Posted by Andre Labonte, the Look API.

With over a billion downloads on Google Play, Google’s Contacts app is many Android customers’ major instrument for viewing and organizing their private contact info. Contacts builders purpose to make the app a simple means for customers to attach with the individuals who matter most to them. To make connecting even easier, the Contacts engineering crew constructed a wholly new widget from scratch utilizing Jetpack Look, Android’s newest framework for designing and growing widgets.

Contacts customers get pleasure from connecting by way of widgets

Widgets make it simple for customers to shortly entry their favourite app options. As a substitute of getting to navigate to and thru an utility, widgets might be added on to a tool’s house display to create a shortcut to the knowledge customers want. With this in thoughts, Contacts engineers developed a brand new widget for customers’ favourite contacts that permits them to succeed in family and friends quicker.

“With the growing recognition of house display widgets,” stated Phil Groman, product supervisor at Contacts, “we needed to make our widget as helpful as doable in order that customers can extra simply join with their most necessary contacts.”

A Google Opinion Rewards survey of Contacts widget customers confirmed that about 80% of customers with the Favorites widget on their house display discovered it useful for locating and connecting with their contacts. The survey used a 5-point scale, with 1 signifying “Under no circumstances useful” and 5 signifying “Extraordinarily useful.” Roughly 80% of the polled customers chosen choices 4 or 5.

Quicker improvement utilizing Jetpack Look

Beforehand, the Contacts crew constructed the app’s widgets utilizing RemoteViews, however the crew switched to Jetpack Look for its acquainted APIs, concise Compose syntax, and out-of-the-box assist of Materials You dynamic theming. Jetpack Look can be constructed on prime of the Jetpack Compose Runtime, which makes improvement easy because of its fashionable declarative method to UI and Kotlin APIs.

Contacts engineers additionally favored Jetpack Look as a result of the toolkit is backward appropriate with RemoteViews code. Utilizing Jetpack Look, they might create the brand new Favorites widget with assist way back to API 23 of RemoteViews. At present, the Favorites widget helps again to API 31. Jetpack Look additionally presents a WorkManager-backed replace mechanism, making it simpler for builders to load a widget’s show knowledge.

Android has further documentation accessible on the Jetpack Look touchdown web page to assist information the event and implementation of widgets, which Contacts engineers used to construct the Favorites widget. These assets helped Contacts engineers learn to construct responsive dynamic layouts for resizing, incorporate materials themes, add UIs for empty and error states, and confirm accessibility options like content material descriptions.

After the Contacts crew constructed the brand new Favorites widget, engineers estimated end-to-end improvement utilizing Jetpack Look to be 25% quicker in comparison with one other Contacts widget constructed utilizing RemoteViews.

Doing extra with Jetpack Look

Due to Jetpack Look, the Contacts crew significantly lowered the time it took to supply a widget. Jetpack Look’s Compose-based framework and intuitive Kotlin APIs made improvement simpler, permitting engineers to shortly get a brand new widget off the bottom and out to customers.

“Jetpack Look helped so much throughout improvement,” stated Zhen Fan, a software program engineer at Contacts. “It elevated improvement velocity and made builders happier general.”

Proper now, the Contacts crew is starting emigrate one other one among its widgets from RemoteViews to Jetpack Look. The crew hopes to include extra advanced UI variations by making the swap, permitting engineers to develop richer options for customers to get pleasure from.

Get began

Study extra about growing partaking widgets with Jetpack Look.