Android Developers Blog

Posted by James Lau, Product Manager ( twitter.com/jmslau) Today is the beginning of KotlinConf . It's been almost 6 months since we announced Kotlin as a first-class language for Android at Google I/O. During this period, the number of apps on Google Play using Kotlin has more than doubled. More than 17% of the projects in Android Studio 3.0 are now using Kotlin. We are really excited about the strong momentum, and we are thrilled that Android developers all over the world are discovering the joy of Kotlin programming. Kotlin for Android is production-ready. From startups to Fortune 500 companies, developers are already using Kotlin to build their apps. Developers from Pinterest, to Expedia, to Basecamp -- and many others -- are finding their use of Kotlin is increasing productivity and their overall developer happiness levels. Take a look at some of their experiences with Kotlin below. With the recent release of href="https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html">...

Posted by Ritesh Nayak M and Ronald Ho, Product Managers Today we're announcing Fast Pair, a hassle-free process to pair your Bluetooth devices on all supported Android devices running Google Play services 11.7+ with compatibility back to Marshmallow (Android 6.0). Fast Pair makes discovery & pairing of Bluetooth devices easy and is currently rolling out to Android 6.0+ devices. You can try this out with Google Pixel Buds or Libratone's Q Adapt On-Ear , Bose® QuietComfort 35 II, and soon on Plantronics Voyager 8200 series wireless headsets. Ease of use, speed and security are the design principles driving the Fast Pair specification. Fast Pair uses BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) for advertising and discovery and uses classic Bluetooth for pairing. Here's what a Fast Pair flow looks like: Turn on a Fast Pair-enabled device and put it in pairing mode. Android scans for BLE broadcasts in close proximity of the user's phone and discovers a Fast Pair packet (provided Blueto...

Posted by Frank van Diggelen, Software Engineer Last year in Android Nougat, we introduced APIs for retrieving Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Raw measurements from Android devices. This past week, we publicly released href="https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/sensors/gnss.html#analyze">GNSS Analysis Tools to process and analyze these measurements. Android powers over 2 billion devices, and Android phones are made by many different manufacturers. The primary intent of these tools is to enable device manufacturers to see in detail how well the GNSS receivers are working in each particular device design, and thus improve the design and GNSS performance in their devices. However, with the tools publicly available, there is also significant value to the research and app developer community. How to use the tool The GNSS Analysis Tool is a desktop application that takes in raw the GNSS Measurements logged from your Android device as input. This desktop applica...

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering Today we're giving you an early look at Android 8.1. This update to Android Oreo includes a set of targeted enhancements including optimizations for Android Go (for devices with 1GB or less of memory) and a new Neural Networks API to accelerate on-device machine intelligence. We've also included a few smaller enhancements to Oreo in response to user and developer feedback. We're bringing you this Developer Preview so you can get your apps ready; we've already been helping device makers prepare for this new version. We recommend starting soon -- we're expecting the final public version href="https://developer.android.com/preview/overview.html">in December . It's easy to get Android 8.1 Developer Preview on your Pixel or Nexus device. Just enroll in the Android Beta Program -- you'll soon receive an over-the-air update to Android 8.1 beta. If you enrolled previously, you're all set, there's no n...

Posted by Jamal Eason , Product Manager, Android Android Studio 3.0 is ready to download today. Announced at Google I/O 2017, Android Studio 3.0 is a large update focused on accelerating your app development on Android. This release of Android Studio is packed with many new updates, but there are three major feature areas you do not want to miss, including: a new suite of app profiling tools to quickly diagnose performance issues, support for the Kotlin programming language, and a new set of tools and wizards to accelerate your development on the latest Android Oreo APIs. We also invested time in improving stability and performance across many areas of Android Studio. Thanks to your feedback during the preview versions of Android Studio 3.0! If you are looking for high stability, want to build high quality apps for Android Oreo, develop with the Kotlin language, or use the latest in Android app performance tools, then you should download Android Studio 3.0 today. Check out the the list...

Posted by Vineet Buch, Director of Product Management, Google Play Apps & Games Read this in العَرَبِيَّة‎‎ , Deutsch , español (Latinoamérica) , le français , Bahasa Indonesia , Italiano , 日本語 , 한국어 , português do Brasil , русский язы́к , ไทย , Türkçe , tiếng Việt , 中文 (简体) or 中文 (繁體) . Today we kicked off our annual global Playtime series with back-to-back events in Berlin and San Francisco. Over the next month, we’ll be hearing from many app and game developers in cities around the world. It has been an amazing 2017 for developers on Google Play, there are now more than 8 billion new installs per month globally. To help you continue to take advantage of this opportunity, we're announcing innovations on Google Play and new features in the Play Console. Follow us on Medium where presenters will be posting their strategies, best practices, and examples to help you achieve your business objectives. As Google Play continues to grow rapidly, we want to help people understand our...

Posted by Adriana Puchianu, Developer Marketing Google Play Following href="https://events.withgoogle.com/indie-games-contest-europe/">last year's success , today we're announcing the second annual href="https://events.withgoogle.com/indie-games-contest-2017/">Google Play Indie Games Contest in Europe, expanding to more countries and bigger prizes. The contest rewards your passion, creativity and innovation, and provides support to help bring your game to more people. Prizes for the finalists and winners A trip to London to showcase your game at the Saatchi Gallery Paid digital marketing campaigns worth up to 100,000 EUR Influencer campaigns worth up to 50,000 EUR Premium placements on Google Play Promotion on Android and Google Play marketing channels Tickets to Google I/O 2018 and other top industry events Latest Google hardware Special prizes for the best Unity games How to enter the contest If you're based in one of the 28 eligible countries,...