Android Developers Blog

Posted by Dave Smith , Developer Advocate for IoT Android Things makes building connected embedded devices easy by providing the same Android development tools, best-in-class Android framework, and Google APIs that make developers successful on mobile. Since the initial preview launch back in December, the community has turned some amazing ideas into exciting prototypes using the platform. To empower these makers and developers using Android Things to share and learn from each other, we have partnered with href="https://hackster.io">Hackster.io to create a community where aspiring IoT developers can go to showcase their projects and get inspired by the work of others. Hackster.io is a community of 200,000 engineers and developers dedicated to building internet-connected hardware projects. They also seek to educate and challenge members through live workshops and design contests. We are eager to see the projects that you come up with. More importantly, we're excited to...

Posted by Wayne Piekarski , Developer Advocate for IoT Today we are launching a preview of the href="https://partner.android.com/things/console">Android Things Console . This console allows developers to manage the software running on their fleet of Android Things IoT devices, including creating factory images, as well as updating the operating system and developer-provided APKs. Devices need to run a system image downloaded via the Android Things Console in order to receive future updates, such as the upcoming Developer Preview 5. Google provides all of the infrastructure for over-the-air (OTA) updates, so developers can focus on their specific application and not have to build their own implementation – getting their IoT devices to enter the market faster and more securely than before. Let's take a tour of the console, and see the features it offers. Product Creation and Product Settings The developer first defines a product, which includes selecting a name and the t...

Posted by Xiaowen Xin and Renu Chaudhary, Android Security Team The processing of external and untrusted content is often one of the most important functions of an app. A newsreader shows the top news articles and a shopping app displays the catalog of items for sale. This comes with associated risks as the processing of untrusted content is also one of the main ways that an attacker can compromise your app, i.e. by passing you malformed content. Many apps handle untrusted content using href="https://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebView.html">WebView , and we've made many improvements in Android over the years to protect it and your app against compromise. With Android Lollipop, we started delivering WebView as an independent APK, updated every six weeks from the Play store, so that we can get important fixes to users quickly. With the newest WebView, we've added a couple more important security enhancements. Isolating the renderer process in...

Posted by Maximilian Ruppaner, Software Engineer on Google Play On June 30, 2017, Google will be ending support for the Android Market app on Android 2.1 Eclair and older devices. When this change happens, users on these devices will no longer be able to access, or install other apps from, the Android Market. The change will happen without a notification on the device, due to technical restrictions in the original Android Market app. It has been 7 years since Android 2.1 Eclair launched. Most app developers are no longer supporting these Android versions in their apps given these devices now account for only a small number of installs. We will still be supporting later versions of Android Market for as long as feasible. Google Play , the replacement for Android Market, is available on Android 2.2 and above.

Posted by Ritesh Nayak M, Product Manager Last year at I/O we launched the href="https://developers.google.com/awareness/">Awareness API , a simple yet powerful API that let developers use signals such as Location, Weather, Time and User Activity to build contextually relevant app experiences. Available via Google Play services, the Awareness API offers two ways to take advantage of context signals within your app. The href="https://developers.google.com/awareness/android-api/snapshot-api-overview">Snapshot API lets your app request information about the user's current context, while the href="https://developers.google.com/awareness/android-api/fence-api-overview">Fence API lets your app react to changes in user's context, and when it matches a certain set of conditions. For example, "tell me whenever the user is walking and their headphone is plugged in". Until now, you could specify a time fence on the Awareness APIs but were...

Posted by Wayne Piekarski , Developer Advocate for IoT Today, we're releasing a new Developer Preview 4.1 (DP4.1) of href="https://developer.android.com/things/index.html">Android Things , with updates for new supported hardware and bug fixes to the platform. Android Things is Google's platform to enable Android Developers to create Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and seamlessly scale from prototype to production. New hardware A new Pico i.MX6UL revision B board has been released, which supports many common external peripherals from partners such as Adafruit and Pimoroni. There were some prototype Pico i.MX6UL boards made available to some early beta testers, and these are not compatible with DP4.1. Improvements DP4.1 also includes some performance improvements since DP4, such as boot time optimizations that improve the startup time of i.MX7D based hardware. This Developer Preview also includes a version of Google Play Services, specifically optimized for IoT dev...

Posted by Aaron Stacy, Software Engineer, Google Play services The 11.0.0 release of the Google Play services SDK includes a new way to access href="https://developers.google.com/android/reference/com/google/android/gms/location/LocationServices">LocationServices . The new APIs do not require your app to manually manage a connection to Google Play services through a GoogleApiClient . This reduces boilerplate and common pitfalls in your app. Read more below, or head straight to href="https://github.com/googlesamples/android-play-location">the updated location samples on GitHub . Why not use GoogleApiClient? The LocationServices APIs allow you to access device location, set up geofences, prompt the user to enable location on the device and more. In order to access these services, the app must connect to Google Play services, which can involve error-prone connection logic. For example, can you spot the crash in the app below? Note : we'll assume our app has t...

