Android Developers Blog

Posted by Chet Haase It’s a Wrap! We’ve just finished the first series in the MAD Skills series of videos and articles on Modern Android Development. This time, the topic was Navigation component, the API and tool that helps you create and edit navigation paths through your application. The great thing about videos and articles is that, unlike performance art, they tend to stick around for later enjoyment. So if you haven’t had a chance to see these yet, check out the links below to see what we covered. Except for the Q&A episode at the end, each episode has essentially identical content in the video and article version, so use whichever format you prefer for content consumption. Episode 1: Overview The first episode provides a quick, high-level overview of Navigation Component, including how to create a new application with navigation capability (using Android Studio’s handy application templates), details on the containment hierarchy of a navigation-enabled UI, and a...

Posted by Lily Sheringham, Global Marketing, Platforms & Ecosystems We are launching the second series of the Apps, Games, & Insights podcast. Over the summer, we teamed up with a new group of leading industry insiders and experts to bring you 8 new podcast episodes over the next couple of months. We are bringing you their exceptional business stories, experiences and discussion on some of the latest big questions in the apps and games industry. We are joined again by your hosts—Tamzin Taylor, who heads up Apps & Games Business Development for Google Play in Western Europe, and Dirk Primbs, who leads the Ecosystem Developer Relations team in Europe— and you can find out who they have been cajoling and corralling in the new series, below. In the first series , the guests covered topics ranging from responsible growth and building for the long term, through advice from mergers and acquisitions and venture capital experts, to hot topics such as privacy and accessibi...

By Andrew Ahn, Product Manager, Google Play App Safety At Google Play, we want to foster an ecosystem of safe, engaging, useful, and entertaining apps used and loved by billions of Android users worldwide. That’s why we regularly update and revise our Google Play Developer Policies and Developer Distribution Agreement, detailing the boundaries of app content and functionalities allowed on the platform, as well as providing latest guidance on how developers can promote and monetize apps. In recent efforts in analyzing apps for policy compliance on Google Play we identified some common mistakes and violations that developers make, and we’re sharing these with the developer community with tips and guides on how to avoid them, mitigating the risks of apps and developer accounts being suspended for violating our policies. Links that take users back to other apps on the Play Store One of the most common mistakes we see are apps that have buttons and menus that link out to the Play Store -- e...

Posted by Eric Bahna, Product Manager In August, we announced plans to expand Android Auto’s app ecosystem to enable new navigation, parking, and electric vehicle charging apps. We’ve been hard at work collaborating with our early access partners to test and refine the Android for Cars App Library. Today, we’re releasing the library into an open beta, for any developer to use. This means you’ll now be able to design, develop, and test your navigation, parking or charging app on Android Auto. We’re looking forward to enabling Google Play Store publishing for your beta apps in the coming months. Three of our early access partners: ChargePoint, SpotHero, and Sygic The design phase is the time to familiarize yourself with our design guidelines and app quality guidelines . Driver safety is core to our mission and we want to help you optimize your app for the car. When it comes time to build your app, our new library will hopefully make development easy. Get started with the...

Steve Suppe, Product Manager, Google Play Publishing your app or game is one of the most important moments in your app’s lifecycle. You want everything to go smoothly, from making sure the production release is stable, to getting test releases out quickly, to getting your marketing message just right. That’s why visibility is key. Knowing when your app is in review, when it’s been approved, and when it can go live on Google Play helps you set your own schedule. Now, with two new features in the new Google Play Console , you can do just that. The Publishing overview page helps you better understand your publishing process and Managed publishing gives you better control of when your app updates go live on Google Play. When the new Play Console rolls out to everyone starting November 2 , these features will be the recommended way to control your release timing, so let’s take a closer look. Publishing overview The new Publishing overview page displays all your recent c...

Posted by Scott Swarthout, Product Manager Today, we’re excited to release the stable version of Android Studio 4.1 , with a set of features addressing common editing, debugging, and optimization use cases. A major theme for this release was helping you be more productive while using Android Jetpack libraries, Android’s suite of libraries to help developers follow best practices and write code faster. Based on your feedback we made a number of improvements to the code editing experience with IDE integrations for popular Android libraries. Some highlights of Android Studio 4.1 include a new Database Inspector for querying your app’s database, support for navigating projects that use Dagger or Hilt for dependency injection, and better support for on-device machine learning with support for TensorFlow Lite models in Android projects. We’ve also made updates to Apply Changes to make deployment faster. Based on your feedback, we’ve made several changes to help game developers with ...

Posted by Kylie McRoberts, Program Manager and Alec Guertin, Security Engineer Google’s Android Security & Privacy team has launched the Android Partner Vulnerability Initiative (APVI) to manage security issues specific to Android OEMs. The APVI is designed to drive remediation and provide transparency to users about issues we have discovered at Google that affect device models shipped by Android partners. Another layer of security Android incorporates industry-leading security features and every day we work with developers and device implementers to keep the Android platform and ecosystem safe. As part of that effort, we have a range of existing programs to enable security researchers to report security issues they have found. For example, you can report vulnerabilities in Android code via the Android Security Rewards Program (ASR), and vulnerabilities in popular third-party Android apps through the Google Play Security Rewards Program . Google releases ASR reports in Andro...