Android Developers Blog

Posted by Jamal Eason , Product Manager, Android Today, Android Studio 3.2 is available for download . Android Studio 3.2 is the best way for app developers to cut into the latest Android 9 Pie release and build the new Android App bundle . Since announcing this update of Android Studio at Google I/O '18 , we have refined and polished 20+ new features and focused our efforts on improving the quality for this stable release of Android Studio 3.2. Every developer should use Android Studio 3.2 to transition to using an Android App Bundle , the new app publishing format. With very minimal work, you can generate an app bundle with Android Studio. Once you upload your app bundle to Google Play you can distribute smaller, optimized apps to your users. Early adopters have already seen between 11% - 64% in app size savings with app bundles over the legacy APK app size. Another feature you do not want to miss is the Energy Profiler. This new profiler gives you a set of tools that will hel...

Posted by Jason Woloz and Mayank Jain, Android Security & Privacy Team Our Android and Play security reward programs help us work with top researchers from around the world to improve Android ecosystem security every day. Thank you to all the amazing researchers who submitted vulnerability reports . Android Security Rewards In the ASR program's third year, we received over 470 qualifying vulnerability reports from researchers and the average pay per researcher jumped by 23%. To date, the ASR program has rewarded researchers with over $3M, paying out roughly $1M per year. Here are some of the highlights from the Android Security Rewards program's third year: There were no payouts for our highest possible reward: a complete remote exploit chain leading to TrustZone or Verified Boot compromise. 99 individuals contributed one or more fixes. The ASR program's reward averages were $2,600 per reward and $12,500 per researcher. Guang Gong received our highest reward amount t...

Posted by Jingyu Shi, Partner Developer Advocate, Partner DevRel This is the second in a series of blog posts in which outline strategies and guidance in Android with regard to power. Notifications are a powerful channel you can use to keep your app's users connected and updated. Android provides Notification APIs to create and post notifications on the device, but quite often these notifications are triggered by external events and sent to your app from your app server. In this blog post, we'll explain when and how to generate these remote notifications to provide timely updates to users and minimize battery drain. Use FCM for remote notifications We recommend using Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) to send remote notifications to Android devices. FCM is a free, cross-platform messaging solution that reliably delivers hundreds of billions of messages per day. It is primarily used to send remote notifications and to notify client applications that data is available to sync. If y...

Posted by Madan Ankapura, Product Manager, Android This is the first in a series of blog posts that outline strategies and guidance in Android with regard to power. Your users care a lot about battery -- if it runs out too quickly, it means they can't use your apps. Being a good steward of battery power is an important part of your relationship with the user, and we're continuing to add features to the platform that can help you accomplish this. As part of our announced Play policy about improving app security and performance, an app's target API level must be no more than one year older than the current Android release. Keeping the target API level current will ensure that apps can take advantage of security and performance enhancements offered in the latest platform releases. When you update your app's target API level, it's important that you evaluate your background and foreground needs, which could have a significant impact on power & performance. Past ...

Posted by Peter Armitage, Software Engineer, Google Play Releasing a new version of your app is an exciting moment when your team's hard work finally gets into the hands of your users. However, releasing can also be challenging - you want to keep your existing users happy without introducing performance regressions or bugs. At Google I/O this year , we talked about staged releases as an essential part of how Google does app releases, allowing you to manage the inherent risks of a new release by making a new version of your app available to just a fraction of your users. You can then increase this fraction as you gain confidence that your new version works as expected. We are excited that starting today staged releases will be possible on testing tracks, as well as the production track. We will take a closer look at how staged releases work, and how you can use them as part of your release process. Advantages of a staged release The first benefit of a staged release is that it only...