing a snippet of a conversation I had with Gemini in Android Studio where I had asked it to help fix some code, and it asked me to respond with the contents of the file in question -- instead of just reading it itself. I'm reminding it it can do that, which it then proceeded to do.
tornorbye.bsky.social
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.
tornorbye.bsky.social
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!
Screenshot of the new agent tab in Gemini in Android Studio showing the input prompt and sample queries
tornorbye.bsky.social
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...
Screenshot of the magnification shortcut setting on Android which is how you can enter a mode where pinch gestures magnifies everything
tornorbye.bsky.social
A File is also not a file 😀
tornorbye.bsky.social
Yep - this is issuetracker.google.com/issues/62121... - we'll have more documentation soon. @ducrohet.bsky.social, want to add anything?
tornorbye.bsky.social
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
tornorbye.bsky.social
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?
tornorbye.bsky.social
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.
tornorbye.bsky.social
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...
Screenshot of the web page for next week's "What's new in Android development tools" talk at Google I/O, airing Wednesday May 21, 2025 at 10am Pacific time.