Social and messaging apps have revolutionized how we connect, communicate, and share information, offering spaces for public conversations, private messaging, media creation, photo and video sharing, and even live broadcasts. If your app does any of this, you'll find resources in this developer center to help you create, extend, level up, and optimize these types of experiences.
This developer center covers three areas of social features:
- Messaging and communication
- Media display and playback
- Media capture, creation, editing, and sharing
Messaging and communication
Communication is a core function of social apps, and Android has created bespoke APIs that integrate your app's messaging features, providing more surfaces for users to interact with. Learn how to send and receive messages reliably, as well as how to level your app up with rich emoji support, stickers and images from Android's image keyboard and other rich text sources, and support for sharing text and media directly to other apps.
Media display and playback
Whether your app integrates images and videos or delivers immersive audio experiences, media enriches user interactions and elevates app engagement. Android continues to evolve APIs that minimize the complexity of integrating images and media while making the user experience more integrated and consistent. Learn how to load large bitmaps efficiently, support live-streaming, and handle playback controls and player UI. Level up your app to support UltraHDR images and HDR video, enable picture-in-picture, implement Cast Connect, and more.
Media capture, creation, editing, and sharing
It's increasingly common for social and communication apps to support capturing videos, editing photos, and processing media content, and Android has created libraries that simplify integration into your app while helping you support the latest device and platform features.
Learn how to capture photos and videos, edit videos, access user media libraries, and share to other apps and services. Level up your app with support for UltraHDR image capture, HDR video, zero shutter lag, and more.