Android Quick Guides FAQ

What are Android Quick Guides?

Quick guides are a new type of documentation designed to help you meet your goals in a fast and focused way. Quick guides:

  • Take a code-first approach whenever possible.
  • Use video to explain concepts and show how things work.
  • Are designed to be used in around 7 minutes or less.

What are collections?

Collections bring together related Quick Guides to help you see the bigger picture. For example, you might use a collection to:

  • Understand topics that are closely related to your core goal.
  • Help you discover how to implement additional use cases adjacent to your goal.
  • Find background information or explore concepts more deeply.

You might find the same Quick Guide in more than one collection. That's part of the information design; for example, a topic about how to hide password text could apply to both displaying text and handling user input.

Some Quick Guides aren't part of any collection.

What should I expect in this beta release?

This release is a limited prototype of a new content experience. Here are some of the limitations of this beta version:

  • Content is focused on UI development with Compose.
  • For this release, the topics follow two standard content types: a code-pattern topic, which shows a code example and how it works, and a video topic, which shows embedded video and summarizes the key points covered in the video.
  • The main landing page enables you to search for content by typing keywords or short phrases, and to filter the results by content type.
  • The set of content available is incomplete, by design. It covers only a limited number of developer goals and doesn't necessarily cover any given goal completely.
  • There is some inconsistency between topics, by design. For example, one topic might cover its subject more deeply than another topic covers a different subject. This is part of how we test what the right level of depth is for a Quick Guide.
  • The beta experience is designed to be self-contained, meaning that it usually doesn't provide links to other parts of the Android Developers site. This approach enables us to prototype and test the new features without mixing them with pre existing content. One notable exception is that you will see links to API reference pages.

How can I give feedback?

We'd love your feedback on this experience! In giving us feedback, please keep the following in mind:

  • The current beta is a narrowly scoped, self-contained prototype. Though we've done our best to only include up-to-date information, please don't expect it to be complete in any way, including information or accuracy.
  • We're very interested in feedback about the user experience. For example, does this kind of focused content meet your expectations and needs? What about the discovery mechanisms?

With that out of the way, we welcome your detailed feedback through our public issue tracker.