Android Developers Blog

Posted by Sarah Thomson, BD Partnerships Lead, Indies, Google Play Games Mobile gaming is a fun place to be right now. It's a landscape seeing tremendous success year after year with great potential for additional growth and innovation. It's also a space where developers can express themselves with creative game styles, mechanics, design and more. This is what the indie community does best. Here are 5 tips for indies by indies, shared by our gaming partners at 505 Games , About Fun , Disruptor Beam , Klei Entertainment , and Schell Games . 1. Embrace being indie Indies are inherently smaller operations and should embrace their agility and ability to take risks. Petr Vodak, CEO at About Fun , recommends getting your product out there so you can start taking feedback and apply your learnings to future projects. Don't be afraid to fail! Remaining flexible and building in modularity so you can evolve with the business needs is a strategy embraced by Pete Arden, CMO at Disru...

Posted by Neto Marin , Developer Advocate, Google Play To deliver more engaging viewing experiences to their users, many Android OEMs are experimenting with new, super widescreen smartphones. Samsung has just announced a new flagship device, the Samsung Galaxy S8 , featuring a new display format with an aspect ratio of 18.5:9. At the Mobile World Congress earlier this year, Xiaomi and LG also launched their new flagship devices, the Mi Mix (launched October 2016) and the LG G6 respectively, with an expanded screen aspect ratio of 18:9. (Left) An app with a maximum aspect ratio set at 16:9 on an 18.5:9 device  (Right) An app with a maximum aspect ratio set at or over 18.5:9 on an 18.5:9 device In order to take full advantage of the larger display formats on these devices, you should consider increasing your app's maximum supported aspect ratio. To do so, simply declare an android.max_aspect <meta-data>   element in the app's <application>   element: <meta-...

Posted by Scott Main, Technical Writer If you love trying out all of the newest features in Android Studio and helping us make it a better IDE, we're making it even easier to download early preview builds  with a new website . Here, you can download and stay up to date on all the latest Android Studio previews and other tools announcements. Android Studio previews give you early access to new features in all aspects of the IDE, plus early versions of other tools such as the Android Emulator and platform SDK previews. You can install multiple versions of Android Studio side-by-side, so if a bug in the preview build blocks your app development, you can keep working on the same project from the stable version. The latest preview for  Android Studio 2.4 just came out last week, and it includes new features to support development with the Android O Developer Preview. You can download and set up the O preview SDK from inside Android Studio, and then use Android O’s XML font resour...

Posted by Dave Geffon, Partnerships Manager, Google Play Games The most successful games usually have the strongest communities. They are a powerful force in driving additional engagement and increasing awareness for your titles. At GDC 2017, we spoke with a few game developers about best practices for successfully building their own communities. Watch the panel session below to hear advice from Seriously , Social Point , and Super Evil MegaCorp . 1. Be authentic Community is a mindset; be honest, transparent & patient with your communications. Loyal users are extremely valuable, thus the folks at Super Evil Megacorp say that you should act like you have to earn every player. 2. Start small Build a plan and start today. Launch your social media channels, look into influencers, and create a strategy. Whether it's sharing one piece of fan art a week across your network, or running a closed beta to gather feedback from your most valued users, take action and learn what works ...

Posted by Adam Gutterman, Go-To-Market Strategic Lead, Google Play Games Last month at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), we held a developer panel focused on sharing best practices for building successful app and game businesses. Check out 5 tips for developers, both large and small, as shared by our gaming partners at Electronic Arts (EA), Hutch Games , Nix Hydra , Space Ape Games a n d Omnidrone . 1. Test, test, test The best time to test, is before you launch; so test boldly and test a lot! Nix Hydra recommends testing creative, including art style and messaging, as well as gameplay mechanics, onboarding flows and anything else you're not sure about. Gathering feedback from real users in advance of launching can highlight what's working and what can be improved to ensure your game's in the best shape possible at launch. 2. Store listing experiments Run experiments on all of your store listing page assets. Taking bold risks instead of making assumptions allows ...

Posted by Adrian Ludwig & Mel Miller, Android Security Team Today, we're sharing the third annual Android Security Year In Review, a comprehensive look at our work to protect more than 1.4 billion Android users and their data. Our goal is simple: keep our users safe. In 2016, we improved our abilities to stop dangerous apps, built new security features into Android 7.0 Nougat, and collaborated with device manufacturers, researchers, and other members of the Android ecosystem. For more details, you can read the full Year in Review report or watch our webinar . Protecting you from PHAs It's critical to keep people safe from Potentially Harmful Apps (PHAs) that may put their data or devices at risk. Our ongoing work in this area requires us to find ways to track and stop existing PHAs, and anticipate new ones that haven't even emerged yet. Over the years, we've built a variety of systems to address these threats, such as application analyzers that constantly revie...

