Android Developers Blog

Posted by Florina Muntenescu, Developer Advocate (@FMuntenescu) At Google I/O 2019 we announced that Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first. Together with JetBrains, we also launched Kotlin/Everywhere - a global series of community led events focusing on the potential of using Kotlin everywhere; on Android, servers, web front-end and other platforms. Kotlin/Everywhere events took place from May through December and we want to thank everyone for getting involved 👨‍💻👩‍💻 30,000+ developers participated in-person at Kotlin/Everywhere events 🎥🍿 200,000 views of live-streams and event recordings like Kotlin/Everywhere Bengaluru , Minsk , Chicago , Buenos Aires and more. 📅 500+ events : from short evening meetups, half-day sessions, and full day events, to Kotlin/Everywhere tracks at larger events like DevFests, or even StudyJams that spanned several weeks. 🎤 ~30 speakers from Google and JetBrains gave ~70 talks at events around the world. 🌎 85+ countries/regi...

Posted by Patricia Correa, P&E Developer Marketing Director The last 12 months have seen Google Play continue to grow, with over 116 billion downloads of the apps and games that you created. We’ve been working hard to build the latest technology and tools for modern Android development and distribution, improving Google Play and the Play Console to offer you new and better ways for your app to be discovered, promoted, and monetized. A key focus has been addressing the challenge of keeping users safe and maintaining trust in Google Play. Modern Android development We are focused on building great tools and services and your feedback is crucial in helping us do so. You have told us that you love Android’s openness, but we have also heard that you would like us to marry it with an opinion about the right way to do things. We call this approach modern Android development: opinionated and powerful, for fast, easy development, taking away everything that slows you down so you can focus ...

Posted by Jeff Bailey , AOSP Engineering Manager; Ally Sillins , AOSP Program Manager; Kris Hildrum, Open Source Code Search Tech Lead; Jay Sachs, Kythe Tech Lead/Manager Searching for "it's all about the code" open source on Google returns more than a million hits. Today we’re introducing a public code search tool for the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Link: https://cs.android.com The Android repository is made up of a collection of git repositories which are managed together using our ‘repo’ tool. Because of this, most tools (such as github, gitweb, etc) can’t see the source code the way that it’s laid out when it’s checked out on the system. In partnership with our colleagues who run Google’s internal Code Search and Kythe , we’re pleased to present a code search tool that presents a view of all of the Android source code as you actually use it. Here are some features you can take advantage of starting today: View the source code Navigate cross-references acro...

Posted by Paul Lammertsma , Developer Advocate Technology has changed the way media and entertainment is accessed and consumed in the home. While the living room experience is evolving with the addition of smart devices, TVs still remain the largest and most frequently used screen for watching content. When Android TV was first introduced in 2014, we set out to bring the best of Android into the connected home on the TV. We worked closely with the developer community to grow our content and app ecosystem and bring users the content they want. Since then, we’ve seen tremendous momentum with OEM and operator partners as well as consumer adoption worldwide. Today, we are bringing Android API level 29 with the recent performance and security updates made with Android 10 to Android TV. We’re excited to provide faster updates through Project Treble and more secure storage with encrypted user data. TLS 1.3 by default also brings better performance benefits and is up to date with the TLS st...

Posted by David Winer , Kotlin Product Manager When we announced Kotlin as a supported language for Android, there was a tremendous amount of excitement among developers. Since then, there has been a steady increase in the number of developers using Kotlin. Today, we’re proud to say nearly 60% of the top 1,000 Android apps contain Kotlin code , with more and more Android developers introducing safer and more concise code using Kotlin. During this year’s I/O, we announced that Android development will be Kotlin-first, and we’ve stood by that commitment. This is one of the reasons why Android is the gold partner for this year’s KotlinConf . Seamless Kotlin on Android In 2019, we focused on making programming in Kotlin on Android a seamless experience, with modern Kotlin-first APIs across the Android platform. Earlier this year, we launched a developer preview of Jetpack Compose , a modern UI toolkit for Android built using a Kotlin domain-specific language (DSL). We also incorporated c...

Posted by Dan Galpin , Developer Advocate With over 2.5 billion monthly active devices, the Android Platform gives incredible reach for game developers. Taking advantage of that opportunity can be a challenge, particularly if your game really tries to push the limits of what mobile can do. We've spent years working with game developers to try to both capture and address the biggest issues, and we're just beginning to see the fruits of that effort with the launch of the Android Game SDK. The Android Game SDK is a set of libraries that you can use to enhance your Android game. The first library we are launching in the Android Game SDK helps developers with frame pacing, the synchronization of a game's rendering loop with the OS display subsystem and underlying display hardware. Android's display subsystem is designed to avoid tearing that occurs when the display hardware switches to a new frame in the middle of an update. To this end, it buffers past frames, detects late ...

Today is the last day to apply for the Android Developer Challenge ! And to spark your imagination, we wanted to take a look at one of the original Android Developer Challenge winners, from over 10 years ago. Meet Maurizio Leo : Maurizio and team have been working on Android for a while now. In fact, he was one of the winners of the original Android Developer Challenge, which launched with the start of Android over ten years ago. Their app , which won 3rd place worldwide at the time, has gone on to be downloaded over 30 million times! If you’ve got a great idea that can help users get things done, we want to hear! We’ll pick 10 concepts and provide expertise and guidance to those developers to help in their plans to bring their ideas to fruition, in part from this amazing set of experts we’ve assembled. And once the app is ready, we’ll help showcase it in front of the billions of users on Google Play, through a collection and more. You can read more about all of the prizes here . There...

Posted by Bram Bonné, Senior Software Engineer, Android Platform Security & Chad Brubaker, Staff Software Engineer, Android Platform Security Android is committed to keeping users, their devices, and their data safe. One of the ways that we keep data safe is by protecting network traffic that enters or leaves an Android device with Transport Layer Security (TLS). Android 7 (API level 24) introduced the Network Security Configuration in 2016, allowing app developers to configure the network security policy for their app through a declarative configuration file. To ensure apps are safe, apps targeting Android 9 (API level 28) or higher automatically have a policy set by default that prevents unencrypted traffic for every domain. Today, we’re happy to announce that 80% of Android apps are encrypting traffic by default. The percentage is even greater for apps targeting Android 9 and higher, with 90% of them encrypting traffic by default. Percentage of apps that block cleartext by de...