Android Developers Blog

Posted by Ritesh Nayak M and Ronald Ho, Product Managers Today we're announcing Fast Pair, a hassle-free process to pair your Bluetooth devices on all supported Android devices running Google Play services 11.7+ with compatibility back to Marshmallow (Android 6.0). Fast Pair makes discovery & pairing of Bluetooth devices easy and is currently rolling out to Android 6.0+ devices. You can try this out with Google Pixel Buds or Libratone's Q Adapt On-Ear , Bose® QuietComfort 35 II, and soon on Plantronics Voyager 8200 series wireless headsets. Ease of use, speed and security are the design principles driving the Fast Pair specification. Fast Pair uses BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) for advertising and discovery and uses classic Bluetooth for pairing. Here's what a Fast Pair flow looks like: Turn on a Fast Pair-enabled device and put it in pairing mode. Android scans for BLE broadcasts in close proximity of the user's phone and discovers a Fast Pair packet (provided Blueto...

Posted by Frank van Diggelen, Software Engineer Last year in Android Nougat, we introduced APIs for retrieving Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Raw measurements from Android devices. This past week, we publicly released href="https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/sensors/gnss.html#analyze">GNSS Analysis Tools to process and analyze these measurements. Android powers over 2 billion devices, and Android phones are made by many different manufacturers. The primary intent of these tools is to enable device manufacturers to see in detail how well the GNSS receivers are working in each particular device design, and thus improve the design and GNSS performance in their devices. However, with the tools publicly available, there is also significant value to the research and app developer community. How to use the tool The GNSS Analysis Tool is a desktop application that takes in raw the GNSS Measurements logged from your Android device as input. This desktop applica...

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering Today we're giving you an early look at Android 8.1. This update to Android Oreo includes a set of targeted enhancements including optimizations for Android Go (for devices with 1GB or less of memory) and a new Neural Networks API to accelerate on-device machine intelligence. We've also included a few smaller enhancements to Oreo in response to user and developer feedback. We're bringing you this Developer Preview so you can get your apps ready; we've already been helping device makers prepare for this new version. We recommend starting soon -- we're expecting the final public version href="https://developer.android.com/preview/overview.html">in December . It's easy to get Android 8.1 Developer Preview on your Pixel or Nexus device. Just enroll in the Android Beta Program -- you'll soon receive an over-the-air update to Android 8.1 beta. If you enrolled previously, you're all set, there's no n...

Posted by Jamal Eason , Product Manager, Android Android Studio 3.0 is ready to download today. Announced at Google I/O 2017, Android Studio 3.0 is a large update focused on accelerating your app development on Android. This release of Android Studio is packed with many new updates, but there are three major feature areas you do not want to miss, including: a new suite of app profiling tools to quickly diagnose performance issues, support for the Kotlin programming language, and a new set of tools and wizards to accelerate your development on the latest Android Oreo APIs. We also invested time in improving stability and performance across many areas of Android Studio. Thanks to your feedback during the preview versions of Android Studio 3.0! If you are looking for high stability, want to build high quality apps for Android Oreo, develop with the Kotlin language, or use the latest in Android app performance tools, then you should download Android Studio 3.0 today. Check out the the list...

Posted by Vineet Buch, Director of Product Management, Google Play Apps & Games Read this in العَرَبِيَّة‎‎ , Deutsch , español (Latinoamérica) , le français , Bahasa Indonesia , Italiano , 日本語 , 한국어 , português do Brasil , русский язы́к , ไทย , Türkçe , tiếng Việt , 中文 (简体) or 中文 (繁體) . Today we kicked off our annual global Playtime series with back-to-back events in Berlin and San Francisco. Over the next month, we’ll be hearing from many app and game developers in cities around the world. It has been an amazing 2017 for developers on Google Play, there are now more than 8 billion new installs per month globally. To help you continue to take advantage of this opportunity, we're announcing innovations on Google Play and new features in the Play Console. Follow us on Medium where presenters will be posting their strategies, best practices, and examples to help you achieve your business objectives. As Google Play continues to grow rapidly, we want to help people understand our...

