Android Developers Blog

Posted by Hoi Lam , Lead Developer Advocate, Android Wear Strava - a standalone wear app available to both Android and iOS users Android Wear 2.0 represents the the latest evolution of the Android Wear platform. It introduced the concept of href="https://developer.android.com/training/wearables/apps/standalone-apps.html">standalone apps that can connect to the network directly and work independently of a smartphone. This is critical to providing apps not only to our Android users, but also iOS users - which is increasingly important as we continue to expand our diverse ecosystem of watches and users. In addition, Wear 2.0 brought multi-APK support to Wear apps, which reduces the APK size of your phone apps, and makes it possible for iOS users to experience your Wear apps. Today, we are announcing that multi-APKs will also work for Android Wear 1.0 watches, so you can now reach all of your users without needing to bundle your Wear app within your phone app's APK. Addit...

Posted by Sami Tolvanen, Senior Software Engineer, Android Security The hardening of Android's userspace has increasingly made the underlying Linux kernel a more attractive target to attackers. As a result, more than a third of Android security bugs were found in the kernel last year. In Android 8.0 (Oreo), significant effort has gone into hardening the kernel to reduce the number and impact of security bugs. href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/07/protecting-android-with-more-linux.html">Android Nougat worked to protect the kernel by isolating it from userspace processes with the addition of SELinux ioctl filtering and requiring seccomp-bpf support, which allows apps to filter access to available system calls when processing untrusted input. Android 8.0 focuses on kernel self-protection with four security-hardening features backported from upstream Linux to all Android kernels supported in devices that first ship with this release. Hardened usercopy U...

Posted by Dave Burke, VP, Android Engineering With more than two billion active devices, Android is the largest mobile platform in the world. And for the past nine years, we've worked to create a rich set of tools, frameworks and APIs that deliver developers' creations to people everywhere. Today, we're href="https://developers.google.com/ar/">releasing a preview of a new software development kit (SDK) called ARCore. It brings augmented reality capabilities to existing and future Android phones. Developers can start experimenting with it right now. We've been developing the fundamental technologies that power mobile AR over the last three years with Tango, and ARCore is built on that work. But, it works without any additional hardware, which means it can scale across the Android ecosystem. ARCore will run on millions of devices, starting today with the Pixel and Samsung's S8, running 7.0 Nougat and above. We're targeting 100 million devices at the ...

Posted by Kacey Fahey, Developer Marketing, Google Play With so many great mobile games launching this year, we saw a huge amount of interest from indie developers to showcase their art at the href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/07/calling-all-indie-developers-in-us.html">Google Play Indie Games Festival in San Francisco next month. While it was a tough selection process, we're excited to announce the 20 finalists, as well as our esteemed judging panel. Fans will be able to play the new and un-released indie games in a fun festival atmosphere where they can also meet the creators themselves. To attend and learn more about the event, register now for free at href="https://goo.gl/Nxydsd">g.co/play/sfindiegamesfest2017 . So how did we choose the 20 finalists? We powered up our phones, put our game-faces on, and looked for games that not only met the festival requirements, but also stood out with their overall design, fun, and quality. These ...

Posted by Steven Tepper, App Quality Consultant, Google Play href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/02/AndroidWear2.html">Wear 2.0 launched back in February with added support for new hardware features in addition to adopting new href="https://www.google.com/design/spec-wear/android-wear/designing-for-watches.html">Material Design themes , href="https://www.google.com/design/spec-wear/android-wear/designing-for-watches.html"> g href="https://www.google.com/design/spec-wear/android-wear/designing-for-watches.html">u i href="https://www.google.com/design/spec-wear/android-wear/designing-for-watches.html">d e href="https://www.google.com/design/spec-wear/android-wear/designing-for-watches.html">l i href="https://www.google.com/design/spec-wear/android-wear/designing-for-watches.html">n e href="https://www.google.com/design/spec-wear/android-wear/designing-for-watches.html"...

Posted by Takeshi Hagikura, Developer Programs Engineer Since announcing href="https://developer.android.com/training/constraint-layout/index.html">ConstraintLayout at Google I/O last year, we've continued to improve the layout's stability and layout editor support. We've also added new features specific to ConstraintLayout that help you build various type of layouts, such as href="https://developer.android.com/training/constraint-layout/index.html#constrain-chain">introducing chains and href="https://developer.android.com/training/constraint-layout/index.html#ratio">setting size as a ratio . In addition to these features, there is a notable performance benefit by using ConstraintLayout . In this post, we'll walk through how you can benefit from these performance improvements. How Android draws views? To better understand the performance of ConstraintLayout , let's take a step back and see how Android draws views. When a use...

Posted by Karolis Balciunas, VC & Startups Business Development, Google Play Early Access was launched at Google I/O 2016 as a destination on Google Play for beta app and game titles still in development, and to attract early adopters willing to test those titles. The results speak for themselves. The program has helped over 350 developers launch their titles and generated over 40M beta installs for their apps and games during just the short window before their public availability on the Play Store. More importantly, the average rating for titles that have been through Early Access is 4.3☆ once in production, putting them in a strong position to be favored in search and discovery on Google Play. Early Access also generates positive awareness for new titles. Alumni like href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.simplehabit.simplehabitapp">Simple Habit and href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=digit.android">Digit were chosen as...

Posted by Edward Cunningham. Product Manager, Android Security Eagle-eyed users of Android O will have noticed the absence of the 'Allow unknown sources' setting, which has existed since the earliest days of Android to facilitate the installation of apps from outside of Google Play and other preloaded stores. In this post we'll talk about the new Install unknown apps permission and the security benefits it brings for both Android users and developers. Earlier this year we introduced href="https://www.blog.google/products/android/google-play-protect/">Google Play Protect - comprehensive security services that are always at work to protect your device from harm. Google Play continues to be one of the safest places for Android users to download their apps, with the majority of Potentially Harmful Apps (PHAs) originating from third-party sources. A common strategy employed by PHA authors is to deliver their apps via a hostile downloader. For example, a gaming app...

Posted By: Dave Burke, VP of Engineering After more than a year of development and months of testing by developers and early adopters (thank you!), we're now ready to officially launch Android 8.0 Oreo to the world. Android 8.0 brings a ton of great features such as picture-in-picture, autofill, integrated Instant Apps, Google Play Protect, faster boot time, and much more. We're pushing the sources to Android Open Source Project (AOSP) for everyone to access today. Pixel and Nexus 5X/6P builds have entered carrier testing and we expect to start rolling out in phases over the next several weeks, alongside Pixel C and Nexus Player. Android Beta users will receive the update to the final version today and images are href="https://developer.android.com/about/versions/o/download.html">available to download and flash manually. We've been working closely with our partners over the last many months, and by the end of this year, hardware makers like Essential, Gene...