Google I/O 2016 Highlights

Following up on my last blog post, here are the highlights from Google I/O 2016. Every year, we see a lot of sessions focused on Android, Chrome, Web Development. This year we had some new welcoming additions with Firebase and VR. I hope this overview gives you a better insight on what this conference has to offer.

Disclaimer: The following list is focused on technical sessions and is biased towards Android, being that my primary interest on this event.

Android

What’s new in Android

This is the most important session regarding what the new Android version will bring. We hear about the new Layout Manager (Constraint Layout), Multi-Window Support, Notification Enhancements and VR Support to name a few new features that will be available on Android N.

Android Layouts: a new world

The session that teaches all about the new Constraint Layout.
Although this knowledge is currently not required, Constraint Layout will surely replace RelativeLayout as the most flexible Layout Manager in the near future.

What’s new in Android Wear 2.0?

A session to present all the interesting innovations on the future version of Android Wear: New User Interface, Standalone Apps (direct access to cloud), Complications API (any watch face can show data from any app), Messaging (new input methods as handwriting, keyboard, Smart Reply and 3rd party IMEs) and Fitness (automatic activity recognition and data API).

The experts’ guide to Android development tools

One of the most useful sessions with a lot of tricks on how to use Android Studio in the most productive way. It shows some tips for code editing on the IDE, some mind-blowing magic with the debugger tools that can speed up greatly the amount of time spent finding bugs, some tips when working with C and C++ and a demonstration on how to improve the build times by using the best and most updated project configurations.

Advanced Espresso

An excelent session that teaches the best practices and explains some of the inwards of the Espresso in order to take the most out of this framework.

Android honorable mentions

What the Fragment?

This session brings a tricky subject in order to demystify some of the wrong usages of Fragments as well as presenting some welcoming developments regarding Fragment’s Lifecycle.

RecyclerView ins and outs

Another session to explain in detail a subject very hard to master when there is a need to implement a more sophisticated behaviour to RecyclerView.

What’s new with Notifications in Android N and Android Wear 2.0

A very technical session presenting all the enhancements added to Notifications on Android N and Android Wear 2.0.

Non-Android sessions

Zero to App: Develop with Firebase

A session with live coding by 3 developers (Android, iOS and Web) that build in a matter of minutes a chat app with live synchronization, authentication and cloud storage.

VR at Google

A session that presents an overview of the plan of Google regarding VR.