Android Developers Blog

Posted by Sergejs Cuhrajs, Community Manager, Google Play Earlier this year we launched the href="https://medium.com/googleplaydev">Google Play Apps & Games publication on Medium to help developers discover best practices and insights to grow successful apps and games businesses on Google Play. As we draw closer to the end of the year we thought it's a good time to revisit some of our most popular posts according to you – our readers. It's clear that many of you are excited by the potential of new technology, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), and how it could enhance user interaction with your apps and games. You're also concerned with everyday issues including how to keep your APK size manageable, how to acquire new users, and how to monetize games without pushing away your players. So without further adieu, here's the list of the top 10: href="https://medium.com/googleplaydev/applying-human-centered-design-to-emerging-tech

Posted by Bejamin Baxter, Developer Programs Engineer At Google I/O 2017, we href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/welcome-to-your-new-home-on-android-tv.html">announced a redesign of the Android TV's home screen. We expanded the recommendation row concept so that each app can have its own row (or multiple rows) of content on the home screen. Since the release of the new home screen, we have seen increased adoption of the new recommendation channels for Android Oreo in a wide variety of apps. With more and more apps surfacing high-quality recommendations using the new channels, the href="https://developer.android.com/training/tv/discovery/recommendations-row.html">legacy recommendation row in the new home screen on Android O will be phased out over the next year. Currently, when an app creates recommendations with the href="https://developer.android.com/training/tv/discovery/recommendations-row.html#build">legacy notificatio

Posted by Gian G Spicuzza, Android Security team Android Oreo is stuffed full of security enhancements. Over the past few months, we've covered how we've improved the security of the Android platform and its applications: from href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/08/making-it-safer-to-get-apps-on-android-o.html">making it safer to get apps , dropping href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/04/android-o-to-drop-insecure-tls-version.html">insecure network protocols , providing more href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/04/changes-to-device-identifiers-in.html">user control over identifiers , href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/08/hardening-kernel-in-android-oreo.html">hardening the kernel , href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/07/shut-hal-up.html">making Android easier to update , all the way to href="https://android-developers.googleb

Posted by Edward Cunningham, Product Manager, Android [ Edit : Updated post on Dec 21 to clarify that when the 64-bit requirement is introduced in August 2019, 32-bit support is not going away. Apps that include a 32-bit library just need to have a 64-bit version too.] Google Play powers billions of app installs and updates annually. We relentlessly focus on security and performance to ensure everyone has a positive experience discovering and installing apps and games they love. Today we're giving Android developers a heads-up about three changes designed to support these goals, as well as explaining the reasons for each change, and how they will help make Android devices even more secure and performant for the long term. In the second half of 2018, Play will require that new apps and app updates target a recent Android API level. This will be required for new apps in August 2018 , and for updates to existing apps in November 2018 . This is to ensure apps are built on the latest AP

Posted by Jamal Eason , Product Manager, Android Today, we are excited to announce Quick Boot for the Android Emulator. With Quick Boot, you can launch the Android Emulator in under 6 seconds. Quick Boot works by snapshotting an emulator session so you can reload in seconds. Quick Boot was first released with Android Studio 3.0 in the canary update channel and we are excited to release the feature as a stable update today. In addition to this new feature, we also wanted to highlight some of the top features from recent releases. Since the complete revamp of the Android Emulator href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2015/12/android-studio-20-preview-android.html">two years ago , we continue to focus on improving speed, stability and adding a rich set of features that accelerate your app development and testing. With all the recent changes, it is definitely worth updating to the latest version of the Android Emulator to use it today. Top 5 Features Quick Boot - Re

Posted by Dave Smith , Developer Advocate for IoT Creating robust connections between IoT devices can be difficult. WiFi and Bluetooth are ubiquitous and work well in many scenarios, but suffer limitations when power is constrained or large numbers of devices are required on a single network. In response to this, new communications technologies have arisen to address the power and scalability requirements for IoT. Low-power Wireless Personal Area Network (LoWPAN) technologies are specifically designed for peer-to-peer usage on constrained battery-powered devices. Devices on the same LoWPAN can communicate with each other using familiar IP networking, allowing developers to use standard application protocols like HTTP and CoAP. The specific LoWPAN technology that we are most excited about is href="https://www.threadgroup.org/What-is-Thread/Overview">Thread : a secure, fault-tolerant, low-power mesh-networking technology that is quickly becoming an industry standard. Today w

Posted by Andrew Woloszyn, Software Engineer Developing for 3D is complicated. Whether you're using a native graphics API or enlisting the help of your favorite game engine, there are thousands of graphics commands that have to come together perfectly to produce beautiful 3D images on your phone, desktop or VR headsets. GAPID (Graphics API Debugger) is a new tool that helps developers diagnose rendering and performance issues with their applications. With GAPID, you can capture a trace of your application and step through each graphics command one-by-one. This lets you visualize how your final image is built and isolate problematic calls, so you spend less time debugging through trial-and-error. GAPID supports OpenGL ES on Android, and Vulkan on Android, Windows and Linux. Debugging in action, one draw call at a time GAPID not only enables you to diagnose issues with your rendering commands, but also acts as a tool to run quick experiments and see immediately how these changes wou

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering At href="https://www.blog.google/products/android/introducing-android-oreo-go-edition">Google for India this Monday, we announced the final release of Android 8.1 Oreo. Android 8.1 Oreo is another exciting step toward bringing to life our vision of an AI-first mobile platform, for everyone, everywhere. Android 8.1 introduces support for our new href="https://www.android.com/versions/oreo-8-0/go-edition/">Android Oreo (Go edition) software experience for entry-level devices. Android Oreo (Go edition) brings the best of Android to the rapidly growing market for low-memory devices around the world, including your apps and games. Android 8.1 also introduces the href="https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/neuralnetworks/index.html">Neural Networks API , a hardware accelerated machine learning runtime to support ML capabilities in your apps. On supported devices, the Neural Networks API enables fast and effi

Posted by Fred Chung, Developer Advocate In recent months, there's a growing trend for handset makers to ship new devices with long screen aspect ratio (stretching beyond 16:9), many of which also sport rounded corners. This attests to the Android ecosystem's breadth and choice. Pixel 2 XL and Huawei Mate 10 Pro are just two of many examples. These screen characteristics could bring a very immersive experience to users and they take notice of apps and games that don't take advantage of the long aspect ratio screen on these new devices. Therefore it is important for developers to optimize for these screen designs. Let's have a look at related support provided by the Android OS. Optimize for long aspect ratio screens Most apps using standard UI widgets will likely work out-of-the-box on these devices. href="https://developer.android.google.cn/guide/practices/screens_support.html">Android documentation details techniques for flexibly working on multiple