Android Developers Blog

Posted by Kanika Sachdeva, Product Manager, Google Play At Google Play, we’re committed to providing a positive, safe environment for children and families. Over the last few years, we’ve helped parents find family-friendly content through the Designed for Families program and empowered them to set digital ground rules for their families with Family Link parental controls. After taking input from users and developers we are evolving our Google Play policies to provide additional protections for children and families. These policy changes build on our existing efforts to ensure that apps for children have appropriate content, show suitable ads, and handle personally identifiable information correctly; they also reduce the chance that apps not intended for children could unintentionally attract them. Over the next few months, we will continue to roll out additional features that will help parents make informed choices before they install apps for their kids. What’s changing for develope

Posted by Patricia Correa, Director, Platforms & Ecosystems Developer Marketing Back in March we opened submissions for the Indie Games Showcase , an international competition for games studios from Europe*, South Korea, and Japan who are constantly pushing the boundaries of storytelling, visual excellence, and creativity in mobile. We were once again impressed by the diversity and creativity that the indie community is bringing to mobile, and we’re happy to announce the 20 finalists. Check out the local websites to learn more about the finalists and the events. Europe AntVentor by LoopyMood (Ukraine) CHUCHEL by Amanita Design (Czech Republic) #DRIVE by Pixel Perfect Dude (Poland) Fly THIS! By Northplay (Denmark) Fobia by Tapteek (Russia) G30 - A Memory Maze by Ivan Kovalov (Russia) Gold Peaks by Afterburn (Poland) Grayland by 1DER Entertainment (Slovakia) Hexologic by MythicOwl (Poland) Lucid Dream Adventure by Dali Games (Poland) OCO by SPECTRUM48 (United Kingdom) Ord

Posted by Peiyong Lin, Software Engineer Android is now at the point where sRGB color gamut with 8 bits per color channel is not enough to take advantage of the display and camera technology. At Android we have been working to make wide color photography happen end-to-end, e.g. more bits and bigger gamuts. This means, eventually users will be able to capture the richness of the scenes, share a wide color pictures with friends and view wide color pictures on their phones. And now with Android Q, it's starting to get really close to reality: wide color photography is coming to Android. So, it's very important to applications to be wide color gamut ready. This article will show how you can test your application to see whether it's wide color gamut ready and wide color gamut capable, and the steps you need to take to be ready for wide color gamut photography. But before we dive in, why wide color photography? Display panels and camera sensors on mobile are getting better and be

Posted by Posted by Florina Muntenescu & Wojtek Kaliciński, Developer Advocates, Android Last week at Google I/O, we announced a big step: Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first. It’s a language that many of you already love: over 50% of professional Android developers now use Kotlin, and it’s the fastest-growing language on GitHub. As part of this announcement, many new Jetpack APIs and features will be offered first in Kotlin. So if you’re starting a new project, you should try writing it in Kotlin; code written in Kotlin often means much less code for you–less code to type, test, and maintain. To help you dive deeper into Kotlin, we’re happy to announce a new program we’re launching together with JetBrains: Kotlin/Everywhere , a series of community-driven events focussing on the potential of Kotlin on all platforms. We are aiming to help learn the essentials and best practices of using Kotlin everywhere, be it for Android, back-end, front-end and other platfo

Posted by Dan Galpin Developing Android Apps with Kotlin , developed by Google together with Udacity, is our newly-released, free, self-paced online course. You'll learn how to build Android apps using industry-standard tools and libraries in the Kotlin programming language. Android development fundamentals are taught in the context of an architecture that provides the scaffolding for robust, maintainable applications. The course covers why and how to use Android Jetpack components such as Room for databases, Work Manager for background processing, the Navigation component, and more. You'll use popular community libraries to simplify common tasks such as Glide for image loading, Retrofit for networking, and Moshi for JSON parsing. The course teaches key Kotlin features such as coroutines to help you write your app code more quickly and concisely. As you work through the course, you'll build fun and interesting apps, such as a Mars photo gallery, a trivia game, a sleep trac

Posted by Gloria On, Program Manager, Google Play Many developers are increasingly focused on growing their businesses globally, and there were more than 94 billion apps downloaded from Google Play in the last year, reaching more than 190 countries. The regulatory environment is frequently changing in local markets, and in some countries local governments have implemented withholding tax requirements on transactions with which Google or our payment processor partners must comply. We strive to help both developers and Google meet local tax requirements in markets where we do business, and where Google or our payment processor partners are required to withhold taxes, we may need to deduct those amounts from our payments to developers. Due to new requirements in some markets, we'll be rolling out withholding taxes soon to all those doing business in those countries. We wanted to bring this to the attention of Google Play developers to allow you time to prepare for these upcoming chang

Posted by Gloria On, Program Manager, Google Play Many developers are increasingly focused on growing their businesses globally, and there were more than 94 billion apps downloaded from Google Play in the last year, reaching more than 190 countries. The regulatory environment is frequently changing in local markets, and in some countries local governments have implemented withholding tax requirements on transactions with which Google or our payment processor partners must comply. We strive to help both developers and Google meet local tax requirements in markets where we do business, and where Google or our payment processor partners are required to withhold taxes, we may need to deduct those amounts from our payments to developers. Due to requirements in some local markets, we'll be rolling out withholding taxes soon to all those doing business in those countries. We wanted to bring this to the attention of Google Play developers to allow you time to prepare for these upcoming cha

Posted by Rene Mayrhofer and Xiaowen Xin, Android Security & Privacy Team With every new version of Android, one of our top priorities is raising the bar for security. Over the last few years, these improvements have led to measurable progress across the ecosystem, and 2018 was no different. In the 4th quarter of 2018, we had 84% more devices receiving a security update than in the same quarter the prior year. At the same time, no critical security vulnerabilities affecting the Android platform were publicly disclosed without a security update or mitigation available in 2018, and we saw a 20% year-over-year decline in the proportion of devices that installed a Potentially Harmful App . In the spirit of transparency, we released this data and more in our Android Security & Privacy 2018 Year In Review. But now you may be asking, what’s next? Today at Google I/O we lifted the curtain on all the new security features being integrated into Android Q. We plan to go deeper on each fea

Posted by Jeff Vander Stoep, Android Security & Privacy Team and Chong Zhang, Android Media Team Android Q Beta versions are now publicly available . Among the various new features introduced in Android Q are some important security hardening changes. While exciting new security features are added in each Android release, hardening generally refers to security improvements made to existing components. When prioritizing platform hardening, we analyze data from a number of sources including our vulnerability rewards program (VRP). Past security issues provide useful insight into which components can use additional hardening. Android publishes monthly security bulletins which include fixes for all the high/critical severity vulnerabilities in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) reported through our VRP. While fixing vulnerabilities is necessary, we also get a lot of value from the metadata - analysis on the location and class of vulnerabilities. With this insight we can apply t

Posted by Jeff Vander Stoep, Android Security & Privacy Team and Chong Zhang, Android Media Team Android Q Beta versions are now publicly available . Among the various new features introduced in Android Q are some important security hardening changes. While exciting new security features are added in each Android release, hardening generally refers to security improvements made to existing components. When prioritizing platform hardening, we analyze data from a number of sources including our vulnerability rewards program (VRP). Past security issues provide useful insight into which components can use additional hardening. Android publishes monthly security bulletins which include fixes for all the high/critical severity vulnerabilities in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) reported through our VRP. While fixing vulnerabilities is necessary, we also get a lot of value from the metadata - analysis on the location and class of vulnerabilities. With this insight we can apply t