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering Since the first launch in 2008, the Android project has thrived on the incredible feedback from our vibrant ecosystems of app developers and device makers, as well as of course our users. More recently, we've been pushing hard on improving our engineering processes so we can share our work earlier and more openly with our partners. So, today, I'm excited to share a first href="http://developer.android.com/preview">developer preview of the next version of the OS: Android O. The usual caveats apply: it's early days, there are more features coming, and there's still plenty of stabilization and performance work ahead of us. But it's booting :). Over the course of the next several months, we'll be releasing updated developer previews, and we'll be doing a deep dive on all things Android at href="https://events.google.com/io/">Google I/O in May. In the meantime, we'd love your feedback on tr...

Posted by  Dan Albert , Android NDK Tech Lead Android NDK r14 The latest version of the Android Native Development Kit (NDK), Android NDK r14, is now available for download . It is also available in the SDK manager via Android Studio. So what's new in r14? The full changelog can be seen here , but the highlights include the following: Updated all the platform headers to unified headers (covered in detail below) LTO with Clang now works on Darwin and Linux libc++ has been updated. You can now use thread_local  for statics with non-trivial destructors (Clang only) RenderScript is back! Unified Headers We've completely redone how we ship platform header files in the NDK. Rather than having one set of headers for every target API level, there's now a single set of headers. The availability of APIs for each Android platform is guarded in these headers by #if __ANDROID_API__ >= __ANDROID_API_FOO__ preprocessor directives. The prior approach relied on periodically-captured sna...

Posted by Christopher Katsaros, Developer Marketing, Android LinkedIn is the world's largest social network for professionals. LinkedIn has 10 apps on Google Play , including the flagship LinkedIn app , which provides all of the same features users find on the web, so users can do things like browse and send messages to their professional network with an improved user experience. For LinkedIn, and other teams with a large number of developers adding code to a project, making sure that everyone pays attention to areas that affect performance is vital for the quality of their app. That's why the the LinkedIn mobile team uses Android Studio to build high quality Android apps. Watch Pradeepta Dash, Engineering Manager for Infrastructure at LinkedIn, as well as Drew Hannay, Tech Lead for the Android Infrastructure team, talk about how Android Studio helps everyone on their team stay focused on these topics while getting new engineers quickly up and running: The top Android d...

Posted by Dom Elliott, Developer Marketing, Google Play We've updated the Android Developers website with some useful information about Google Play and the Google Play Developer Console for new and existing developers alike. Visit the site to understand more about: How Google Play helps you grow your business The Google PlayDeveloper Console and its features Best practices to succeed on Google Play And more! The updated business guide to succeeding on Google Play is full of best practices and success stories from other developers grouped into five objectives. Here are a few new articles to check out: Develop : Build a high quality app or game with best practices on topics such as implementing material design , testing on popular devices , using Firebase Analytics , and requesting permissions appropriately. Launch : Review the updated launch checklist , the localization checklist , and best practices on topics such as using pre-launch & crash reports , beta testing , and mak...

Posted by James Lau , Product Manager  At Google, we always try to do the right thing. Sometimes this means adjusting our plans. We know how much our Android developer community cares about good support for Java 8 language features, and we're changing the way we support them. We've decided to add support for Java 8 language features directly into the current javac and dx set of tools, and deprecate the Jack toolchain. With this new direction, existing tools and plugins dependent on the Java class file format should continue to work. Moving forward, Java 8 language features will be natively supported by the Android build system. We're aiming to launch this as part of Android Studio in the coming weeks, and we wanted to share this decision early with you. We initially tested adding Java 8 support via the Jack toolchain. Over time, we realized the cost of switching to Jack was too high for our community when we considered the annotation processors, bytecode analyzers and rewri...

Posted by Security Software Engineers—Bernhard Grill, Megan Ruthven, and Xin Zhao Google works hard to protect users across a variety of devices and environments. Part of this work involves defending users against  Potentially Harmful Applications  (PHAs), an effort that gives us the opportunity to observe various types of threats targeting our ecosystem. For example, our security teams recently discovered and defended users of our ads and Android systems against a new PHA family we've named Chamois. Chamois is an Android PHA family capable of: Generating invalid traffic  through ad pop ups having deceptive graphics inside the ad Performing  artificial app promotion  by automatically installing apps in the background Performing  telephony fraud  by sending  premium text messages Downloading and executing additional plugins Interference with the ads ecosystem We detected Chamois during a routine ad traffic quality evaluation. We analyzed malicio...