Android Developers Blog

Posted by Wayne Piekarski , Developer Advocate for IoT The next release of Android Things Developer Preview 6 (DP6) is here with lots of new features and bug fixes. Android Things is Google's platform that enables Android Developers to create Internet of Things (IoT) devices with support for powerful applications such as video and audio processing and on-board machine learning with TensorFlow. For the specifics on what is new, visit the href="https://developer.android.com/things/preview/releases.html">release notes . Here are a few of the highlights of what is in DP6. IoT launcher DP6 includes a new IoT launcher that allows the user to see the current state of the device and change settings using a touch screen or USB input devices. Settings such as configuring the WiFi, finding the build ID, and checking for updates is now something that can be done interactively, making it even easier to get started. This launcher is visible when no other developer-provided href=&quo

Posted by Jocelyn Becker, Senior Program Manager, Google Developer Training If you know the basics of building Android apps and want to delve deeper, take a look at our new href="http://developers.google.com/training/courses/android-advanced">Advanced Android Development course built by the Google Developers Training team. Do you want to learn how to use fragments, add widgets for your app, and fine tune your app's performance? Make your app available to a diverse user base through localization and accessibility features? Use sensors in your app? How about creating custom views, drawing directly to the screen and running animations? Each lesson in our new course takes you through building an app that illustrates an advanced concept, from incorporating maps into your app to using a SurfaceView to draw outside the main UI thread. This course is intended for experienced Java programmers who already know the fundamentals of building Android apps. It is a follow-on course

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering Starting today we're rolling out an update to the Android 8.1 developer preview, the last before the official launch to consumers in December. Android 8.1 adds targeted enhancements to the Oreo platform, including optimizations for Android Go (for devices with 1GB or less of memory) and a 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. If you have a device enrolled in the href="http://www.android.com/beta">Android Beta Program , you'll receive the update over the next few days. If you haven't enrolled yet, just visit the href="http://www.android.com/beta">Android Beta site to enroll and get the update. At the official release in December we'll bring Android 8.1 to all supported Pixel and Nexus devices worldwide -- including href="https://www.blog.google/products/pixel/new-pixel-

Posted by Sam Stern, Developer Programs Engineer The release of version 11.6.0 of the Google Play services SDK moves a number of popular APIs to a new paradigm for accessing Google APIs on Android. We have reworked the APIs to reduce boilerplate, improve UX, and simplify authentication and authorization. The primary change in this release is the introduction of new Task and href="https://developers.google.com/android/reference/com/google/android/gms/common/api/GoogleApi">GoogleApi based APIs to replace the GoogleApiClient access pattern. The following APIs are newly updated to eliminate the use of GoogleApiClient : Auth - updated the Google Sign In and Credentials APIs. Drive - updated the Drive and Drive Resource APIs. Fitness - updated the Ble, Config, Goals, History, Recording, Sensors, and Sessions APIs. Games - updated the Achievements, Events, Games, Games Metadata, Invitations, Leaderboards, Notifications, Player Stats, Players, Realtime Multiplayer, Snapshots,

Posted by Neto Marin, Developer Advocate Understanding how people find your app and what they do once they've installed it is crucial to helping you make the right product and marketing decisions. This is especially important when you're deciding your advertising strategy and budget. Today many app measurement companies and ad networks offer ad attribution solutions based on referral data. As such accurate install referral data is vital for correctly attributing app installs, as well as discounting fraudulent attempts for install credit. To help you obtain more accurate and reliable data about your installs, we're introducing the Google Play Install Referrer API , a reliable way to securely retrieve install referral content. Using this API, your app will get precise information straight from the Play Store, including: The referrer URL of the installed package. The timestamp, in seconds, of when the referrer click happened. The timestamp, in seconds, of when the installation

Posted by Dave Smith , Developer Advocate for IoT Back in September, we href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/09/android-things-hackster-contest.html">worked with Hackster.io to encourage the developer community to build smart connected devices using Android Things and post their projects to the href="https://www.hackster.io/contests/Google">Developer Challenge for Android Things . The goal was to showcase the combination of turnkey hardware and a powerful SDK for building and maintaining devices at scale. Thank you to everyone who participated in the contest and submitted a project or idea. We had over 1100 participants register for the contest, resulting in over 350 submissions. Out of that group, we've chosen three winners. Each winner will receive support and tools from href="https://www.dragoninnovation.com/">Dragon Innovation to develop their concepts into commercial products. Join us in congratulating the following make