Posted by Kacey Fahey, Developer Marketing, Google Play Every day developers around the world are hard at work creating high quality apps and games on Android. Striving to deliver amazing experiences for an ever growing diverse user base, we've seen a significant increase in the level of polish and quality of apps and games on Google Play. As part of our efforts to recognize this content on the Play Store, today we're launching href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/topic?id=editors_choice">Android Excellence . The new collections will showcase apps and games that deliver incredible user experiences on Android, use many of our href="https://developer.android.com/distribute/best-practices/index.html">best practices , and have great design, technical performance, localization, and device optimization. Android Excellence collections will refresh quarterly and can be found within the revamped href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/topic?id=editors...

Posted by Neto Marin, Developer Advocate Many developers want to make money through their apps, but it's not always easy to deal with all the different types of payment methods. We launched the Google Play In-app Billing API v3 in 2013, helping developers offer in-app products and subscriptions within their apps. Year after year, we've added features to the API, like subscription renewal, upgrades and downgrades, free trials, introductory pricing, promotion codes, and more. Based on your feedback, we’re pleased to announce the Play Billing Library - Developer Preview 1 . This library aims to simplify the development process when it comes to billing, allowing you to focus your efforts on implementing logic specific to your app, such as application architecture and navigation structure. The library includes several convenient classes and features for you to use when integrating your Android apps with the In-app Billing API. The library also provides an abstraction layer on top of...

Posted by Wei Liu, Product Manager When we launched reCAPTCHA ten years ago, we had a simple goal: enable users to visit the sites they love without worrying about spam and abuse. Over the years, reCAPTCHA has changed quite a bit. It evolved from the distorted text to href="https://security.googleblog.com/2014/04/street-view-and-recaptcha-technology.html">street numbers and names, then href="https://security.googleblog.com/2014/12/are-you-robot-introducing-no-captcha.html">No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA in 2014 and Invisible reCAPTCHA in March this year. By now, more than a billion users have benefited from reCAPTCHA and we continue to work to refine our protections. reCAPTCHA protects users wherever they may be online. As the use of mobile devices has grown rapidly, it's important to keep the mobile applications and data safe. Today, on reCAPTCHA's tenth birthday, we're glad to announce the first reCAPTCHA href="https://developer.android.com/training...

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering Three weeks ago at Google I/O, we href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/whats-new-in-android-o-developer.html">announced the second developer preview of Android O along with key themes, Fluid Experiences and Vitals, and highlighted our work towards a modular base with href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here-comes-treble-modular-base-for.html">Project Treble . It was also an important milestone for us with the release of the first beta-quality candidate. We talked a lot about what's new in Android during the keynote and breakout sessions—if you missed the livestream, be sure to check out the full archive of talks href="https://www.youtube.com/user/androiddevelopers/playlists?sort=dd&view=50&shelf_id=14">here . Today we're rolling out Developer Preview 3 with the final Android O APIs, the latest system images, and an update to Android Studio to help you g...

Posted by Kazushi Nagayama, Ninja Spamologist and Bryan Woodward, Policy Specialist Ensuring Google Play remains trusted and secure is one of our top priorities. We've recently announced improvements in fighting href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/10/keeping-the-play-store-trusted-fighting-fraud-and-spam-installs.html">spam installs as well as href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/11/keeping-it-real-improving-reviews-and-ratings-in-google-play.html">fake ratings & reviews . In order to underscore these announcements and provide more clarity, we have now updated our href="https://play.google.com/about/storelisting-promotional/ratings-reviews-installs/">Developer Program Policies on incentivized ratings, reviews, and installs: Developers must not attempt to manipulate the placement of any apps in the Store. This includes, but is not limited to, inflating product ratings, reviews, or install counts by illegit...

Posted by Mayank Jain and Scott Roberts of the Android Security team Two years ago, we launched the href="https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/android-rewards/">Android Security Rewards program. In its second year, we've seen great progress. We received over 450 qualifying vulnerability reports from researchers and the average pay per researcher jumped by 52.3%. On top of that, the total Android Security Rewards payout doubled to $1.1 million dollars. Since it launched, we've rewarded researchers over $1.5 million dollars. Here are some of the highlights from the Android Security Rewards program's second year: There were no payouts for the top reward for a complete remote exploit chain leading to TrustZone or Verified Boot compromise, our highest award amount possible. We paid 115 individuals with an average of $2,150 per reward and $10,209 per researcher. We paid our top research team, C0RE Team , over $300,000 for 118 vulnerability reports. We paid 31 re...