Android Developers Blog

Posted by Platform Hardening Team In Android 11 we continue to increase the security of the Android platform. We have moved to safer default settings, migrated to a hardened memory allocator, and expanded the use of compiler mitigations that defend against classes of vulnerabilities and frustrate exploitation techniques. Initializing memory We’ve enabled forms of automatic memory initialization in both Android 11’s userspace and the Linux kernel. Uninitialized memory bugs occur in C/C++ when memory is used without having first been initialized to a known safe value. These types of bugs can be confusing, and even the term “uninitialized” is misleading. Uninitialized may seem to imply that a variable has a random value. In reality it isn’t random. It has whatever value was previously placed there. This value may be predictable or even attacker controlled. Unfortunately this behavior can result in a serious vulnerability such as information disclosure bugs like ASLR bypasses, or contro...

Posted by: Charmaine D’Silva, Product Lead, Android Privacy and Framework Narayan Kamath, Engineering Lead, Android Privacy and Framework Stephan Somogyi, Product Lead, Android Security Sudhi Herle, Engineering Lead, Android Security This blog post is part of a weekly series for #11WeeksOfAndroid . For each #11WeeksOfAndroid , we’re diving into a key area so you don’t miss anything. This week, we spotlighted Privacy and Security ; here’s a look at what you should know. Privacy and security is core to how we design Android, and with every new release we increase our investment in this space. Android 11 continues to make important strides in these areas, and this week we’ll be sharing a series of updates and resources about Android privacy and security. But first, let’s take a quick look at some of the most important changes we’ve made in Android 11 to protect user privacy and make the platform more secure. As shared in the “ All things privacy in Android 11 ” video, we’re giving users e...

Posted by Hoi Lam , Android Machine Learning This blog post is part of a weekly series for #11WeeksOfAndroid. Each week we’re diving into a key area of Android so you don’t miss anything. Throughout this week, we covered various aspects of Android on-device machine learning (ML). Whichever stage of development be it starting out or an established app; whatever role you play in design, product and engineering; whatever your skill level from beginner to experts, we have a wide range of ML tools for you. Design - ML as a differentiator “Focus on the user and all else will follow” is a Google mantra that becomes even more relevant in our machine learning age. Our Design Advocate, Di Dang, highlighted the importance of finding the unique intersection of user problems and ML strengths . Too often, teams are so keen on the idea of machine learning that they lose sight of their user needs. Di outlined how the People + AI Guidebook can help you make ML product decisions and used the example of...

Posted by Di Dang , Design Advocate From our Machine Learning-themed week together, we’ve delved into an ML Kit x CameraX Codelab , and we learned how to train your own custom models and integrate them in your Android app . In addition to the technical considerations that go into using ML, it’s important that we design our ML-based apps in a way that enables our users to feel in control of the ML technology, and not the other way around. To help product creators understand some best practices for ML product decisions, the PAIR team published the People + AI Guidebook at Google I/O last year. Let’s take a look at some ML design considerations you can apply in your Android apps by learning from the example of Read Along . Google recently launched Read Along, an Android app that uses on-device ML and voice UI to help children learn to read anytime, anywhere, using just their voice. According to the UN Division of Sustainable Development Goals , more than 50% of children worldwide are no...

Posted by Xiaodao Wu, Developer Advocate With the rise in quality content that’s keeping us glued to the big screen, it’s no surprise watch time on the TV continues to grow. As users spend more time in their living rooms, they are also looking to get more from their smart TVs and streaming devices. To help developers meet these needs, we are always working to support the latest Android features on Android TV. Today, we are releasing an Android 11 Developer Preview for Android TV with many privacy, performance, accessibility and connectivity features. More information can be found on the Android 11 Developer Preview web page. The Android 11 Developer Preview on TV is for developers (not for consumer use), this image is for ADT-3 developer devices only, it is available by manual download and flash. All user data on the ADT-3 device will be wiped out after flash. Once the device has been flashed to Android 11, you will not be able to go back to the previous Android 10 build. Downloadi...

