Android Developers Blog

Posted by Jisha Abubaker , Product Manager Last month’s #AndroidDevSummit was jam-packed with announcements and technical news...so much that we wouldn’t be surprised if you missed something. So all this month, we’ll be diving into key areas from throughout the summit so you don’t miss anything. We previously spotlighted Jetpack Compose , Kotlin and Android Studio , and today, we’re highlighting the rest of Android Jetpack , with the top three things you should know: #1: A number of new & updated Jetpack libraries ready to use: WorkManager 2.2 (Stable) has landed significant updates in the last releases with features like on-demand initialization improving app startup time when using WorkManager and improved testing support. Hear more of the new features and best practices. Room 2.2 (Stable) is packed with features you asked for too : pre-packaged databases, improved relationship support and now better support for Kotlin Flow as well. Check out the What’s new in Room session...

Just a little over a week left to finish your submission for the Android Developer Challenge, due December 2 ! Technology is enabling us to create a whole new era of helpful innovation by helping people get things done more quickly and surfacing patterns that would be difficult to detect using traditional methods. Ultimately, this helpful innovation is enabling us to live better, more productive, and safer lives. Earlier this week, we highlighted the type of helpful innovation ideas powered by machine learning which are the sort of examples we’re looking for, to help inspire you. Today, we wanted to share the names of the panel of experts we’ve assembled to help bring your projects to life as part of the Android Developer Challenge. These experts will be making the final decision on the 10 finalists of the Android Developer Challenge, and if you’re selected as one of those finalists, we plan to have you meet them when we bring you to Google HQ for a bootcamp next year: Dave Burke is ...

Last month, we kicked off the next Android Developer Challenge , and asked you to submit your ideas focused on helpful innovation, powered by on-device machine learning. But what exactly do we mean when we say helpful innovation? We’re glad you asked! We rounded up a few of Google’s on-device machine learning offerings, together with some great recent examples of this technology in action, to help inspire your submission. Don’t forget, submit your idea by December 2! Using machine learning to tackle Fall Armyworm Take Nazirini Siraji. When she and a team of developers noticed a crop-pest threatening the livelihood of Ugandan farmers, they taught themselves TensorFlow to combat this pest. They collected training data from nearby fields in the form of images. With TensorFlow, they re-trained a MobileNet , a technique known as transfer learning and then used the TensorFlow Converter to generate a TensorFlow Lite FlatBuffer file which they deployed in an Android app. With the app, a f...

Posted by Caren Chang , Developer Programs Engineer Android users care a lot about the battery life on their phones. In particular, how your app schedules deferrable background tasks play an important role in battery life. To help you build more battery-friendly apps, we introduced WorkManager as the unified solution for all deferrable background processing needs. Starting November 1, 2020, we are unifying deferrable background tasks on Android around WorkManager, and GCMNetworkManager will be deprecated and no longer supported. Why WorkManager The WorkManager API incorporates the features of Firebase Job Dispatcher (FJD) and GcmNetworkManager solutions, providing a consistent job scheduling service back to API level 14 while being conscious of battery life. For example, if your app needs to send log files up to the server, it would be more efficient to wait until the device is both charging and connected to WiFi. In this case, WorkManager will ensure that the sync will execute ...

Posted by Aleks Haecky Advanced Android in Kotlin , developed by Google together with Udacity, is our newly-released, free, self-paced online course. In this course expert instructors from the Android team at Google will introduce you to some of the advanced features you can build into your Android apps. This course is intended for developers who have mastered the basics of building an Android app in Kotlin, and want to dive deeper into advanced functionality. To benefit most from this course, you need skills equivalent to what's taught in our Android Fundamentals Udacity or codelab courses. Advanced Android in Kotlin teaches you about notifications, graphics and animations on Android, using third-party authentication for login, and how to add maps to your apps. Learn how to create custom views that can look like anything you want, draw to a canvas, and have eye-catching animations. And, most importantly, you will learn how to properly test your apps! Here is a sample of app...

Posted by Deepanshu Madan, Product Manager Last month’s #AndroidDevSummit was jam-packed with announcements and technical news...so much that we wouldn’t be surprised if you missed something. So all this month, we’ll be diving into key areas from throughout the summit so you don’t miss anything. Earlier this week, we spotlighted Kotlin and Jetpack Compose , and today, we’re highlighting Android Studio , with the top three things you should know: #1: Support for Jetpack Compose For the best experience developing with Jetpack Compose , you can now use the latest version of Android Studio 4.0 in the canary channel , and benefit from smart editor features, such as New Project templates, code completion and the ability to immediately preview your Jetpack Compose UI. #2: What’s new in Android Studio session We covered both new features and successes of our quality initiative called Project Marble . On the quality aspect, we discuss improvements around hangs and latency, memory leak de...

Posted by Marcus Leal, Product Manager, Google Play Ads How do people find your app? It’s the million-dollar question for any developer, and the answer can help you make the right choices about your marketing strategy and budget. Accurate install referral data is crucial for understanding which traffic sources send users to download your app from the Google Play Store, as well as identifying fraudulent attempts to claim install attributions. That’s why in 2017, we launched the Play Install Referrer API , which provides a reliable and robust mechanism for apps to retrieve referral information directly from the Play Store. It was a big step forward from the old install_referrer intent broadcast , so many developers made the switch right away, including App Attribution Program partners like Adjust, AppsFlyer, and Kochava. Now, because it’s been replaced by the new API, we’ve decided to deprecate the install_referrer intent broadcast mechanism on March 1, 2020. After this date, new versio...