Modern Android development

The Android team's recommended development tools, libraries, and guidance that make it fast and easy to build high quality Android apps.

Improve your productivity

The modern Android approach helps you build apps with less code so you can increase your development speed and reduce your maintenance.

Reduce your crashes

Incorporating best practices will help you see less errors, and your users will experience fewer bugs and crashes.

Focus on what makes your app unique

With less boilerplate, code complexity, fewer errors, and backwards-compatibility built in, you can focus on making your app unique.

What is modern Android development?

Compose:
Build compelling user interfaces

Jetpack Compose simplifies and accelerates UI development on Android. Write less code and use powerful tools and intuitive Kotlin APIs.

Use Compose

Kotlin:
A modern, concise, powerful language

More than 95% of the the top 1,000 Android apps use Kotlin to boost productivity, developer satisfaction, and code safety.

Learn more

Jetpack:
Libraries for easier app development

Check out the Android suite of libraries, which implement our best practices and reduce boilerplate code.

Get started

Use Android Studio for development

Android Studio is the official IDE for Android app development, featuring Compose design tools, flexible build system, and Android Emulator.

Android Studio

Target the latest Android version

We handle backwards compatibility, so you can target the latest Android version, use the latest technologies, and run consistently across Android versions and devices.

Get started

Architecture and testing best practices

Architecture, testing patterns, and guidance help you build solid, scalable apps.

Learn more

App quality

Build high-quality apps to provide seamless and consistent user experiences. Explore how to build for large screens, and ensure your apps work well across form factors like tablets, foldable devices, and Chromebooks. Use the Android core app-quality checklist to help evaluate the smoothness and safety of your user experience.

See guidelines

	Good	Great
Core value	Fun, useful, or both
User experience	Easy to use	Delightful to use
Technical quality	Work well on users' devices	Make the most of users' devices
Privacy and security	Safe	Designed for safety

	Good
Core value	Fun, useful, or both
User experience	Easy to use
Technical quality	Works well on users’ devices
Privacy and security	Safe

	Great
Core value	Fun, useful, or both
User experience	Delightful to use
Technical quality	Makes the most of users' devices
Privacy and security	Designed for safety

Samples

Now in Android

Now in Android is an Android app built with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. Now in Android is designed to serve as a reference for Android developers that models best practices for design and development.

Android System
UI

Intermediate

Compose samples

This repository contains a set of individual Android Studio projects to help you learn about Compose in Android. Each sample demonstrates different use cases, complexity levels and APIs.

Intermediate

To do app

These samples showcase different architectural approaches to developing Android apps. In its different branches you'll find the same app (a TODO app) implemented with small differences.

Intermediate

Build across Form Factors

Guide

Kotlin guide

Many Jetpack libraries for Wear OS are written in Kotlin to help you streamline your development, learn how to apply Modern Android development to applications for the wrist.

Guide

Large screens guide

You can use the same concepts from building UI and layout management in mobile apps to extend your app to large screens. Learn more here.

Guide

Compose for TV

The Compose for TV library enables you to build modern native TV apps, more efficiently and with less code, using components optimized for TV that are easily customizable.