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Google's New LiteRT Accelerator Supercharges AI Workloads on Snapdragon-powered Android Devices
Google has introduced a new accelerator for LiteRT, called Qualcomm AI Engine Direct (QNN), to enhance on-device AI performance on Qualcomm-powered Android devices equipped with Snapdragon 8 SoCs. The accelerator delivers significant gains, offering up to a 100x speedup over CPU execution and 10x over GPU.
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After Seven Years, Google Reinvents Android Navigation with Jetpack Navigation 3
Google has released the new Jetpack Navigation 3 library, which redesigns from the ground up notification handling in Android apps. The new library gives full control on the back stack and integrates seamlessly with Jetpack Compose's state management.
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CameraX 1.5 Brings Advanced Video Recording and Image Capture to Android
CameraX 1.5 introduces support for capturing slow-motion and high frame-rate videos as well as unprocessed, uncompressed still images. These capabilities are enabled by the new SessionConfig API, which streamlines camera setup and configuration.
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Running Java on iOS: Gluon Introduces OpenJDK Mobile Resources and Automated Build Pipelines
OpenJDK is now able to build and run on iOS (and Android) as a native binary, opening the way to run unmodified Java code on mobile.
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Android GenAI Prompt API Enables Natural Language Requests with Gemini Nano
The ML Kit GenAI Prompt API, now available in alpha, enables Android developers to send natural language and multimodal requests to Gemini Nano running on-device, extending the text summarization and image description capabilities introduced with the initial GenAI release.
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Apple Previews SDK for Building Android Apps with Swift
The Swift SDK for Android, recently released as a nightly build, is designed to help developers to port their Swift packages to Android, making it easier to share code across platforms. While the SDK is still in preview, over 25% of packages in the Swift Package Index can already be compiled for Android.
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Pixnapping: Side-Channel Vulnerability Allows Android Apps to Capture Sensitive Screen Data
A newly discovered class of attacks targets Android devices, allowing malicious apps to steal on-screen information from other apps using a technique known as pixel stealing. Dubbed Pixnapping, the attack leverages previously known side-channel vulnerabilities and affects virtually all apps, including Signal, Google Authenticator, Venmo, and many others.
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Google Brings Optimized Resource Shrinking in Latest Android Gradle Plugin
The latest version of the Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) introduces an optimized resource-shrinking approach that unifies code optimization and resource shrinking, achieving up to 50% reduction in app size for apps that share significant resources and code across different form factor, says Google.
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Android Studio Narwhal Extends Gemini AI Capabilities
The latest Android Studio Narwhal 3 Feature Drop introduces enhancements aimed at boosting developer productivity, including support for resizable Compose previews, new app Backup & Restore tools, and expanded Gemini capabilities such as automatic code generation from UI screenshots.
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Jetpack Compose Enhances Scrolling, Lazy Lists, and More
The latest release of Jetpack Compose, as usual named after its introduction month, adds new APIs for rendering shadows, 2D scrolling, improved list performance, and more.
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Arm Scalable Matrix Extension 2 Coming to Android to Accelerate On-Device AI
Available in the Armv9-A architecture, Arm Scalable Matrix Extension 2 (SME2) is a set of advanced CPU instructions designed to accelerate matrix heavy computation. The new Arm technology aims to help mobile developers to run advanced AI models directly on CPU with improved performance and efficiency, without requiring any changes to their apps.
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Google Previews Gemini's Agent Mode in Android Studio Narwhal
Google has announced the integration of Gemini in Android Studio's Agent Mode into the latest canary release of Android Studio, Android Studio Narwhal preview. According to Google, the new Agent Mode is designed to handle multi-step development tasks that span across several files.
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Android 16 Introduces Wide-Ranging Features and Changes
Google has released Android 16, now available for supported Pixel devices. The new release introduces a wide range of new APIs and changes, some of which affect existing apps and require developers to update their code. Material 3 Expressive, the new paradigm for Android user interfaces, is not yet included and will roll out later this year.
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Google Brings Gemini Nano to ML Kit with New On-Device GenAI APIs
The new GenAI APIs recently added to ML Kit enable developers to use Gemini Nano for on-device inference in Android apps, supporting features like summarization, proofreading, rewriting, and image description.
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Gemma 3n Available for On-Device Inference Alongside RAG and Function Calling Libraries
Google has announced that Gemma 3n is now available in preview on the new LiteRT Hugging Face community, alongside many previously released models. Gemma 3n is a multimodal small language model that supports text, image, video, and audio inputs. It also supports finetuning, customization through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and function calling using new AI Edge SDKs.