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TikTok's Native Cross-Platform UI Framework Lynx Goes Open Source
TikTok maker ByteDance has open-sourced Lynx, a collection of frameworks and tools enabling the creation of native, cross-platform mobile apps using Web markup, CSS, and JavaScript. Lynx aims to deliver native performance thanks to its custom JavaScript engine and pixel-perfect UI rendering.
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Meta Unifies Facebook’s Video Delivery System across Mobile and Web Apps
Meta finalized efforts to consolidate Facebook’s video delivery system by migrating video experiences from older Watch product to more recent Reels product, which became the basis of the unified system. The unification process required changes across mobile UI, server backend, and ranking systems while ensuring a seamless transition for billions of users.
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Google Launches Gemma 3 1B for Mobile and Web Apps
Requiring a "mere" 529MB, Gemma 3 1B is a small language model (SLM) specifically meant for distribution across mobile and Web apps, where models must download quickly and be responsive to keep user engagement high.
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Google Enhances Data Privacy with Confidential Federated Analytics
Google has announced Confidential Federated Analytics (CFA), a technique designed to increase transparency in data processing while maintaining privacy. Building on federated analytics, CFA leverages confidential computing to ensure that only predefined and inspectable computations are performed on user data without exposing raw data to servers or engineers.
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Google Introduces Widgets Quality Tiers
Google will start classifying all Android widgets in three quality tiers based on their adherence to best practices and widget guidelines, helping creators improve the user experiences of their widgets.
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Google's Image Generation Model Imagen 3 Now Available in Vertex AI in Firebase as a Preview
Google's most advanced GenAI image generation model, Imagen 3, is now available in preview through Vertex AI in Firebase enabling seamless integration into Android and iOS apps through its Kotlin and Swift SDKs.
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Google's Vertex AI in Firebase SDK Now Ready for Production Use
Three months after its launch in beta, the Vertex AI in Firebase SDK is now ready for production, says Google engineer Thomas Ezan, who further explores three dimensions that are essential for its successful deployment to production: abuse prevention, remote configuration, and responsible AI use.
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Android Studio Ladybug Update Adds Gemini Support, New Debugging Features, and More
In its recent update to Android Studio Ladybug (2024.2.2), Google has added new Gemini Code Transforms to modify, refactor, or create code, debugging and testing tools, and developer experience improvements. Additionally, the IDE adopts the latest IntelliJ 2024.2 platform release.
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Flutter 3.27 Promotes New Rendering Engine Impeller, Improves iOS and Material Widgets, and More
Flutter 3.27, brings a wealth of changes, including better adherence to Apple's UI Guidelines thanks to a number of improved Cupertino widgets, new features for CarouselView, list rows and columns, ModalRoutes transitions, and so on. Furthermore, the new release makes the Impeller rendering engine the default, with improved performance, instrumentation support, concurrency support, and more.
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Google Launches Android XR, Its New AI-Powered Extended Reality Platform
Android XR is Google's new operating system aimed at powering devices like headsets and glasses and making possible new experiences, a.k.a. apps, running on them. Android XR will integrate Gemini, Google's AI assistant, to enable understanding user intent, defining a plan, guiding through tasks, and more.
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Kotlin Reaches 2.1.0, Bringing New Language Features, Compiler Updates, and More
Kotlin 2.1.0 introduces new syntax, including guard conditions, non-local break and continue, and multi-dollar string interpolation. Additionally, it extends its multiplatform capabilities and improves the K2 compiler.
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Google Introduces Gemini AI Features to Android Studio
Google has released a set of updates to Gemini in Android Studio, aiming to enhance the developer productivity through AI-powered features. This release is designed to bring AI to every stage of the development lifecycle, such as AI-assisted coding, refactoring, generating documentation, analyzing and test code, and suggesting fixes.
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Kotlin HTTP Toolkit Ktor 3.0 Improves Performance and Adds Support for Server-Sent Events
Ktor, Kotlin's native framework to create asynchronous HTTP server and client applications, has reached version 3. It adopts kotlinx-io, which brings improved performance albeit at the cost of breaking changes, and adds support for Server-Sent events, CSFR, serving static resources from ZIP files, and more.
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Vertex AI in Firebase Aims to Simplify the Creation of Gemini-powered Mobile Apps
Currently available in beta, the Vertex AI SDK for Firebase enables the creation of apps that go beyond the simple chat model and text prompting. Google has just made available a colab to help developers through the steps required to integrate it into their apps.
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Compiler Explorer Provides Insights into Low-Level Android App Optimization
Android engineers at Google added support for the Java and Kotlin programming languages to Compiler Explorer, an open source tool aimed at exploring how compilers work by compiling code in real-time. Using Compiler Explorer, Android engineers can optimize the performance of their apps by observing how the compiler works under the hood instead of using a set of pre-defined best practices.