Posted by Adriana Puchianu, Developer Marketing Google Play Following href="https://events.withgoogle.com/indie-games-contest-europe/">last year's success , today we're announcing the second annual href="https://events.withgoogle.com/indie-games-contest-2017/">Google Play Indie Games Contest in Europe, expanding to more countries and bigger prizes. The contest rewards your passion, creativity and innovation, and provides support to help bring your game to more people. Prizes for the finalists and winners A trip to London to showcase your game at the Saatchi Gallery Paid digital marketing campaigns worth up to 100,000 EUR Influencer campaigns worth up to 50,000 EUR Premium placements on Google Play Promotion on Android and Google Play marketing channels Tickets to Google I/O 2018 and other top industry events Latest Google hardware Special prizes for the best Unity games How to enter the contest If you're based in one of the 28 eligible countries,...

Editor's note: Cross-post from The Keyword. If you’re a developer interested in supporting a fundraising cause within your title or if you have a social impact app, let us know Posted by Maxim Mai, Partner Development Manager, Google Play We grow enough food to feed everyone on the planet. Yet 815 million people–one in nine—still go to bed on an empty stomach every day. On October 16, people from around the world come together for href="http://www.wfp.org/WorldFoodDay">World Food Day , with the goal to promote awareness and action for those who suffer from hunger and to advocate for food security and nutritious diets for all. To raise funds and awareness for this cause, Google Play has joined forces with 12 popular apps and games to create the href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/topic?id=campaign_editorial_worldfoodday17_ep&e=-EnableAppDetailsPageRedesign">Apps and Games Against Hunger collection available in North and Latin America. From now u...

Posted by Steven Soneff, Identity Product Manager To build apps that make use of phone numbers, it's often crucial to verify that the user owns a number. Doing this can be tricky from a UX perspective, not least in understanding phone number formats in different locales, but also in providing a verification mechanism that isn't cumbersome or using intrusive device permissions, such as the ability to read all of a user's SMS. There are many libraries for efficient pre-built phone authentication, such as Firebase Phone Auth , but if you are an advanced developer and need to build this functionality yourself, Google Play Services has two new APIs that help you obtain a user's phone number and verify it via SMS without device permissions: the Phone Selector and SMS Retriever . Apps like href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flipkart.android">Flipkart have seen a 12% increase of success rates in phone number sign-up flows using these methods. ...

Jichao Li, Software Engineer; Shobana Ravi, Software Engineer Since our href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/android-instant-apps-is-open-to-all.html">public launch at Google I/O, we've been working hard to improve the developer experience of building instant apps. Today, we're excited to announce availability of the Android Instant Apps SDK 1.1 with some highly-requested features such as improved NDK support, configuration APKs for binary size reduction, and a new API to maintain user's context when they transition from an instant app to the installed app. Introducing configuration APKs For a great instant app experience, app binaries need to be lean and well structured. That's why we're introducing configuration APKs. Configuration APKs allow developers to isolate device-specific resources and native libraries into independent APKs. For an application that uses configuration APKs, the Android Instant Apps framework will only load t...

Posted by Nazmul Idris, Android Devices and Media Developer Advocate The Google Assistant is available across phones, speakers, Android TV and more. And it can help users get more done throughout their day—where they need to add something to a to-do list, turn on the lights, or play a song. With music specifically, the Assistant has a lot to offer. It can understand media commands across devices ("play rock music") and supports media controls (like pause, skip, fast forward, thumbs up). And users can also control Android media playback through the Google Assistant. For example, you can pause playback by telling the Google Assistant to "pause playback" without lifting a finger. Or play music by saying "play rock on Universal Music Player". In order for the user to control playback in your Android Media app via the Google Assistant, you can use the href="https://medium.com/google-developers/understanding-mediasession-part-1-3-e4d2725f18e4">Medi...

Posted by Isai Damier, Software Engineer, Android DA Working with Multiple JobServices In its continuous effort to improve user experience, the Android platform has introduced strict limitations on background services starting in API level 26. Basically, unless your app is running in the href="https://developer.android.com/about/versions/oreo/background.html#services">foreground , the system will stop all of your app's background services within minutes. As a result of these restrictions on background services, JobScheduler jobs have become the de facto solution for performing background tasks. For people familiar with services, JobScheduler is generally straightforward to use: except in a few cases, one of which we shall explore presently. Imagine you are building an Android TV app. Since channels are very important to TV Apps, your app should be able to perform at least five different background operations on channels: publish a channel, add programs to a channel, s...