Android Developers Blog

Posted by Shawn Willden, Staff Software Engineer Our smart devices, such as mobile phones and tablets, contain a wealth of personal information that needs to be kept safe. Google is constantly trying to find new and better ways to protect that valuable information on Android devices. From partnering with external researchers to find and fix vulnerabilities, to adding new features to the Android platform, we work to make each release and new device safer than the last. This post talks about Google's strategy for making the encryption on Google Pixel 2 devices resistant to various levels of attack—from platform, to hardware, all the way to the people who create the signing keys for Pixel devices. We encrypt all user data on Google Pixel devices and protect the encryption keys in secure hardware . The secure hardware runs highly secure firmware that is responsible for checking the user's password. If the password is entered incorrectly, the firmware refuses to decrypt the device...

Melissa Daniels, Program Manager for Android Things Android Things enables you to build and maintain IoT devices at scale. We recently released Android Things 1.0 with long-term support for production devices, so you can easily take an IoT device from prototype to commercial product. We packed Google I/O this year with Android Things content to inspire and empower the developer community, from talks and codelabs to interactive demos and a scavenger hunt. Here's a closer look at the fun stuff we had on display that you won't see on the shelves of retail stores. Demos We introduced a handful of new interactive Android Things demos across I/O, showcasing the AI and ML capabilities of the platform, so if you didn't get an opportunity to attend this year, here's a few of our favorites-- perfect for exploring from wherever you are in the world! Smart Flowers: Flos Mobilis What do you get when you combine machine learning, Android Things and robotics? Flos Mobilis , a continu...

Posted by Sai Deep Tetali, Software Engineer, Google Play Protect At Google I/O 2017, we introduced Google Play Protect , our comprehensive set of security services for Android. While the name is new, the smarts powering Play Protect have protected Android users for years. Google Play Protect's suite of mobile threat protections are built into more than 2 billion Android devices, automatically taking action in the background. We're constantly updating these protections so you don't have to think about security: it just happens. Our protections have been made even smarter by adding machine learning elements to Google Play Protect. Security at scale Google Play Protect provides in-the-moment protection from potentially harmful apps (PHAs), but Google's protections start earlier. Before they're published in Google Play, all apps are rigorously analyzed by our security systems and Android security experts. Thanks to this process, Android devices that only download apps...

Posted by Aleks Haecky, Training Developer & Word Artist, Google+ , LinkedIn , Medium The Kotlin Bootcamp Udacity course is a free, self-paced online course that teaches you the basics of the Kotlin programming language. This introduction to Kotlin was created by Google experts in collaboration with Udacity and is for people who already know how to program. The Kotlin language lets you create apps in less time, writing less code, and with fewer errors. This modern object-oriented language offers a strong type system, type inference, null safety, properties, lambdas, extensions, coroutines, higher-order functions, and many other features. Kotlin is so concise that you can create complete data classes with a single line of code. Kotlin is officially supported for building Android apps, fully interoperates with the Java programming language and libraries, and is included with IntelliJ and Android Studio. In this course you will learn everything you need to program in Kotlin, includin...

Posted by Gerardo Capiel and Varouj Chitilian, Google Pay Today's customers want to get things done faster than ever, whether they're ordering groceries or shopping for a new pair of shoes. With Google Pay, we want to ensure checkout doesn't slow them (or your conversions) down, while enhancing the customer experience at every step of the way. Last week at Google I/O , we announced some exciting new features that do just that. We also shared the latest ways developers can use Google Pay to offer the best experiences at checkout and beyond—all available for free with our APIs. Here are some of the highlights and how you can make the most of them. More places for customers to check out online We've started rolling out support for checking out with Google Pay regardless of your browser or device. This means customers can pay with Google Pay on most major browsers from any device. Enabling this functionality within your apps and sites is simple. Watch Google Pay software en...

