Android Developers Blog

Posted by Hoi Lam , Lead Developer Advocate, Wear OS by Google Today we launched the Wear OS by Google developer preview and brought Android P platform features to wearables. The developer preview includes updated system images on the official Android Emulator and a downloadable system image for the Huawei Watch 2 Bluetooth or Huawei Watch 2 Classic Bluetooth. This initial release is intended for developers only and is not for daily or consumer use. Therefore, it is only available via manual download and flash. Please refer to the release notes for known issues before downloading and flashing your device . In this release, we would like to highlight the following features that developers should pay attention to: Restriction related to non-SDK methods and fields : To improve app compatibility, Android P has started the process of restricting access to non-SDK methods and fields. Developers should make plans to migrate away from these. If there is no public equivalent for your use case,...

Posted by Jamal Eason , Product Manager, Android We are excited to announce that Android Studio 3.1 is now available to download in the stable release channel. The focus areas for this release are around product quality and app development productivity. In addition to many underlying quality changes, we added several new features into Android Studio 3.1 that you should integrate into your development flow. New to Android Studio 3.1 is a C++ performance profiler to help troubleshoot performance bottlenecks in your app code. For those of you with a Room or SQLite database in their your app, we added better code editor support to aid in your SQL table and query creation statements. We also added better lint support for your Kotlin code, and accelerated your testing with an updated Android Emulator with Quick Boot. If any of these features sound exciting or you are looking for the next stable version of Android Studio, you should download Android Studio 3.1 today! Check out the list of n...

Posted by Marc Stogaitis, Tajinder Gadh, and Michael Cai, Android Activity Recognition Team Phones are our most personal devices we bring with us everywhere, but until now it's been hard for apps to adjust their experience to a user's continually changing environment and activity. We've heard from developer after developer that they're spending valuable engineering time to combine various signals like location and sensor data just to determine when the user has started or ended an activity like walking or driving. Even worse, when apps are independently and continuously checking for changes in user activity, battery life suffers. That's why today, we're excited to make the Activity Recognition Transition API available to all Android developers - a simple API that does all the processing for you and just tells you what you actually care about: when a user's activity has changed. Since November of last year, the Transition API has been working behind the scene...

Posted by Benjamin Frenkel, Product Manager, Google Play Instant We've been working hard to make Google Play the premier platform for game discovery and a place for you to grow your business. In the last year, the number of Android users who installed a game has more than doubled. Nearly 40% of that growth came from emerging markets, including Brazil, India, Indonesia and Mexico. Our investments extend beyond the Play Store and include many key Google products: Last week, we introduced a gaming solution from Google Maps APIs that enables you to build game worlds based on real world data to find the best places for gameplay. We also launched Agones , an open source, dedicated game server hosting product built on Google Cloud Platform, in collaboration with Ubisoft, to support multiplayer games. At last month's Mobile World Congress, we released version 1.0 of ARCore , our augmented reality SDK for Android, enabling you to publish AR apps and games to Google Play for the first t...

Originally posted by Dave Kleidermacher, Vice President of Security for Android, Play, ChromeOS, on the Google Security Blog Our team's goal is simple: secure more than two billion Android devices. It's our entire focus, and we're constantly working to improve our protections to keep users safe. Today, we're releasing our fourth annual Android security year in review. We compile these reports to help educate the public about the many different layers of Android security, and also to hold ourselves accountable so that anyone can track our security work over time. We saw some really positive momentum last year and this post includes some, but not nearly all, of the major moments from 2017. To dive into all the details, you can read the full report at: g.co/AndroidSecurityReport2017 Google Play Protect In May, we announced Google Play Protect, a new home for the suite of Android security services on nearly two billion devices. While many of Play Protect's features had...

Posted by Adam Vartanian, Software Engineer We hope you're enjoying the first developer preview of Android P. We wanted to specifically call out some backward-incompatible changes we plan to make to the cryptographic capabilities in Android P, which you can see in the developer preview. Changes to providers Starting in Android P, we plan to deprecate some functionality from the BC provider that's duplicated by the AndroidOpenSSL (also known as Conscrypt) provider. This will only affect applications that specify the BC provider explicitly when calling getInstance() methods. To be clear, we aren't doing this because we are concerned about the security of the implementations from the BC provider, rather because having duplicated functionality imposes additional costs and risks while not providing much benefit. If you don't specify a provider in your getInstance() calls, no changes are required. If you specify the provider by name or by instance—for example, Cipher.get...

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering Last week at Mobile World Congress we saw that Android's ecosystem of developers, device makers, and silicon partners continues to bring amazing experiences to users worldwide. Looking ahead, today we're sharing the first developer preview of Android P , the newest version of Android. It's an early baseline build for developers only -- you're our most trusted reviewers and testers ;-) Early feedback from our developer community is crucial in helping us evolve the platform to meet your needs. We'd love to get you started exercising the new features and APIs in P, and as always, we depend on your early feedback and ideas, so please give us your input ! This first developer preview of Android P is just the start - we'll have lots more to share at Google I/O in May, stay tuned! New features to try in your apps Here's a look at some of the cool features in this first preview of Android P that we want you to try and give fe...

Posted by Dave Smith , Developer Advocate for IoT Today we're releasing Developer Preview 7 (DP7) of Android Things, Google's platform that enables Android developers to create Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The platform also supports powerful applications such as video and audio processing and on-board machine learning with TensorFlow. The latest preview is based on Android 8.1 and is updated to support version 11.8.0 of Google Play Services. For all the details of what's included in DP7, see the release notes . Here are some of the highlights: Console enhancements and device updates New features are also available in the Android Things Console to enhance product management from prototype to production: Product Models. Create multiple software variations of the same hardware product, and manage the builds and updates for each independently. Product Sharing. Grant additional user accounts access to view and manage the models, builds, and updates for a given product. ...