Android Developers Blog

Posted by Tom Grinsted, Product Manager, Google Play At this year’s Google I/O, we announced a slate of new features to help you take your business further with Google Play. Launching today, these changes include several improvements designed to help you make better decisions about your business by providing clearer, more actionable data. We know the right data is critical to help you improve your app performance and grow your business. That’s why we’re excited to share a major update that enables you to better measure and analyse your core statistics — the most fundamental install and uninstall metrics by user and device. We’ve also enhanced the Statistics page on the Play Console to show change over time, enable more granular configurations, and, coming soon, exclusive benchmarks for core stats! More granular configurations are now available on the Statistics page to help you better understand your acquisition and churn. More accurate and more expansive than before, the new metrics ...

Posted by Catherina Xu (Product Manager) Last November, we released Fast Pair with the Jaybird Tarah Bluetooth headphones. Since then, we’ve engaged with dozens of OEMs, ODMs, and silicon partners to bring Fast Pair to even more devices. Last month, we held a talk at I/O announcing 10+ certified devices, support for Qualcomm’s Smart Headset Development Kit, and upcoming experiences for Fast Pair devices. width="" height="" alt="The Fast Pair team presenting at I/O 2019."> The Fast Pair team presenting at I/O 2019. Upcoming experiences Fast Pair makes pairing seamless across Android phones - this year, we are introducing additional features to improve Bluetooth device management. True Wireless Features. As True Wireless Stereo (TWS) headphones continue to gain momentum in the market and with users, it is important to build system-wide support for TWS. Later this year, TWS headsets with Fast Pair will be able to broadcast individual battery i...

Posted by Wojtek Kaliciński, Developer Advocate, Android Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson announces support for Kotlin during the Developer Keynote at I/O 2017. Today at OSCON (the O'Reilly Open Source Software Conference ), Kotlin was awarded the Open Source Award for Breakout Project of the Year. There is no doubt to us why Kotlin received this award: it’s a fast moving (but thoughtfully developed) programming language that lets you write better code, faster. It’s great to see Kotlin continue to receive the sort of recognition as Breakout Project of the Year, building on other awards like #1 fastest growing language on Github . We’re big fans of Kotlin, and we’ve heard that you are too – feedback from you is in part why we announced support for the language over two years ago. This meant bundling the Kotlin plugin in Android Studio, along with promising to support Kotlin-built apps going forward. But there was a long way to go for many teams at Google to provide a first class experie...

Posted by Sean McQuillan , Developer Advocate, Android Registration is now open for Android Dev Summit 2019! Learn, share, and connect at #AndroidDevSummit 2019. It's a great place to learn new Android development skills, share feedback and ideas with the Android engineering team, and connect with Android developers from around the globe. Join us for the two day conference on October 23-24 hosted at the Google Event Center (MP7) in Sunnyvale, CA. We'll share two days of deep technical talks covering topics such as Jetpack, Android Studio, Android Q, Kotlin, and more. You will learn about the latest innovations straight from the Android engineering team, discover best practices to help you build even better apps, and accelerate your teams’ productivity on Android. The Android engineering team will be there in person to answer your questions, hear your ideas and feedback (we love that!), and discuss the direction of Android development. And you will be joined by Android develope...

Posted by Florina Muntenescu , Android Developer Advocate Displaying text is an important task in most apps, so in Android Q we're continuing to introduce new features to support your needs and improve performance. We disabled hyphenation by default, enabled creating a typeface using multiple fonts or font families, exposed the list of fonts installed on the device, and improved some of the most-used text styling APIs. Hyphenation is off by default in Android Q and AppCompat v1.1.0 Our performance tests showed that when hyphenation is enabled, up to 70% of the time spent on measuring text is on hyphenation. Hyphenation takes up to 70% of the time spent measuring text Given that hyphenation often isn’t needed for all TextViews in an app, and because of the impact on performance, we decided to turn hyphenation off by default in Android Q and AppCompat v1.1.0. If you want to use hyphenation, you need to manually turn it on in your app by setting the hyphenation frequency to normal. Y...

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering Android Q Beta 5 launches today! Today we're rolling out Beta 5, bringing Android Q Beta very close to the system behaviors you'll see in the final release. Developer APIs were already finalized in the previous update . So, now is the time to test your apps for compatibility and make sure they are ready! You can get Beta 5 today on Pixel devices by enrolling here . If you're already enrolled and received Beta 4 on your Pixel device, you'll automatically get the update to Beta 5. Partners participating in the Android Q Beta program will also be updating their devices to Beta 5 over the coming weeks. To get started with Android Q Beta, visit developer.android.com/preview . What’s in Beta 5? The Beta 5 update includes the latest Android Q system images for Pixel and Android jEmulator, along with the final Android Q developer APIs (API level 29), the official API 29 SDK, and updated build tools for Android Studio. These give you ev...

Posted by Don Turner , Developer Advocate for Android Media In Android Q there's a new API which allows applications to capture the audio of other applications. It's called the AudioPlaybackCapture API and it enables some important use cases for easier content sharing and accessibility. Some examples include: Live captioning - allowing the audio content of the currently playing app to be captioned or translated in real time. In fact, the Live Caption feature shown at I/O this year is a client of this API. Live captioning allows your users to engage with audible content even when it's impossible or inconvenient to do so, such as listening in a public place without headphones. Game recording and streaming - In-game sounds can be recorded and streamed to live audiences, helping to increase the social reach of game content. There may be some situations where a developer wishes to disallow the capture of their app's audio. This article explains how audio capture works for...

Posted by Patricia Correa, Director, Developer Marketing We just wrapped up the Indie Games Showcase in Europe, Japan & South Korea! Back in March we started our search for some of the newest and most creative indie titles from these regions. The search culminated last week with the celebration of indie developers at events in London, Tokyo, and Seoul, and the selection of the winners from our finalists. Developers from 12 countries traveled to the events and showcased their games to the audience of gamers, industry experts, YouTube creators, and journalists. The games were on show to the public, who spent several hours trying out their games and voting for their favourites, alongside the Google Play team. The top 10 finalists were then selected, and went on to pitch their games, and compete for big prizes in front of the jury. Now, we are happy to announce the winners from each region! They will be returning home with a prize package that includes promotions on the Google Play St...