Tag Archives: Android app development

#AndroidDevChallenge – It’s a wrap!

Posted by The Jetpack Compose Team

From delightful doggos to creative countdowns and storming weather apps, the 2000 submissions to the #AndroidDevChallenge blew our socks off. We are truly amazed at the creativity and beauty of the apps you built with Jetpack Compose, Android’s new UI toolkit. Now that we judged the final challenge, let’s wrap up, look back at this incredible journey and find out who the winners are!

Week #1 - Puppy adoption app ?

The week that made us say “Aww” every time we check out our social media timelines. With this challenge you took your first steps with Compose and learned how to work with lists.

We already shipped the prizes to the first 500 successful submissions: a limited edition trophy of our Jetpack Compose superhero, made of LEGO bricks.

Jetpack Compose prize

Week #1 prize: Jetpack Compose superhero

Week #2 - Countdown timer ⏲️

When time came to implement a countdown timer, you didn’t disappoint! This challenge showed us that you mastered state and animation in Compose.

The first successful 500 submissions already got this week’s prize: a Compose poster pack.

Jetpack Compose prize

Week #2 prize: a Jetpack Compose poster pack

Week #3 - Speed round ?

We couldn’t believe how fast you were! This week you had to implement a design provided by us (the designs are still available if you want to try your hand at them in your own time). We opened the challenge in 3 different time zones, each with its own design to build. Here are the winning projects and the time it took to implement each of them:

  • WeTrade Jorge Baños - 2h 43min
  • MySoothe Nezih Yılmaz - 2h 44min
  • Bloom Takaki Hoshikawa - 5h 57min

It was incredible seeing how quickly the winners worked with themes and layouts in Compose; scoring themselves a Pixel 5 each!

Week #4 - Weather app ?

Come rain or shine, Android developers don’t disappoint! This week it rained… Compose weather apps. We judged them on 4 categories: code quality, novelty of idea, visual beauty and overall execution. As you made our job quite hard, we got some help from some of our Google Developer Experts to decide the winning projects:

Code quality: Paulo Pereira - JetWeatherfy

Novelty of idea: Roman Levinzon - Colony X Weather

Visual beauty: Chris Horner - Weather Scene

Overall execution: Corentin Bect - Flux

The winners each got a Google Pixel 5!


It was incredible to see what thousands of you built in this Jetpack Compose #AndroidDevChallenge. We hope that the challenge gave you a fun way to start learning Jetpack Compose and get ready to adopt it in your apps. If you’re new to Compose or want to dig deeper, check out our docs, codelabs & samples:

Have fun composing!

Google Developer Student Clubs in India build Android Apps with Kotlin

Posted by Siddhant Agarwal, Google Developer Student Clubs India Community Manager and Biswajeet Mallik, Program Manager, Google Developers India

Google Developer Student Clubs recently hosted Android Study Jams, a collection of community-organized study groups, in 275 campuses across India. These study jams helped students build Android apps in the Kotlin programming language via a curriculum provided by Google.

These virtual events were attended by thousands of students in 250+ colleges and saw the creation of hundreds of new Android apps made with Kotlin. To celebrate all of this exciting work, we wanted to showcase some noteworthy apps built by the Android Study Jam session participants:

Stumate App

Android 12 logo

Developed by GDSC GMR Institute of Technology, Stumate is a place for students who are looking for a solution to store all of their files and notes in one organized place on their devices. This application also allows students to send notifications to their classmates about assignments while uploading notes in a PDF, Word Document or a Presentation.

The app uses the Material Design library for the front-end and Firebase as a backend. Some of the technical concepts used in the app include:

  1. SharedPreferences and RoomDatabase to store user credentials
  2. WorkManager to schedule the reminders at a particular time
  3. Data Binding to display the content
  4. Firebase Authentication (Google Single Sign On and Email Auth), Realtime Database, Storage, Firebase Cloud Messaging, Crashlytics
  5. Firebase Test Lab to test the application on various devices

You can find this app on the Play Store here.


