Android Developers Blog

Posted by Vikrant Nanda and René Mayrhofer, Android Security & Privacy Team There is no better time to talk about Android dessert releases than the holidays because who doesn't love dessert? And what is one of our favorite desserts during the holiday season? Well, pie of course. In all seriousness, pie is a great analogy because of how the various ingredients turn into multiple layers of goodness: right from the software crust on top to the hardware layer at the bottom. Read on for a summary of security and privacy features introduced in Android Pie this year. Strengthening Android Making Android more secure requires a combination of hardening the platform and advancing anti-exploitation techniques. Platform hardening With Android Pie, we updated File-Based Encryption to support external storage media (such as, expandable storage cards). We also introduced support for metadata encryption where hardware support is present. With filesystem metadata encryption, a single key pres...

Posted by Patricia Correa, Platforms & Ecosystems Earlier this year we highlighted some of Google Play's milestones and commitments in supporting the 1M+ developers on the Play Store, as well as those of you working on Android apps and games and looking to launch and grow your business on our platforms. We have been inspired and humbled by the achievements of app and game developers, building experiences that delight and help people everywhere, as some stories highlighted in #IMakeApps . We continue to focus on helping you grow thriving businesses and building tools and resources to help you reach and engage more users in more places, whilst ensuring a safe and secure ecosystem. Looking to 2019, we are excited about all the things to come and seeing more developers adopt new features and update to Android P . In the meantime let's share some of the 2018 highlights on Google Play and Android: Building for the future Along with Android P we have continued to help ...

Posted by Fei Ye, Software Engineer and Kazushi Nagayama, Ninja Spamologist Google Play ratings and reviews are extremely important in helping users decide which apps to install. Unfortunately, fake and misleading reviews can undermine users' trust in those ratings. User trust is a top priority for us at Google Play, and we are continuously working to make sure that the ratings and reviews shown in our store are not being manipulated. There are various ways in which ratings and reviews may violate our developer guidelines: Bad content : Reviews that are profane, hateful, or off-topic. Fake ratings : Ratings and reviews meant to manipulate an app's average rating or top reviews. We've seen different approaches to manipulate the average rating; from 5-star attacks to positively boost an app's average rating, to 1-star attacks to influence it negatively. Incentivized ratings : Ratings and reviews given by real humans in exchange for money or valuable items. When we see the...

Posted by Jeff Bailey, AOSP Team AOSP has been around for more than 10 years and visibility into the project has often been restricted to the Android Team and Partners. A lot of that has been rooted in business needs: we want to have fun things to show off at launches and the code wasn't factored in a way that let us do more in the open. At the Android Developer Summit last month, we demoed GSI running on a number of partner devices, enabled through Project Treble. The work done to make that happen has provided the separation needed, and has also made it easier to work with our partners to upstream fixes for Android into AOSP. As a result of this, more than 40% of the commits to our git repository came in through our open source tree in Q3 of this year. Publishing Android's Continuous Integration Dashboard In order to support the developers working directly in AOSP and our partners upstreaming changes, we have enabled more than 8000 tests in presubmit -- tests that are run...

This blogpost is a collaboration between Google and Twitter. Authored by Jingwei Hao with support from César Puerta, Fred Lohner from Twitter, and developed with Jingyu Shi from Google. Push notifications are an important way to keep Twitter users informed about what's happening. However, they can be a significant and often overlooked source of battery drain. For example: high priority notifications can wake a phone from Doze , and fetching data upon push notification delivery via the network can drain the battery quickly. As app developers at Twitter, we know that battery life is an important aspect of the mobile experience for our users. Over time we've taken several steps to optimize our app to work with the power saving features, particularly around push notifications. In this article, we'll share what we did to save battery life on our users' devices in the hope this will help other developers optimize their apps as well. Firebase Cloud Messaging migration Earlier...

