Android Developers Blog

Posted by Shailen Tuli Today we're releasing the source code for the official href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.samples.apps.iosched&hl=en">Google I/O 2017 for Android app. This year's app substantially modifies existing functionality and adds several new features. It also expands the tech stack to use href="https://firebase.google.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=1001467%20%7C%20Firebase*%20Brand%20GENERIC%20%7C%20US%20%7C%20en%20%7C%20Desk%2BTab%2BMobile%20%7C%20Text%20%7C%20BKWS%20%5B2017%5D&utm_term=%7Bkeyword%7D&gclid=Cj0KCQjwq7XMBRCDARIsAKVI5Qais3r2YPsnohDN1mzomMUFysiwEJJ5W2V-LfRO_0btHf5SAfMmp5caAofLEALw_wcB">Firebase . In this post, we'll highlight several notable changes to the app as well as their design considerations. The most prominent new feature for 2017 is the event reservation system, designed to help save in-person attendees' time and provide a streamlined c...

Posted by Jonathan Karmel Since our public launch at href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/android-instant-apps-is-open-to-all.html">Google I/O this year, we've been hard at work expanding the number of supported devices and the availability of instant apps, so that users can run your apps instantly, without installation. We're excited to announce that 500 million Android users now have access to instant apps across countries where Google Play operates. A number of Google Play apps and games businesses across a range of industries have already started building with instant apps. Following the launch of their instant apps, they have seen strong results in engagement, acquisition and retention. href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vimeo.android.videoapp&hl=en_GB">Vimeo: WIth more than 50M creators and 240M viewers worldwide, Vimeo has built a platform whereby people can easily share videos with friends. T...

Posted by Dmitry Malykhanov, Developer Relations Partner, Google Play Android Instant Apps provides rich, native experiences at the tap of a web link. People can experience your app without upfront installation, enabling a higher level and quality of engagement. However, to provide comparable latency of loading a mobile webpage, an instant app needs to be lean and well structured, so it can be downloaded and run quickly in response to a URL tap. In light of that, we encourage that the binary loaded in response any entry-point URL is as small as possible, with a maximum of 4MB. The smaller the binaries, the faster the instant app will load and the smoother the user experience. This document will propose best practices for managing the application structure and binary size to enable a smooth instant app experience. These practices will also benefit your installable app. Refactoring your codebase The biggest binary size benefit comes from refactoring your app into multiple feature modul...

Posted by Adriana Puchianu, Developer Marketing, Google Play Based in the UK, href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Playdemic&e=-EnableAppDetailsPageRedesign">Playdemic is a free-to-play mobile games developer. Their leading game href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.playdemic.golf.android">Golf Clash is designed to provide a short and fun, competitive experience. It uses a simple and accessible game mechanics based on one-thumb gaming which has generated substantial user engagement, with an average of 44 minutes played over three sessions a day. Golf Clash is now played by more than 1.5 million players every day whilst the average revenue per user is equal to other platforms. Watch Paul Gouge, CEO & Co-founder, and Gareth Jones, Head of Production, discuss how Playdemic uses live game operations ("live ops") to continuously engage players and grow their business on Google Play. Live ops are also referre...

Posted by Tom Grinsted, Product Manager Subscriptions can be a sustainable source of revenue, allowing you to invest in your long-term business growth with confidence. Subscription apps are growing rapidly on Google Play; the number of subscribers doubled in the last year and spend on subscriptions has increased 10-times over the past three years. To help the growing number of subscription businesses we're seeing, we href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRZPXgRhOH0">introduced the subscriptions dashboard in the Google Play Console at I/O 2017. Today, we're adding three new subscription reports covering acquisition, retention, and cancellations to help you understand your data and make informed business decisions. Find information below on the new features, our updated best practices to help you grow your subscriptions business, and stories from other developers succeeding on Google Play. New subscription reports now available in the Google Play Console Three n...

Posted by James Lau , Product Manager Android developers know that dex compilation is a key step in building an APK. This is the process of transforming .class bytecode into .dex bytecode for the Android Runtime (or Dalvik, for older versions of Android). The dex compiler mostly works under the hood in your day-to-day app development, but it directly impacts your app's build time, .dex file size, and runtime performance. That's why we are investing in making important improvements in the dex compiler. We're excited to announce that the next-generation dex compiler, D8, is now available for preview as part of href="https://developer.android.com/studio/preview/index.html">Android Studio 3.0 Beta release . When comparing with the current DX compiler, D8 compiles faster and outputs smaller .dex files, while having the same or better app runtime performance. * Tested with benchmark project href="https://github.com/jmslau/perf-android-large/tree/android-30"...

Posted by Wayne Piekarski , Developer Advocate for IoT Today, we're releasing Developer Preview 5 (DP5) of href="https://developer.android.com/things/index.html">Android Things , which includes the major change of being based on the upcoming Android O release. Android Things is Google's platform to enable Android Developers to create Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and seamlessly scale from prototype to production. Android O Android O is currently under href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/07/developer-preview-4-now-available.html">Developer Preview for phones and tablets, and DP5 is now based on this upcoming release (previous releases were based on Android N). This means that your future Android Things applications should target API 26 to work correctly on the platform with our support libraries. Hardware Changes DP5 now adds support for the new href="https://developer.android.com/things/hardware/imx6ul.html">NXP SprIo...