Android Developers Blog

Posted by Matt Pearring, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Developer Marketing In just a week, we'll be kicking off Android Dev Summit 2018, broadcasting live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA on November 7 and 8. We'll have two days of deep technical sessions from the Android engineering team, with over 30 sessions livestreamed. The app just went live; download it on Google Play and start planning. With the app you can explore the conference schedule with details on keynotes, sessions, and lightning talks. You can also plan your summit experience by saving events to your personalized schedule. This year's app is also an Instant app , so you can try it out first before installing it! Android Dev Summit app screenshots If you can't join in person, you can always join us online — we'll be livestreaming all of the sessions on the Android Dev Summit website or app and making them available on YouTube throughout the conference so you can watch...

Posted by Ritesh Nayak M, Product Manager Three years ago, we created Nearby Notifications as a way for Android users to discover apps and content based on what is nearby. Our goal was to bring relevant and engaging content to users - to provide useful information proactively. Developers have leveraged this technology to let users know about free wifi nearby, provide guides while in a museum, and list transit schedules at bus stops. We've learned a lot building and launching Nearby Notifications. However, earlier this year, we noticed a significant increase in locally irrelevant and spammy notifications that were leading to a poor user experience. While filtering and tuning can help, in the end, we have a very high bar for the quality of content that we deliver to users, especially content that is delivered through notifications. Ultimately, we have determined these notifications did not meet that bar. As a result, we have decided to discontinue support for Nearby Notifications. W...

Dan Lavelle, Head of Learning Operations, Google Play Having a great idea for an app or game is just the beginning. At Google Play, it's our goal to provide you with the tools and skills to build successful mobile app and games businesses. Training continues to be among the top requested features from Android developers, and we've heard your feedback. That's why we're launching a brand new, free e-learning platform to help you realize the full potential of your business on Google Play. Introducing Google Play's Academy for App Success Whether you're looking to grow your audience, understand performance metrics, or increase revenue, Play Academy is here to help you understand the best practices and Play Console features to succeed on Google Play. We built Play Academy to fit into your busy schedule. Learn from your home or office computer, or take courses on-the-go with your mobile device. Key features of Play Academy Learning paths Choose from 10 collections o...

Posted by James Bender, Product Manager, Google Play In June we started adding security metadata to all apps and app updates to help verify product authenticity from Google Play. We're doing this is to help developers reach a wider audience, particularly in countries where peer-to-peer app sharing is common because of costly data plans and limited connectivity. Now, when a user shares an app via Play-approved partner peer-to-peer apps, Play will be able to determine shared app authenticity while a device is offline, add those shared apps to a user's Play Library, and manage app updates when the device comes back online. This will give users more confidence when using Play-approved peer-to-peer app beta partners, starting today with SHAREIt and Files Go by Google . An additional integration from Xender is planned in the coming weeks. Please visit the Play Store to make sure you have the latest versions of these apps. This also benefits you as a developer as it provides a Play...

Posted by Janis Danisevskis, Information Security Engineer, Android Security In Android Pie, we introduced Android Protected Confirmation, the first major mobile OS API that leverages a hardware protected user interface (Trusted UI) to perform critical transactions completely outside the main mobile operating system. This Trusted UI protects the choices you make from fraudulent apps or a compromised operating system. When an app invokes Protected Confirmation, control is passed to the Trusted UI, where transaction data is displayed and user confirmation of that data's correctness is obtained. Once confirmed, your intention is cryptographically authenticated and unforgeable when conveyed to the relying party, for example, your bank. Protected Confirmation increases the bank's confidence that it acts on your behalf, providing a higher level of protection for the transaction. Protected Confirmation also adds additional security relative to other forms of secondary authentication,...

Posted by Matt Henderson, Product Manager, Google Play Today we are kicking off Playtime, our annual global event series, hosting over 800 attendees in Berlin and San Francisco to share insights from experts around the world and the latest updates on our products. This will be followed by events in Sao Paulo, Singapore, Taipei, Seoul, and Tokyo. At Google Play, we continue to invest in tools that make it easier for you to develop and distribute your apps to a global audience. Below are some of the exciting updates we are announcing today: Building smaller apps 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. Smaller apps have higher conversion rates and our user research shows that app size is a leading motivator in driving uninstalls. With the Android App Bundle's modularization, you can also deliver features on demand, instead of at install time, further reducing the size of your app....

Posted by Matt Henderson, Product Manager, Google Play Today we are kicking off Playtime, our annual global event series, hosting over 800 attendees in Berlin and San Francisco to share insights from experts around the world and the latest updates on our products. This will be followed by events in Sao Paulo, Singapore, Taipei, Seoul, and Tokyo. At Google Play, we continue to invest in tools that make it easier for you to develop and distribute your apps to a global audience. Below are some of the exciting updates we are announcing today: Building smaller apps 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. Smaller apps have higher conversion rates and our user research shows that app size is a leading motivator in driving uninstalls. With the Android App Bundle's modularization, you can also deliver features on demand, instead of at install time, further reducing the size of your app....