Posted by Lilian Young and Shawn Willden, Android Security; and Frank Salim, Google Pay New Android Pie Keystore Features The Android Keystore provides application developers with a set of cryptographic tools that are designed to secure their users' data. Keystore moves the cryptographic primitives available in software libraries out of the Android OS and into secure hardware. Keys are protected and used only within the secure hardware to protect application secrets from various forms of attacks. Keystore gives applications the ability to specify restrictions on how and when the keys can be used. Android Pie introduces new capabilities to Keystore. We will be discussing two of these new capabilities in this post. The first enables restrictions on key use so as to protect sensitive information. The second facilitates secure key use while protecting key material from the application or operating system. Keyguard-bound keys There are times when a mobile application receives data but...

Posted by Keith Smyth This is the fourth in a series of blog posts in which outline strategies and guidance in Android with regard to power. A process is not forever Android is a mobile operating system designed to work with constrained memory and battery. For this reason, a typical Android application can have its process killed by the system to recover memory. The process being killed is chosen based on a ranking system of how important that process is to the user at the time. Here, in descending order, is the ranking of each class of process. The higher the rank, the less likely that process is to be killed. Native Native Linux daemon processes are responsible for running everything (including the process killer itself). System The system_server process, which is responsible for maintaining this list. Persistent apps Persistent apps like Phone, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth are crucial to keeping your device connected and able to provide its most...

Posted by Sam Spencer, Technical Program Manager, Google Play The Android Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) platform is seven years old and the active device count has been below 1% for some time. Consequently, we are deprecating support for ICS in future releases of Google Play services. For devices running ICS, the Google Play Store will no longer update Play Services APK beyond version 14.7.99. What does this mean as an Application developer: The Google Play services SDK contains the interfaces to the functionality provided by the Google Play services APK , running as background services. The functionality required by the current, released SDK versions is already present on ICS devices with Google Play services and will continue to work without change. With the SDK version changes earlier this year, each library can be independently released and may update its own minSdkVersion. Individual libraries are not required to change based on this deprecation. Newer SDK components may continue to s...

Posted by John Posavatz, Product Manager, Android Auto At Google I/O this past May, we provided a sneak preview of several new media and messaging features for Android Auto. We are happy to announce that these features are now ready in our latest version of Android Auto, and we encourage you to update your Android Auto implementations to take advantage of them! New Media Features Several new features make it easier for users to find the media content that they're looking for. Check out the full documentation for them on our Android developer site. Search results After performing an Assistant-based search (e.g. "OK Google, play [artist / album / playlist / book / song / genre]"), music auto-plays as before, and in addition you can now provide your own list of categorized results. First, you'll need to declare support for onSearch() in your MediaBrowserServiceCompat implementation, and then override it . Android Auto forwards a user's search terms to this method ...

Posted by Jocelyn Becker, Senior Program Manager, Google Developer Training The Google Developers Training team recently published an updated version of our Android Developer Fundamentals course as a series of Google codelabs. Codelabs made their debut as onsite tutorials at Google I/O in 2015, and have skyrocketed in popularity as a way for developers to learn how to use Google technologies, APIs, and SDKs. A codelab is a short, self-contained tutorial that walks you through how to do a specific task. More than 2 million users have worked through Google codelabs this year. Our Android courses were originally intended as classroom-based courses. However, we found that many people work through the courses on their own, outside of formal teaching programs. So, when we updated the Android Developer Fundamentals course, in addition to supporting classroom-based learning, we made the material available as a sequential series of codelabs. Android Developer Fundamentals course The updated A...

Posted by Purnima Kochikar, Director, Business Development, Games & Applications Today, we announced our annual Best of 2018 list , highlighting the best content on Google Play. But ever wonder about the makers behind your favorite apps and games like PUBG MOBILE or Tasty ? Well, we wanted to take a moment to celebrate the developers that brought to life the best U.S. apps and games of 2018. And this year was jam packed with entertainment — all thanks to the developers who pushed the envelope and sparked our imaginations. Check out the full rundown of the developers behind the best apps and games of 2018 on Google Play: Best App of 2018 Drops: Learn 31 new languages by Language Drops Most Entertaining Apps VIMAGE - cinemagraph creator & live photo animator by vimage No.Draw - Colors by Number 2018 by Creative APPS Neverthink: The TV of the Internet by Neverthink Tik Tok - including musical.ly by musical.ly Scout FM - Podcast Radio by Scout FM Best Self Improvement Apps M...