Posted by Wojtek Kalicinski, Android Developer Advocate, Akshay Kannan, Product Manager for Android Authentication, and Felipe Leme, Software Engineer on Android Frameworks Starting in Oreo, Autofill makes it easy for users to provide credit cards, logins, addresses, and other information to apps. Forms in your apps can now be filled automatically, and your users no longer have to remember complicated passwords or type the same bits of information more than once. Users can choose from multiple Autofill services (similar to keyboards today). By default, we include Autofill with Google, but users can also select any third party Autofill app of their choice. Users can manage this from Settings->System->Languages>Advanced->Autofill service. What's available today Today, Autofill with Google supports filing credit cards, addresses, logins, names, and phone numbers. When logging in or creating an account for the first time, Autofill also allows users to save the new credentia

Posted by Xiaowen Xin, Android Security Team The new Google Pixel 2 ships with a dedicated hardware security module designed to be robust against physical attacks. This hardware module performs lockscreen passcode verification and protects your lock screen better than software alone. To learn more about the new protections, let's first review the role of the lock screen. Enabling a lock screen protects your data, not just against casual thieves, but also against sophisticated attacks. Many Android devices, including all Pixel phones, use your lockscreen passcode to derive the key that is then used to encrypt your data. Before you unlock your phone for the first time after a reboot, an attacker cannot recover the key (and hence your data) without knowing your passcode first. To protect against brute-force guessing your passcode, devices running Android 7.0+ verify your attempts in a secure environment that limits how often you can repeatedly guess. Only when the secure environment

Posted by Oscar Rodriguez, Partner Developer Advocate [ Note: This blog was amended in March 2018 to include our latest recommendations regarding app integrity verification, and in May 2019 to amend the quota increase request form link.] The SafetyNet Attestation API helps you assess the security and compatibility of the Android environments in which your apps run. Since it was introduced in March 2015, many developers have successfully integrated it into their Android apps to make more informed decisions based on the integrity and compatibility of the devices running their apps. Throughout the years, the SafetyNet Attestation API has evolved, and its adoption has steadily increased. However, as with any security/anti-abuse related API, there are many common pitfalls that may lead developers into developing unstable systems, or worse, into a false sense of security. In this post, we provide a list of the most common mistakes we have seen developers make when integrating the SafetyNe

Posted by Marc Stogaitis and Tajinder Gadh, Software Engineers Driving is an essential part of our daily activities. So at Google we spend a lot of time thinking how we can make Android devices better and safer for our users. How we can prevent distracted driving and together build an open ecosystem to enable safety first smartphone experiences. Recently we launched Driving Do-Not-Disturb on the newly announced Pixel 2 generation of devices. Once enabled, Driving Do-Not-Disturb automatically puts your device into a do not disturb mode while driving. During this mode any incoming messages and notifications are silenced while you can still receive incoming calls, navigation directions and voice interactions using a connected Car bluetooth. The product is designed to limit distractions during driving while at the same time not getting in the way so users can continue to use navigation or other similar apps with minimal friction. Behind the scenes, it uses AI powered on-device Activity R

Posted by Kate Brennan and Mathilde Cohen Solal, Google Play and Daraiha Greene, CS in Media Google Play is committed to empowering new and existing voices in gaming. Earlier this year, we hosted the Indie Games Festival and sponsored the Girls Make Games href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/+GoogleDevelopers/posts/fH3NMC6gSRT">summer camp . We also href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/09/google-and-ideas-united-launch-program.html">announced a collaboration between Infinite Deviation and Google Play. Infinite Deviation is an initiative created by Google Computer Science (CS) in Media and href="http://ideasunited.com/">Ideas United in order to tackle issues of representation in computer science. The collaboration between Google Play and Ideas United brought the Infinite Deviation program to gaming, called Infinite Deviation: Games . The program invited game designers from all backgrounds to pitch an original mobile game concept

Posted by Lukas Bergstrom, Product Manager, Android Developer Frameworks Team Android runs on billions of devices, from high-end phones to airplane seatbacks. The Android OS manages resources aggressively to perform well on this huge range of devices, and sometimes that can make building robust apps complicated. To make it easier, we launched a preview of Architecture Components at Google I/O to provide guidance on app architecture, with libraries for common tasks like lifecycle management and data persistence. Together, these foundational components make it possible to write modular apps with less boilerplate code, so developers can focus on innovating instead of reinventing the wheel - and we hope to keep building on this foundation in the future. Today we're happy to announce that the Room and Lifecycle href="http://developer.android.com/arch">Architecture Components libraries have reached 1.0 stable. These APIs are ready for production apps and libraries, and ar