Android Developers Blog

Posted by Sameer Samat, Vice President, Product Management Developers are our partners and by pairing their creativity and innovation with our platforms and tools, together we create delightful experiences for billions of people around the world. Listening carefully to their feedback is an important part of how we continue to make Android better with each release and improve how mobile app stores work. In an April 2019 blog post we shared some updates we made to Android APIs and Play Policies based on developer feedback. And today, we wanted to share some additional insights we’ve gained from developer feedback and how we’re taking that input to improve Google Play and Android. Some of the key themes we’ve heard include: Supporting developers’ ability to choose how they distribute their apps through multiple app stores on different platforms (mobile, PC, and console), each with their own business model competing in a healthy marketplace; Clarifying our policies regarding who needs ...

Posted by Mrinalini Loew, Group Product Manager We are committed to providing powerful tools and services to help developers build and grow their businesses while ensuring a safe, secure and seamless experience for users. Today we are addressing some of the most common themes we hear in feedback from developers. Below are a few frequently asked developer questions that we thought would also be helpful to address. Q: Can I distribute my app via other Android app stores or through my website? A: Yes, you can distribute your app however you like! As an open ecosystem, most Android devices come preinstalled with more than one store - and users can install others. Android provides developers the freedom and flexibility to distribute apps through other Android app stores, directly via websites, or device preloads, all without using Google Play’s billing system. Q: What apps need to use Google Play's billing system? A: All apps distributed on Google Play that are offering in-app pu...

Posted by Tom Grinsted, Product Manager, Google Play Console We hope you’re enjoying the new Google Play Console . With over 350,000 people now using it as their default experience and thousands more providing feedback, the new Play Console is ready to come out of beta. Thank you to everyone who has helped to get it here. This means that the old Play Console will be discontinued starting November 2, 2020 . After this date, you’ll be automatically directed to the new Play Console when you log into your account. If you haven't tried it already, we recommend that you switch to the new version now. To get started, visit play.google.com/console . The new Play Console’s responsive design means that you can use it across all of your devices. The new navigation makes it easier to find and understand important features, and we’ve added areas to help you better understand your release status, acquisition performance, and guidance on policy changes. Thanks to your feedback, we’ve alre...

Posted by Haining Chen, Vishwath Mohan, Kevin Chyn and Liz Louis, Android Security Team As phones become faster and smarter, they play increasingly important roles in our lives, functioning as our extended memory, our connection to the world at large, and often the primary interface for communication with friends, family, and wider communities. It is only natural that as part of this evolution, we’ve come to entrust our phones with our most private information, and in many ways treat them as extensions of our digital and physical identities. This trust is paramount to the Android Security team. The team focuses on ensuring that Android devices respect the privacy and sensitivity of user data. A fundamental aspect of this work centers around the lockscreen, which acts as the proverbial front door to our devices. After all, the lockscreen ensures that only the intended user(s) of a device can access their private data. This blog post outlines recent improvements around how users inte...

Posted by Wolfram Klein, Product Manager, Android TV We’ve been turning it up to 11 all summer long, leading up to the launch of Android 11 on mobile. Now, following right behind the mobile release, we are launching Android 11 on Android TV to bring the latest platform features to the big screen. Android 11 on Android TV introduces performance and privacy improvements, new features tailored for the TV, and updated developer tools, in addition to enabling many of the features we announced during the #11WeeksOfAndroid. Foundational Improvements Android TV continues to bring many of the benefits that come with the core Android update to the TV. With Android 11, performance improvements, like enhanced memory management, and privacy features, like one-time permissions, are introduced to make sure TV devices work quickly and securely. Tailored for the TV Android 11 emphasizes media by bringing support for Auto Low Latency Mode , and low latency media decoding , along with a new...

Posted by Yafit Becher, Product Manager & Dan Galpin , Developer Advocate Play Asset Delivery downloads the best supported texture for the device Google Play Asset Delivery allows you to publish an Android App Bundle to Google Play containing all the resources your game needs. It offers multiple delivery modes, auto-updates, compression, and delta patching, all hosted at no cost to you. As of today, you can use Google Play Asset Delivery to include textures in multiple texture compression formats in your Android App Bundle and Google Play will automatically deliver the assets with the best supported texture compression format for each device. With Texture Compression Format Targeting, you can start using ASTC for devices that support it while falling back to ETC2/ETC1 to devices that don’t. The Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) format offers advantages, such as improved rendering performance, faster load times, a smaller in-memory footprint, better battery life, and...

Posted by Jay Kong, Gaming and Graphics Product Manager With the rollout of Android 11 on Pixel, Android GPU Inspector (AGI) has graduated from a limited developer preview to an open beta. During the preview, AGI has been helpful in finding performance bottlenecks for developers we've been working with, and we're looking forward to hearing your feedback. What is Android GPU Inspector? AGI is a graphics profiling tool that allows you to look into the GPU of Android devices to better understand graphics bottlenecks and optimize the performance of games and apps that leverage 3D graphics APIs. It shows a timeline of events for your running game or app, which includes system activities, high frequency GPU hardware counters, and, if you are using Vulkan, GPU activity information. What devices can I use it on? AGI relies on updated firmware and video drivers to get information it needs; the first devices to support it are the Pixel 4 and 4XL running Android 11. While we are work...

Posted by Stephanie Cuthbertson, Director, Product Management Android 11 is here! Today we’re pushing the source to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and officially releasing the newest version of Android. We built Android 11 with a focus on three themes: a People -centric approach to communication, Controls to let users quickly get to and control all of their smart devices, and Privacy to give users more ways to control how data on devices is shared. Read more in our Keyword post . For developers, Android 11 has a ton of new capabilities. You’ll want to check out conversation notifications, device and media controls, one-time permissions, enhanced 5G support, IME transitions, and so much more. To help you work and develop faster, we also added new tools like compatibility toggles, ADB incremental installs, app exit reasons API, data access auditing API, Kotlin nullability annotations, and many others. We worked to make Android 11 a great release for you, and we can’t wait to se...

Posted by Florina Muntenescu , Android Developer Advocate, Rohit Sathyanarayana, Software Engineer Welcome Jetpack DataStore, now in alpha - a new and improved data storage solution aimed at replacing SharedPreferences. Built on Kotlin coroutines and Flow, DataStore provides two different implementations: Proto DataStore , that lets you store typed objects (backed by protocol buffers ) and Preferences DataStore , that stores key-value pairs . Data is stored asynchronously, consistently, and transactionally, overcoming most of the drawbacks of SharedPreferences. SharedPreferences vs DataStore * SharedPreferences has a synchronous API that can appear safe to call on the UI thread, but which actually does disk I/O operations. Furthermore, apply() blocks the UI thread on fsync() . Pending fsync() calls are triggered every time any service starts or stops, and every time an activity starts or stops anywhere in your application. The UI thread is blocked on pending fsync() calls schedul...