Posted by Nagendra Modadugu and Bill Richardson, Google Device Security Group At the Made by Google event last week, we talked about the combination of AI + Software + Hardware to help organize your information. To better protect that information at a hardware level, our new Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL devices include a Titan M chip.We briefly introduced Titan M and some of its benefits on our Keyword Blog , and with this post we dive into some of its technical details. Titan M is a second-generation, low-power security module designed and manufactured by Google, and is a part of the Titan family . As described in the Keyword Blog post , Titan M performs several security sensitive functions, including: Storing and enforcing the locks and rollback counters used by Android Verified Boot . Securely storing secrets and rate-limiting invalid attempts at retrieving them using the Weaver API. Providing backing for the Android Strongbox Keymaster module, including Trusted User Presence and Prote...

Posted by Luiz Gustavo Martins, Partner Developer Advocate, Partner DevRel This is the third in a series of blog posts in which outline strategies and guidance in Android with regard to power. Over the years, executing background tasks on Android has evolved. To write modern apps , it's important to learn how to run your background tasks in modern fashion. When is an app in the background? Before understanding what background execution is, we need to have a clear view of when Android understands an app to be in the foreground. An app is considered to be in the foreground if any of the following is true: The app has a visible activity, whether the activity is started or paused. The app has a foreground service . Another foreground app is connected to the app, either by binding to one of its services , or using one of its content providers . For example, an app is in the foreground if another app or the system binds to its: IME Wallpaper service Notification listener Voice or te...

In less than a month, we'll be kicking off Android Dev Summit 2018, broadcasting live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA on November 7 and 8. We'll have two days of deep technical sessions from the Android engineering team, with over 30 sessions livestreamed. The first wave of sessions were just posted to the website: check them out and start planning . The summit kicks off on November 7 at 10AM PST with the keynote, where you'll hear directly from Dave Burke and others on the present and future of Android development. From there, we'll dive into two tracks (and two days!) of deep technical content from the Google engineering team, on topics such as Android Pie, Android Studio, Kotlin, Android Jetpack, Google Play and more. We'll also have demos and office hours for those attending in person; more on that in the coming weeks! We received a ton of interest from developers looking to attend in person; if you were one of those who expressed interes...

Posted by Don Turner, Developer Advocate, Android Audio Framework This week we released the first production-ready version of Oboe - a C++ library for building real-time audio apps. Oboe provides the lowest possible audio latency across the widest range of Android devices, as well as several other benefits. Single API Oboe takes advantage of the improved performance and features of AAudio on Oreo MR1 (API 27+) whilst maintaining backward compatibility (using OpenSL ES ) on API 16+. It's kind of like AndroidX for native audio . Less code to write and maintain Using Oboe you can create an audio stream in just 3 lines of code (vs 50+ lines in OpenSL ES): AudioStreamBuilder builder; AudioStream *stream = nullptr; Result result = builder.openStream(&stream); Other benefits Convenient C++ API (uses the C++11 standard) Fast release process: supplied as a source library, bug fixes can be rolled out in days, quite a bit faster than the Android platform release cycle Less guesswork: Pr...

Posted by Sami Tolvanen, Staff Software Engineer, Android Security Android's security model is enforced by the Linux kernel, which makes it a tempting target for attackers. We have put a lot of effort into hardening the kernel in previous Android releases and in Android 9, we continued this work by focusing on compiler-based security mitigations against code reuse attacks. Google's Pixel 3 will be the first Android device to ship with LLVM's forward-edge Control Flow Integrity (CFI) enforcement in the kernel, and we have made CFI support available in Android kernel versions 4.9 and 4.14 . This post describes how kernel CFI works and provides solutions to the most common issues developers might run into when enabling the feature. Protecting against code reuse attacks A common method of exploiting the kernel is using a bug to overwrite a function pointer stored in memory, such as a stored callback pointer or a return address that had been pushed to the stack. This allows a...

Posted by Paul Bankhead, Director, Product Management, Google Play We focus relentlessly on security and privacy on the Google Play Store to ensure Android users have a positive experience discovering and installing apps and games they love. We regularly update our Google Play Developer policies and today have introduced stronger controls and new policies to keep user data safe. Here are a few updates: Upgrading for security and performance As previously announced , as of November 1, 2018, Google Play will require updates to existing apps to target API level 26 (Android 8.0) or higher (this is already required for all new apps). Our goal is to ensure all apps on Google Play are built using the latest APIs that are optimized for security and performance. Protecting Users Our Google Play Developer policies are designed to provide a safe and secure experience for our users while also giving developers the tools they need to succeed. For example, we have always required developers to li...

Posted by James Lau ( @jmslau ), Product Manager Today marks the beginning of KotlinConf 2018 - the largest in-person gathering of the Kotlin community annually. 2018 has been a big year for Kotlin, as the language continues to gain adoption and earn the love of developers. In fact, 27% of the top 1000 Android apps on Google Play already use Kotlin. More importantly, Android developers are loving the language with over 97% satisfaction in our most recent survey. It's no surprise that Kotlin was voted as the #2 most-loved language in the 2018 StackOverflow survey. Google supports Kotlin as a first-class programming language for Android development. In the past 12 months, we have delivered a number of important improvements to the Kotlin developer experience. This includes the Kotlin-friendly SDK , Android KTX , new Lint checks and various Kotlin support improvements in Android Studio . We have also launched Kotlin support in our official documentation , new flagship samples in...