Ask Me Anonymously App

Android 12 logo

Ask Me Anonymously is a chat application developed by GDSC Chandigarh University where users can ask questions to one another without revealing their identity.

This app uses concepts that were taught in Android Study Jams such as:

  1. RecyclerView
  2. Activity Lifecycle
  3. Data Binding
  4. Using Glide for loading and displaying images from the internet

The application also uses Firebase Realtime Database and Firebase Cloud Storage for implementing the above-said functionality, it also uses some other notable Firebase features such as Cloud Messaging and Firebase Dynamic Links.

You can find this app on the Play Store here.

Travel Wise App

Android 12 logo

Developed by GDSC Indian Institute of Information Technology, Lucknow, Travel Wise is an app that helps users find co-travellers in their journey, allowing you to share your journey and save money on travelling.

The app uses Google Firebase for authentication and Realtime Database for storage.

Eye Tester App

Android 12 logo

In today's digital age, our screen time has dramatically increased, making eyesight problems more common. GDSC Vidyavardhaka College of Engineering developed an Eye Tester app, which tells whether one should visit a doctor or not based on a simple digital eye test.

The app uses the concept 'toast' which makes the text appear for a short period and disappear, and 'random' which generates random numbers. The app is designed using Compose’s 'constraint-layout' which gives the flexibility to design the UI of the app efficiently.

Taperback App

GDSC Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute developed Taperback, a book and novel reading Android app. In Taperback, users can read from a large collection of free books collected manually from already publicly available online websites. Books from these sites are then later uploaded to the Firebase Firestore and Storage using a custom made Web Portal, along with other metadata of the books. New books are often added daily.

This app was created using Kotlin and XML. Some of the key concepts used are Kotlin Coroutines, navigation graphs, RecyclerView, WebView, SQLite, data caching, and more.

We want to thank all the Android Study Jam facilitators for hosting these sessions and for helping students develop these exciting Android apps with Kotlin.

The Google Developer Student Clubs Community in India is now bringing their enthusiasm to the 2021 Solution Challenge, where they’re building apps that serve their local community.

Get started

Ready to start learning Kotlin and building your own Android apps? If you’re a university student, join a Google Developer Student Club near you. If you’re a professional, find the right Google Developer Group for you.

Inviting educators to the Google Developers India Faculty Summit on 23rd April, 2021

Posted by Harsh Dattani, Community Manager

University Professor's have a large impact by educating the next generation of developers and engineers. Google Developers wants to enable university faculty with the best curriculum on Android development and programs. Earlier this year we announced the launch of our new faculty-led curriculum for Android Development with Kotlin in India. The curriculum is based on classroom learning (virtual or in-person) with an instructor delivering lectures on important Android concepts and students receiving hands-on practice through interactive pathways.

The Google Developers India Faculty Summit 2021 will kick things off on April 23rd. The Faculty Development Training program provides professors or faculty from different universities or skilling partners in India with resources designed by a team at Google.

Current partners in India include: Shivaji University, I. K. Gujral Punjab Technical University, Chandigarh University, Ganpat University, Telangana Academy for Skill and Knowledge (TASK), Learn 4 Grow, Teerthanker Mahaveer University and Information, and Communication Technology Academy of Kerala. These organizations will be the first to learn an offer this curriculum to their students with more universities to follow in upcoming semesters

Leading scholars and educational influencers from computer-science faculties at Indian universities will be in attendance, giving attendees the perfect chance to network with other professionals in Android development

Chief guest for the event is Professor Anil D. Sahasrabudhe, Chairman, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). As he describes the upcoming summit,

"Google India Faculty Summit 2021 is a great opportunity for faculties of technical institutes to understand & assimilate nuances of Android Application Development using Kotlin and in turn disseminate the same to students, challenge them to create new applications, innovative solutions and make them entrepreneurs/employable engineers."

Register today for the summit here and see you on April 23rd at 10 AM IST.

