Android Developers Blog

Posted by Maxim Mai, Apps Partnerships, Google Play Last Thursday at Google I/O 2017, we announced the href="https://g.co/play/gpa2017">winners of this year's Google Play Awards . Grab some popcorn and watch the href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayXMtOmXXhw">award ceremony , we think it's just as fun as The Oscars. This year, we included a category to celebrate the achievements of developers who publish outstanding apps that have positive social impact. In introducing this awards category, we were inspired by the UN's href="https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs">17 Sustainable Development Goals . With the ability to reach over 1 billion active Android devices around the world, we think that app developers have a tremendous opportunity to impact Zero Hunger ( SDG #2 ), Good Health and Wellbeing ( href="https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg3">SDG #3 ) and Quality Education ( SDG #4 ), and many others. Read on to...

Posted by Paul Saxman , Android Devices and Media Developer Relations Lead src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9kf-UXnjVJESMfbuzC-1fFbpnYyXmglBUfu1JZmB3NX1FB8TMhmki8o5DAtcBaMWlf2b9ctuqdboooFZoaQkGnC84mAzRC9JM0bRkgli4AD3EhLZrMUpaoiAtBiaSvvUZwaP5SwNb2bKN/s1600/image1.png" /> Android TV brings rich app experiences and entertainment to the biggest screen in your house, and with Android O, we’re making it even easier for users to access content from their favorite apps. We’ve built a new, content-centric home screen experience for Android TV, and we're bringing the Google Assistant to the platform as well. These features put content that users want to access a few clicks, or spoken words, away. The New Android TV Home Screen The new Android TV home screen organizes video content into channels and programs in a way that’s familiar to TV viewers. Each Android TV app can publish multiple channels, which are represented as rows of programs on th...

Posted by Rahim Nathwani, Product Manager, Google Play Localizing your app or game is an important step in allowing you to reach the widest possible audience. It helps you increase downloads and provide better experiences for your audience. To help do this, Google Play offers an app translation service. The service, by professional linguists, can translate app user interface strings, Play Store text, in-app products and universal app campaign ads. We've made the app translation service available directly from inside the Google Play Console, making it easy and quick to get started. Choose from a selection of professional translation vendors. Order, receive and apply translations, without leaving the Play Console. Pay online with Google Wallet. Translations from your previous orders (if any) are reused, so you never pay for the same translation twice. Great if you release new versions frequently. Using the app translation service to translate a typical app and store description ...

Posted by David Nelloms, Software Engineer Communicating with a group of people is a common use case for many messaging apps. However, it may be difficult to know how the href="https://developer.android.com/training/auto/messaging/index.html">Android Auto messaging API applies to group conversations. Here are some tips for getting started with group messaging in Android Auto: Conversation Name When constructing the UnreadConversation builder, you are required to pass in a name. This is the name of the conversation that is displayed to the user when messages arrive. UnreadConversation.Builder unreadConvBuilder = new UnreadConversation.Builder(conversationName) .setReadPendingIntent(msgHeardPendingIntent) .setReplyAction(msgReplyPendingIntent, remoteInput); For one-on-one conversations, this is simply the name of the other participant. For group conversations, it is best to choose one of two options for the name: Conversation title: If your app supp...

Posted by George Audi, Tom Grinsted and Larry Yang, Google Play The subscription business model is one of the best ways to make more regular, reliable, and recurring revenue on Android and Google Play. In fact, both developers and users love subscription apps so much that we’ve seen a 10X growth in consumer spend over the past three years and double the number of active subscribers in the past year. Thousands of developers are offering subscriptions through Google Play and are already seeing success with our billing platform. That’s why we’ve been working hard to help you take advantage of this opportunity and give you greater insights into your business and Android users. New features to help your subscriptions business thrive You've got a high-performing product with fantastic features and compelling content, but your business can't succeed without acquiring new users. In addition to free trials, intro pricing, flexible billing periods, and more, we recently launched the abil...

Posted by Hoi Lam , Lead Developer Advocate, Android Wear Android Wear 2.0 gives users more informative watch faces and provides developers with new ways to build useful apps. These new opportunities have been well received by users and developers alike. To help developers take advantage of these new features, we have released a suite of complication API tools, to make it easier for developers to add complication support to their watch faces, and a new Wear UI library, to help developers build watch friendly user interfaces. New Complications API tools for Watch Face developers Complications are bite-sized pieces of information displayed directly on the watch face. They can also be great shortcuts into your favorite apps. We introduced the Complications API last year to enable watch faces to receive data from any app that the user selects, and display the data to the user in a way that is stylistically coherent. Today, we are introducing four new tools to make it easier for watch face...

