Android Developers Blog

Posted by Shazia Makhdumi, Global Head of Play Pass Business Development With over 2.5 billion active Android devices, Google Play helps your apps and games get discovered by billions of users worldwide. And from the latest Google Play Store visual refresh to the Indie Games Showcase , we’re constantly working to help users find apps and games they love while helping you grow successful businesses. Today we’re excited to announce the US launch of Google Play Pass , a new subscription service offering access to hundreds of apps and games, completely free of ads and in-app purchases. Play Pass provides subscribers with a high-quality, curated collection of titles–with new titles added frequently. Letting diverse, high-quality content shine Play Pass is designed to enable Google Play users to better experience the variety of content on Play, and all types of apps and games can participate. “For a small studio like ours, being part of Play Pass makes a huge amount of sense,” said Jon Ingo...

Posted by Jocelyn Becker, Senior Program Manager, Google Developer Training Want to learn to build Android apps in Kotlin? Get started with the Kotlin Bootcamp for Programmers and Developing Android apps in Kotlin codelabs courses. Google and Udacity currently offer video-based courses for Kotlin Bootcamp and How to build Android apps in Kotlin . To help people that learn in different ways, we have recently reworked these courses to publish them as tutorial-based codelab courses. More than 2.5 million users have worked through Google codelabs like this just this year. Kotlin Bootcamp Google provides first class support for building Android apps in Kotlin, including Kotlin-friendly Android APIs and API extensions. Kotlin fully interoperates with the Java programming language and libraries, and is included with IntelliJ and Android Studio. In the Kotlin Bootcamp course, you will learn everything you need to program in Kotlin, beginning with the basics such as how to write Kotlin s...

Posted by Rob Barnes & Shawn Willden, Android Security & Privacy Team Billions of people rely on their Android-powered devices to securely store their sensitive information. A vital component of the Android security stack is the key attestation system . Android devices since Android 7.0 are able to generate an attestation certificate that attests to the security properties of the device’s hardware and software. OEMs producing devices with Android 8.0 or higher must install a batch attestation key provided by Google on each device at the time of manufacturing. These keys might need to be revoked for a number of reasons including accidental disclosure, mishandling, or suspected extraction by an attacker. When this occurs, the affected keys must be immediately revoked to protect users. The security of any Public-Key Infrastructure system depends on the robustness of the key revocation process. All of the attestation keys issued so far include an extension that embeds a certificate...

Posted by Sameer Samat, Vice President, Platforms & Ecosystems From day one, we designed Android to be a flexible, adaptive platform. Most people picture a smartphone when they think of Android, but Android also powers an amazing number of large-screen devices. In fact, there are more than 175 million Android tablets with the Google Play store, 1 making Android tablets a vital form factor for Google and our OEM partners today. Android apps also run on Chrome OS laptops , and the number of monthly active users who enabled Android apps grew 250% in just the last year. 2 Here at Google, we’re excited to see how you can take advantage of large-screen formats - including Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab S6 , the upcoming Lenovo™ Smart Tab M8 with Google Assistant, the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Fold, and other devices launching this week at IFA . Our OEM partners are building experiences that help users every day: From the start, Android was designed as a platform that could handle multiple scre...

Posted by Stephanie Cuthbertson, Senior Director of Product Management, Android After more than a year of development and months of testing by early adopters, we’re ready to introduce Android 10 to the world! Android 10 is built around three important themes. First, Android 10 is shaping the leading edge of mobile innovation with advanced machine-learning and support for emerging devices like foldables and 5G enabled phones. Next, Android 10 has a central focus on privacy and security, with almost 50 features that give users greater protection, transparency, and control. Finally, Android 10 expands users' digital wellbeing controls so individuals and families can find a better balance with technology. Today we're releasing the Android 10 source code to Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and making it available to the broader ecosystem. We’re also starting the official Android 10 rollout to all three generations of Pixel devices worldwide. Many partner devices, including those ...

Posted by Kanika Sachdeva, Product Manager, Google Play In May, we launched new Families policies to provide additional protections for children and families on Google Play. As part of this policy change, we’re requiring all developers to provide information on their app’s target audience and content via the Google Play Console by September 1st. Thanks to everyone who has completed it already. If you haven’t done so, please fill it out as soon as possible and consult our developer guide and training course for additional information. Apps that include children in their target audience need to adhere to our new policy requirements including appropriate content, showing suitable ads ( learn more ), and disclosing personally identifiable information correctly. We’ve found that checking for these requirements takes longer than the normal review process, and can result in review times of up to 7 days (or longer in certain exceptional circumstances). Apps who submit inaccurate responses ...

Posted by Adam Bacchus, Sebastian Porst, and Patrick Mutchler — Android Security & Privacy We’re constantly looking for ways to further improve the security and privacy of our products, and the ecosystems they support. At Google, we understand the strength of open platforms and ecosystems, and that the best ideas don’t always come from within. It is for this reason that we offer a broad range of vulnerability reward programs, encouraging the community to help us improve security for everyone. Today, we’re expanding on those efforts with some big changes to Google Play Security Reward Program (GPSRP) , as well as the launch of the new Developer Data Protection Reward Program (DDPRP) . Google Play Security Reward Program Scope Increases We are increasing the scope of GPSRP to include all apps in Google Play with 100 million or more installs. These apps are now eligible for rewards, even if the app developers don’t have their own vulnerability disclosure or bug bounty program. In th...