Android Developers Blog

Posted by Jeff Sharkey, Software Engineer, and Seb Grubb, Product Manager Application Sandboxing is a core part of Android’s design, isolating apps from each other. In Android Q, taking the same fundamental principle from Application Sandboxing, we introduced Scoped Storage . Since the Beta 1 release , you’ve given us a lot of valuable feedback on these changes -- thank you for helping shape Android! Because of your feedback, we've evolved the feature during the course of Android Q Beta. In this post, we'll share options for declaring your app’s support for Scoped Storage on Android Q devices, and best practices for questions we've heard from the community. Updates to help you adopt Scoped Storage We expect that Scoped Storage should have minimal impact to apps following current storage best practices . However, we also heard from you that Scoped Storage can be an elaborate change for some apps and you could use more time to assess the impact. Being developers ourselv...

Posted by Purnima Kochikar, Director, Apps and Games Business Development, Google Play Drum roll please! To kick off Google I/O this year, the 2019 Google Play Awards will take place on Monday, May 6th. We’re excited to highlight nine categories this year, some familiar and some new, to recognize developers that continue to set the bar for quality apps and games on Google Play. Building on previous years, we celebrate our fourth year by recognizing some of the best experiences available on Android, with an emphasis on overall quality, strong design, technical performance, and innovation. The nominees were selected by various teams across Google, and meet criteria thresholds covering high star rating, Android vitals, and have had a launch or major update since April 2018. Congratulations to this year’s nominees below and remember to check them out on Google Play at play.google.com/gpa2019 . Stay tuned as we announce the winners of each category at Google I/O. Standout Well-Being App App...

Posted by Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android After nearly six months of development, Android Studio 3.4 is ready to download today on the stable release channel. This is a milestone release of the Project Marble effort from the Android Studio team. Project Marble is our focus on making the fundamental features and flows of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) rock-solid. On top of many performance improvements and bug fixes we made in Android Studio 3.4, we are excited to release a small but focused set of new features that address core developer workflows for app building & resource management. Part of the effort of Project Marble is to address user facing issues in core features in the IDE. At the top of the list of issues for Android Studio 3.4 is an updated Project Structure Dialog (PSD) which is a revamped user interface to manage dependencies in your app project Gradle build files. In another build-related change, R8 replaces Proguard as the default code shrinker...

Posted by Anuj Gulati, Developer Marketing Manager and Sami Kizilbash, Developer Relations Program Manager Last year we announced the Indie Games Accelerator, a special edition of Launchpad Accelerator, to help top indie game developers from emerging markets achieve their full potential on Google Play. Our team of program mentors had an amazing time coaching some of the best gaming talent from India, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia. We’re very encouraged by the positive feedback we received for the program and are excited to bring it back in 2019. Applications for the class of 2019 are now open, and we’re happy to announce that we are expanding the program to developers from select countries* in Asia, Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Successful participants will be invited to attend two gaming bootcamps, all-expenses-paid at the Google Asia-Pacific office in Singapore , where they will receive personalized mentorship from Google teams and industry experts. Additional benefits in...

Posted by Sameer Samat, VP of Product Management, Android & Google Play Thank you for all the feedback about updates we’ve been making to Android APIs and Play policies. We’ve heard your requests for improvement as well as some frustration. We want to explain how and why we’re making these changes, and how we are using your feedback to improve the way we roll out these updates and communicate with the developer community. From the outset, we’ve sought to craft Android as a completely open source operating system. We’ve also worked hard to ensure backwards compatibility and API consistency, out of respect and a desire to make the platform as easy to use as possible. This developer-centric approach and openness have been cornerstones of Android’s philosophy from the beginning. These are not changing. But as the platform grows and evolves, each decision we make comes with trade-offs. Everyday, billions of people around the world use the apps you’ve built to do incredible things like c...

Posted by Sameer Samat, VP of Product Management, Android & Google Play Thank you for all the feedback about updates we’ve been making to Android APIs and Play policies. We’ve heard your requests for improvement as well as some frustration. We want to explain how and why we’re making these changes, and how we are using your feedback to improve the way we roll out these updates and communicate with the developer community. From the outset, we’ve sought to craft Android as a completely open source operating system. We’ve also worked hard to ensure backwards compatibility and API consistency, out of respect and a desire to make the platform as easy to use as possible. This developer-centric approach and openness have been cornerstones of Android’s philosophy from the beginning. These are not changing. But as the platform grows and evolves, each decision we make comes with trade-offs. Everyday, billions of people around the world use the apps you’ve built to do incredible things like c...

Posted by Daniel Schramm, Product Manager, Google Play Since launching on Google Play nearly 7 years ago, subscriptions have proven to be an essential element in creating sustainable mobile app businesses; 89 of the top 100 highest grossing apps on Google Play in the US now provide subscription products. As the market matures, it is becoming increasingly important for subscription developers to optimize both subscriber conversion and retention in order to maintain growth. To help you do that, we're rolling out new insights available directly in the Play Console. Subscription retention report Example subscription retention report data in the Play Console. Source: Google Internal Data. The recently updated subscription retention report shows how well you are retaining subscribers, along with how well subscribers convert from free trial, introductory price, and first to second payment. You can configure two cohorts based on SKU, country, and subscription start date. This is particula...

Posted by Miguel Montemayor and Diana García Ríos As of Android Gradle plugin 3.4.0 (included in Android Studio 3.4), we are starting the deprecation process of the feature plugin ( com.android.feature ) and instant app plugin ( com.android.instantapp ) as a way to build your instant app. When building your app, you will receive a warning flagging com.android.feature as deprecated. If you have an existing instant app built with the feature plugin, migrate your existing app to an instant-enabled app bundle as soon as possible. What is changing? Last year, we introduced Android App Bundles —a new way to build and publish your Android apps. App bundles simplify delivering optimized APKs, including instant delivery, by unifying uploads into a single artifact. Google Play handles distribution by serving the correct APKs to your instant and installed app users—this is called Dynamic Delivery . To learn more about app bundles, visit the documentation site . Dynamic Delivery is based on the...

Posted by Christiaan Prins and Max Gubin Today we are announcing the release of two new features to ML Kit: Language Identification and Smart Reply . You might notice that both of these features are different from our existing APIs that were all focused on image/video processing. Our goal with ML Kit is to offer powerful but simple-to-use APIs to leverage the power of ML, independent of the domain. As such, we are excited to expand ML Kit with solutions for Natural Language Processing (NLP)! NLP is a category of ML that deals with analyzing and generating text, speech, and other kinds of natural language data. We're excited to start out with two APIs: one that helps you identify the language of text, and one that generates reply suggestions in chat applications. Both of these features work fully on-device and are available on the latest version of the ML Kit SDK, on iOS (9.0 and higher) and Android (4.1 and higher). Generate reply suggestions based on previous messages A new feat...

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering A few weeks ago we Introduced Android Q Beta , a first look at the next version of Android. Along with new privacy features for users, Android Q adds new capabilities for developers - like enhancements for foldables, new APIs for connectivity, new media codecs and camera capabilities, NNAPI extensions, Vulkan 1.1 graphics, and more. Android's program of early, open previews is driven by our core philosophy of openness, and collaboration with our community. Your feedback since Beta 1 proves yet again the value of that openness - it's been loud, clear, and incredibly valuable. You've sent us thousands of bug reports , giving us insights and directional feedback, changing our plans in ways that make the platform better for users and developers. We're taking your feedback to heart, so please stay tuned. We're fortunate to have such a passionate community helping to guide Android Q toward the final product later this year. Today we...