591Chapter 16
The Future of Android: The
64-Bit Android 5.0 OS
As the third edition of this book was going to press, Google announced a 64-bit Android 5.0 L
version of its popular operating system at the Google I/O trade show. Although Android hardware
devices running this version of Android will not be available in large numbers until 2015, I decided to
take this opportunity to add a “Future of Android” chapter covering what was different in the 64-bit
Android 5 OS and how to develop applications for it. By doing so, this book covers developing for
Android versions 1 through 5 and beyond!
Interestingly, all of the current Android classes, nested classes, methods, interfaces, constants,
concepts, formats, codecs, and work processes that I covered in this book, which apply to Android 4,
also hold true (that is, are applicable) to the 64-bit Android 5 operating system. For this reason,
this final chapter is a fantastic opportunity to take the book to an even broader scope (or level) of
coverage of the Android operating system than it already achieved!
In this chapter, I show you how I set up my production studio to handle both 32-bit Android 4.4.4
app development using Java 6 and Eclipse, as well as 64-bit Android 5.0 app development using
Java 7 and IntelliJ using another Android 5.0 application development workstation. This new Android 5
development environment is called Android Studio, and it is currently in beta at version 0.8.
Since Android 4.x (4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4.4) devices will be around for many years to come,
you’ll need to be able to develop for both 32-bit 4.x Android devices, with 3GB and less of system
memory, as well as for 64-bit 5.0 or later Android devices, which support 4GB or more of system
memory. If you have an Eclipse ADT workstation set up for developing 32-bit Android apps, you can
continue to use that to develop for Android 4.4 and previous versions, and you can use IntelliJ on a
different workstation to develop for Android 5.x. Alternatively, you can simply use Android Studio 5.0
to develop for all Android OS versions. Either way, by the time you are finished with this book, you
will be able to develop Android apps with both the 64-bit IntelliJ (Android Studio 5.0) and Java 7, as
well as with 32-bit Eclipse (ADT 4.4) and Java 6. This chapter covers the new features in Android 5.0,
including the new development platform (IntelliJ IDEA), the new runtime (ART), the new 64-bit Linux