Posted by Pali Bhat, VP of Payment Products Thousands of apps and millions of stores accept Android Pay, a simpler and more secure mobile payment experience. Android Pay is now available in 10 markets, with more coming soon, including Brazil, Canada, Russia, Spain and Taiwan. And in addition to our already announced href="https://blog.google/topics/shopping-payments/android-pay-partners-visa-checkout-and-masterpass/">Visa and Mastercard partnerships, we'll soon enable a streamlined mobile checkout experience for PayPal users. The newest ways to pay with Google Yesterday, we announced the Google Payment API, which lets people pay in app or online with any verified credit or debit card saved to their Google Account, via products like Google Play, Chrome and YouTube. Paying with Google in the Wish app For users, the option to pay with Google means breezing through checkout without needing to remember and type multiple lines of payment details. You simply choose your pref...

The Android operating system provides a strong foundation for building apps that run well on a wide range of devices and form factors. That being said, we've listened to developer feedback; Issues like complex lifecycles and the lack of a recommended app architecture make it challenging to write robust apps. We need to make it easier — and more fun — to write robust apps, empowering developers to focus on areas where they can innovate. Today we're announcing a guide to Android app architecture along with a preview of Architecture Components. Rather than reinventing the wheel, we're also recognizing the work done by popular Android libraries. Opinions not Prescriptions We know that there's more than one way to write Android applications.  What we're providing is a set of guidelines that can help you architect an Android application to work best with the unique ways that Android interacts. The Android framework has well-defined APIs to handle contact points with the ...

By Jason Titus, Vice President, Developer Product Group It's great to be in our backyard again for Google I/O to connect with developers around the world. The 7,200 attendees at Shoreline Amphitheatre, millions of viewers on the livestream , and thousand of developers at local I/O Extended events across 80+ countries heard about our efforts to make the lives of developers easier -- allowing them to focus on the problems they're trying to solve by minimizing the pain points of building a product. Earlier this morning, our CEO Sundar Pichai talked about our various billion-user platforms. Whether it's Android or Chrome or the mobile Web, our success would not have been possible without the developer community. And during our Developer Keynote , we covered our heavy investments in tools and services for developers who build on our platforms every day. We have a lot to cover over the next three days. Let's take a closer look at the major developer news at I/O so far: Platf...

By Mike Cleron , Director, Android Platform Today the Android team is excited to announce that we are officially adding support for the Kotlin programming language. Kotlin is a brilliantly designed, mature language that we believe will make Android development faster and more fun. It has already been adopted by several major developers — Expedia, Flipboard, Pinterest, Square, and others — for their production apps. Kotlin also plays well with the Java programming language; the effortless interoperation between the two languages has been a large part of Kotlin's appeal. The Kotlin plug-in is now bundled with Android Studio 3.0 and is available for immediate download . Kotlin was developed by JetBrains , the same people who created IntelliJ , so it is not surprising that the IDE support for Kotlin is outstanding. In addition to the IDE support, we're announcing a collaboration with JetBrains to move Kotlin into a non-profit foundation. (Kotlin is already open sourced under Apach...

Posted by: Jonathan Karmel, Product Manager href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/01/android-instant-apps-starts-initial.html">Earlier this year , we began testing href="https://developer.android.com/topic/instant-apps/index.html">Android Instant Apps , a new way to run Android apps without requiring installation. Thanks to our incredible developer community, we received a ton of feedback that has helped us refine the end-to-end product experience. Today, we're opening Android Instant Apps to all developers, so anyone can build and publish an instant app. There are also more than 50 new experiences available for users to try from a variety of developers, such as HotPads, Jet, the New York Times, Vimeo, and One Football. While these experiences have only been live for a short amount of time, the early data shows positive results. For example, Jet and HotPads are seeing double digit increases in purchases and leads generated. (left to right: O...

Posted by Vineet Buch, Director of Product Management, Google Play Apps & Games Read this in العَرَبِيَّة‎‎ , Bahasa Indonesia , Deutsch , español (Latinoamérica) , le français , português do Brasil , tiếng Việt , русский язы́к , ไทย , Türkçe , 한국어 , 中文 (简体) , 中文 (繁體) , or 日本語 . Google Play continues to grow rapidly around the world, thanks to our ecosystem of developers building high quality and engaging app experiences. There are now 2 billion monthly active Android devices. People in 190 countries downloaded 82 billion apps from the Play Store in the last year and the number of developers with more than 1 million monthly installs grew by 35 percent year on year. We've made huge investments to make purchasing quick and easy by offering direct carrier billing with 140 operators that reach 900M devices every month. These, and other efforts, have made the number of buyers on Google Play grow by almost 30 percent in the ...