Posted by Hoi Lam , Android Machine Learning Yesterday, we talked about turnkey machine learning (ML) solutions with ML Kit . But what if that doesn’t completely address your needs and you need to tweak it a little? Today, we will discuss how to find alternative models, and how to train and use custom ML models in your Android app. Find alternative ML models Crop disease models from the wider research community available on tfhub.dev If the turnkey ML solutions don't suit your needs, TensorFlow Hub should be your first port of call. It is a repository of ML models from Google and the wider research community. The models on the site are ready for use in the cloud, in a web-browser or in an app on-device. For Android developers, the most exciting models are the TensorFlow Lite (TFLite) models that are optimized for mobile. In addition to key vision models such as MobileNet and EfficientNet, the repository also boast models powered by the latest research such as: Wine classificatio...

Posted by Christiaan Prins, Product Manager, ML Kit and Shiyu Hu, Tech Lead Manager, ML Kit Two years ago at I/O 2018 we introduced ML Kit, making it easier for mobile developers to integrate machine learning into your apps. Today, more than 25,000 applications on Android and iOS make use of ML Kit’s features. Now, we are introducing some changes that will make it even easier to use ML Kit. In addition, we have a new feature and a set of improvements we’d like to discuss. A new ML Kit SDK, fully focused on on-device ML ML Kit's APIs are built to help you tackle common challenges in the Vision and Natural Language domains. We make it easy to recognize text, scan barcodes, track and classify objects in real-time, do translation of text, and more. The original version of ML Kit was tightly integrated with Firebase, and we heard from many of you that you wanted more flexibility when implementing it in your apps. As a result, we are now making all the on-device APIs available in a new ...

Posted by Angela Ying, Product Manager, Google Play Subscription continues to be one of the fastest growing business models for apps in Google Play. As your subscription business evolves and becomes more sophisticated, our platform continues to evolve to better support your needs. Today we’re excited to tell you more about the new subscription capabilities we announced at the Android 11 Beta Launch , including promotional codes to help you access new subscribers, new opportunities to remind users of your value and win back churned users. Many of these capabilities are built on top of the Play Billing Library version 3 . In addition to the new capabilities, we are also making improvements to our existing platform. Over the past few years, we have launched many features, such as account hold, restore, and pause, which have been highly effective in reducing your voluntary and involuntary churn. We want to ensure that everyone can take advantage of them, which is why we are planning on cha...

Posted by Jacob Lehrbaum , Director of Developer Relations, Android Developers like you have always played an important role in Android innovation. Over 10 years ago, when we first launched the Android SDK, we also announced the Android Developer Challenge to reward model apps and highlight new ways of solving user problems. As Android pushes the boundaries of machine learning, 5G, foldables, and more, developers continue to help shape these new frontiers. To celebrate this work, we revived the challenge in 2019, with a focus on “Helpful Innovation,” powered by on-device machine learning. We received hundreds of creative projects, and at the end of last year, picked 10 winners who each combined a strong idea and a thirst to bring it to life. Since then, we’ve been working with those winners to help turn their ideas into reality. And today, we’re announcing the 10 winners . Some are still at the beginning of their journey but but their apps are now ready for you to download and try...

Posted by Dr. Stefan Frank, Senior Product Manager, Android System UI This blog post is part of a weekly series for #11WeeksOfAndroid . Each week we’re diving into a key area of Android so you don’t miss anything. This week, we spotlight people & identity. Here's a look at what you should know. The big news One of the goals of Android 11 was making our phones more people-centric. Because nothing matters more to people than connecting to loved ones. It is a core human need especially during our current physical distancing constraints. We have the need to be more social than ever before. Android 11 reimagines how we have conversations on our phones by adding new capabilities to help you maintain your identity across multiple devices. We are announcing some new features in Android 11 that allows you to easily connect with your loved ones, friends and business colleagues. At the center of this release is the Android Conversation Shortcut API and Identity Services Library. The...