Introduction to Jetpack Media3

Jetpack Media3 is the new home for media libraries that enables Android apps to display rich audio and visual experiences. Media3 offers a simple architecture with powerful customization, reliability, and optimizations based on device capabilities to abstract away the complexity that comes with fragmentation.

This document provides an introduction to key APIs for implementing playback and editing use cases with Media3.

Playback Components

Media3 offers several key components for playback use cases. The classes that make up these components will be familiar to you if you have worked with previous Android media libraries.

The following diagram demonstrates how these components come together in a typical app.

The different components of a media app that uses Media3 connect together in several simple ways owing to their sharing of interfaces and classes.
Figure 1: Media app components

The media player

A media player is a component of your app that allows playback of media files. In Media3, you'll find:

Class Description Implementation note
Player Player is an interface that defines traditional high-level capabilities for a media player, such as the ability to play, pause, and seek. In Media3, the Player interface is a common API implemented or used by several components, including MediaSession and MediaController, for example.
ExoPlayer ExoPlayer is the default implementation of the Player interface in Media3.

Learn more about Media3 ExoPlayer

The media session

A media session provides a universal way to interact with a media player. This enables an app to advertise media playback to external sources and to receive playback control requests from external sources. In Media3, you'll find:

Class Description Implementation note
MediaSession Media sessions enable your app to interact with an audio or video player. They advertise media playback externally and receive playback commands from external sources. In Media3, a MediaSession needs a Player to execute commands and obtain the current state.
MediaSessionService The MediaSessionService holds a media session and its associated player in a service separate from your app's main Activity to facilitate background playback.
MediaController The MediaController class is generally used to send commands from outside your app, for example, from other apps or the system itself. The commands are sent to the underlying Player of the associated MediaSession. The MediaController class implements the Player interface, but when calling a method, the MediaController sends the command sent to the connected MediaSession. Client apps like Google Assistant can use MediaController to control playback in a connected session.
MediaLibraryService A MediaLibraryService is similar to a MediaSessionService, except that it includes additional APIs so you can serve your content library to client apps.