Posted by Iliyan Malchev, Project Treble Architect Android P Beta available at android.com/beta As Android continues to evolve, each new release of the OS brings new features, new user experiences, and better security. It is important that these new releases find their way to mobile devices as fast as possible. Yesterday, we announced that the following devices, in addition to Pixel and Pixel 2, now support Android P Beta : Sony Xperia XZ2, Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, Nokia 7 Plus, Oppo R15 Pro, Vivo X21, OnePlus 6 and Essential PH‑1 . Android P Beta provides an opportunity for developers and early adopters around the world to try the latest Android release, test their apps, and provide feedback. In this post, we provide an update to Project Treble and the technology that allowed us to bring Android Beta to more phones this year. Building the Foundation Bringing the new Android release quickly to the hands of users takes a combined effort between Google, silicon manufacturers (SM), device manuf...

Posted by Hoi Lam , Lead Developer Advocate, Wear OS by Google At Google I/O, we launched the Wear OS by Google developer preview 2. This update added support for Actions on Google (AoG) and more power-related enhancements including a new battery saver mode. This developer preview includes updated Android Emulator images and a downloadable system image for the Huawei Watch 2 Bluetooth or Huawei Watch 2 Classic Bluetooth. This preview release is intended for developers only and not for daily or consumer use. Therefore, the preview release is only available via manual download and flash. Please refer to the release notes for known issues before downloading and flashing your device . Support for Actions on Google We have revamped the Google Assistant on Wear OS to support features such as visual cards, follow-on suggestion chips, and text-to-speech. For developers, we added support for Actions on Google to Wear OS and existing Actions will work on Wear OS out of the box. Be sure to obs...

Posted By Stephanie Cuthbertson, Product Management Director, Android As Android has grown exponentially over the past ten years, we've also seen our developer community grow dramatically. In countries like China, India, and Brazil, the number of developers using our IDE almost tripled - in just two years. With such growth, we feel an even greater responsibility to invest in our developer experience. Guided by your feedback, we've focused our efforts on making mobile development fast and easy, helping you get more users by making apps radically smaller, and increasing engagement to keep users coming back. We're also pretty excited to see Android Things go to 1.0, creating new opportunities for you to develop - everything from major consumer devices, to cool remote control vehicles! As Day 1 of Google I/O kicks off, let's take a closer look at these major themes from the Developer Keynote : Development: making mobile development fast and easy Android Jetpack — Today...

Posted by Tian Lim, VP of UX and Product, Google Play Read this in العَرَبِيَّة‎‎ , Bahasa Indonesia , Deutsch , español (Latinoamérica) , le français , português do Brasil , tiếng Việt , русский язы́к , ไทย , Türkçe , 한국어 , 中文 (简体) , 中文 (繁體) , or 日本語 . Google Play connects a thriving ecosystem of developers to people using more than 2 billion active Android devices around the world. In fact, more than 94 billion apps were installed from Google Play in the last year alone. We’re continuing to empower Android developers with new features in the Play Console to help you improve your app’s performance and grow your business. And, at Google I/O 2018, we’re introducing our vision for a new Android app model that is modular and dynamic. Benefit from size savings with the Android App Bundle The Android App Bundle is Android's new publishing format, with which you can more easily deliver a great experience in a smaller app size,...

Today at Google I/O 2018 we announced the latest preview of Android Studio 3.2 which includes an exciting set of features that support the Android P Developer Preview , the new Android App Bundle , and Android Jetpack . Download Android Studio 3.2 from our canary release channel today to explore one of the most feature rich releases of the year. Android Jetpack is a set of libraries, developer tools and architectural guidance to help make it quick and easy to build great Android apps. It provides common infrastructure code so you can focus on what makes your app unique. Android Studio 3.2 includes a wide set of tools that support Jetpack from a visual Navigation Editor that uses the Navigation API, templates for Android Slices APIs, to refactoring tools to migrate to the new Android support libraries in Jetpack — AndroidX. The canary 14 release of Android Studio 3.2 also supports the new Android app model that is the evolution of the APK format, the Android App Bundle. With no...