Android Developers Blog

Posted by Jon Markoff, Staff Developer Advocate, Android Security Have you ever tried to encrypt data in your app? As a developer, you want to keep data safe, and in the hands of the party intended to use. But if you’re like most Android developers, you don’t have a dedicated security team to help encrypt your app’s data properly. By searching the web to learn how to encrypt data, you might get answers that are several years out of date and provide incorrect examples. The Jetpack Security (JetSec) crypto library provides abstractions for encrypting Files and SharedPreferences objects. The library promotes the use of the AndroidKeyStore while using safe and well-known cryptographic primitives . Using EncryptedFile and EncryptedSharedPreferences allows you to locally protect files that may contain sensitive data, API keys, OAuth tokens, and other types of secrets. Why would you want to encrypt data in your app? Doesn’t Android, since 5.0, encrypt the contents of the user's data pa...

Posted by Scott Swarthout, Product Manager We are excited to announce the stable release of Android Studio 3.6 with a targeted set of features addressing quality in primarily code editing and debugging use cases. This is our first release after the end of Project Marble , which was focused on making the fundamental features and flows of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) rock-solid. We learned a lot from Project Marble and in Android Studio 3.6 we introduce a small set of features, polished existing features, and spent a notable effort addressing bugs and improving underlying performance to ensure we meet the high quality bar we set in the past year. Some highlights of Android Studio 3.6 include a new way to quickly design, develop and preview app layouts using XML, with a new Split View in the design editors. Additionally, you no longer have to manually type in GPS coordinates to test location with your app because we now embedded Google Maps right into the Android Emulato...

By Dan Albert, Software Engineer One thing that NDK users struggle with is managing native dependencies: Library authors need to maintain support for both ndk-build and CMake (and hope that their users are using one of those two options and not something else). Libraries don’t always distribute prebuilt binaries for Android, so users must either build the library themselves or rely on (potentially untrustworthy) prebuilt binaries found elsewhere on the web. Android-specific build scripts are often out of date and no longer work. Libraries are sometimes built by a build system that Android doesn’t support. Libraries may not build on the user’s machine. For example, Unix shell scripts won’t run on Windows. Libraries often depend on other libraries, leaving users to chase them down and start the process again. With version 4.0 of the Android Gradle Plugin, we’ve addressed these issues by adding support for distributing and exposing native libraries through the same mechanism that you do f...

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering Android has led the way towards the future of mobile, with new technologies like 5G to foldable displays to machine learning built into the core. A hallmark of our approach is a strong developer community that provides early and thoughtful feedback, helping us deliver a robust platform for apps and games that delight billions of users around the world. So today, we’re releasing the first Developer Preview of Android 11, and building on a strong feedback cycle last year, we’re making this year’s preview available to you earlier than ever. With Android 11 we’re keeping our focus on helping users take advantage of the latest innovations, while continuing to keep privacy and security a top priority. We’ve added multiple new features to help users manage access to sensitive data and files, and we’ve hardened critical areas of the platform to keep the OS resilient and secure. For developers, Android 11 has a ton of new capabilities for your apps, like...

Posted by Krish Vitaldevara, Director of Product Management Trust & Safety, Google Play Last year, we made several changes to our platform and policies to increase user trust and safety. We’re proud of the work we’ve done to improve family safety , limit use of sensitive permissions , and catch bad actors before they ever reach the Play Store. We realize that changes can lead to work for developers. Last year, you told us that you wanted more detailed communications about impactful updates, why we’re making them, and how to take action. You also asked for as much time as possible to make any changes required. With that feedback in mind, today, we’re previewing Android and Google Play policy changes that will impact how developers access location in the background. Giving users more control over their location data Users consistently tell us that they want more control over their location data and that we should take every precaution to prevent misuse. Since the beginning of Androi...

By Omar El Sheikh, Android Engineer Francesco Carucci , Developer Advocate Vulkan provides developers with the power to specify much more information to devices about rendering state compared to OpenGL. With that power though comes some new responsibilities; developers are expected to explicitly implement things that in OpenGL were handled by the driver. One of these things is device orientation and its relationship to render surface orientation. Currently, there are 3 ways that Android can handle reconciling the render surface of the device with the orientation of the device : The device has a Display Processing Unit (DPU) that can efficiently handle surface rotation in hardware to match the device orientation (requires a device that supports this) The Android OS can handle surface rotation by adding a compositor pass that will have a performance cost depending on how the compositor has to deal with rotating the output image The application itself can handle the surface rotation by re...