Tools to help developers provide a positive user experience

Posted by Lisa Martinez, Head of Security & Privacy Business Development, Google Play and Andrew Ahn, Product Manager, Play and Android App Safety

Google helps protect billions of users every day through the use of a robust set of tools designed to keep users safe online. We’re proud to provide a wide range of these same resources to help developers build safe and successful apps. User participation increases when people have a safe and positive app engagement. We’d like to highlight a few of these free tools that developers can consider to help make user experiences safer for everyone.

Reducing toxic conversation with Perspective API

Perspective API, a free product offered by Jigsaw, uses machine learning to identify toxic language, like insults, profanity, or identity based attacks, making it easier to host healthier conversations in your apps. Perspective can be used to give feedback to commenters, help moderators more easily review comments, and keep conversations open online. Many online publishers and developers, such as the New York Times, El País, FACEIT, and Coral by VoxMedia have started to adopt this tool to promote constructive online dialogues. Learn how to get started here.

Increase child safety with Content Safety API

Google’s Content Safety API uses artificial intelligence to help developers better prioritize abuse material for review. We offer this service to NGOs and private companies to support their work protecting children. The API steps up the fight for child safety by prioritizing potentially illegal content for human review and helping reviewers find and report content faster. Quicker identification of new abuse images increases the likelihood that children being abused could be identified and protected from further abuse. Making review queues more efficient and less noisy also reduces the toll on human reviewers, who review images to confirm instances of abuse. Learn more about this on our Protecting Children site.

Prevent links to unsafe files and sites with the Safe Browsing API

Google Safe Browsing helps protect billions of devices every day by showing warnings to users when they attempt to navigate to dangerous sites or download dangerous files. Safe Browsing also notifies webmasters when their websites are compromised by malicious actors. Safe Browsing protections work across Google products and power safer browsing experiences across the Internet. Technical information on how to get started can be found here.

Thank you for continuing to partner with us to provide a positive experience for our shared users on Google Play.

Android Dev Challenge: Week 3 – Speed round

Posted by Jolanda Verhoef, Developer Relations Engineer

On your marks...Get set… Wait a second! Save the date for the third week of the #AndroidDevChallenge! On March 13th, compete with other developers in your time zone; the fastest Compose skills wins! We loved all the creative submissions of week #1 and #2, but now we’re looking for speed. Here’s your challenge:

Week #3 - Speed round ?

Android 12 logo

Be the fastest to implement a set of designs provided by us. The designs will be posted here when the challenge starts. Submit your entry* as soon as you finish implementing the designs.

We’ll post different designs at 3 different times on the 13th:

  • APAC-friendly: opens at 9AM UTC+8
  • EMEA-friendly: opens at 9AM UTC
  • Americas-friendly: opens at 9AM UTC-8

We’ll update this blog post at the beginning of each round with the link to the designs.

Your UI must be fully built in Compose, and strictly match all the guidelines specified in the designs. To help you with the implementation, check out the Compose documentation on theming, layouts, and navigation. For some hands-on learning try out the Compose pathway, with codelabs covering several topics useful for completing this challenge.

Your solution must be implemented in a GitHub repository. Make a copy of this Github repository template and follow the instructions in the README. The template contains a basic Hello World! in Compose and a continuous integration setup.

This week’s prize: a Google Pixel 5!

Android 12 logo

For this week’s challenge, we’re giving away a Google Pixel 5, the ultimate 5G Google phone. In fact, we’ll be giving away three Google Pixel 5 phones: one to each developer who is fastest to submit a successfully implemented design for each of the three rounds of challenges.*





Help make Jetpack Compose better

Community is at the heart of Jetpack Compose and your feedback helps us build a better product:

  • File issues with Jetpack Compose on the official issue tracker.
  • Sign up to be part of the Jetpack Compose research studies.

*Please review the link for the full official rules associated with the entry. ↩

*If you don’t live in a country where the Pixel 5 is available, when you win we’ll instead send you an electronics gift card valued at US$699.