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

Posted by David Winer, Kotlin Product Manager, @davidjwiner 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. First up, we’re spotlighting Kotlin , with the top things you should know: #1: Kotlin momentum on Android Kotlin is at the heart of modern Android development — and we’ve been excited to see how quickly it has won over developers around the world. At Android Dev Summit we announced that nearly 60% of the top 1000 Android apps on the Play Store now use Kotlin, and we’re seeing more developers adopt it every day. Kotlin has helpful features like null safety, data classes, coroutines, and complete interoperability with the Java programming language. We’re doubling down on Kotlin with more Kotlin-first APIs even beyond AndroidX — we just released KTX extensions, including cor

Posted by Anna-Chiara Bellini, @dr0nequeen 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 today, we spotlighted Kotlin and now we’re diving into Jetpack Compose , with the top three things you should know: #1: Jetpack Compose is available in Developer Preview! Jetpack Compose is Android’s modern toolkit for building native UI. It allows developers to write beautiful Android apps in an intuitive way, writing less code and accelerating development. It's powerful, because when writing code is a pleasure, you can focus on making your apps look beautiful and giving your users the best experience. At #AndroidDevSummit, we released the Developer Preview, to enable more feedback as we work towards bringing Jetpack Compose to beta next year. All you need to do is download the

Posted by Kobi Glick, Product Lead, Google Play Today we’re kicking off Playtime, our annual event series where we host developers from all over the world to discuss features and best practices to help you grow your apps and games businesses. Last month’s Android Dev Summit focused on modern Android development . Here on the Google Play team, we’re focusing on modern app and game distribution — our set of powerful and customizable distribution features and tools that work together to power your success on Google Play. The future of Android distribution The Android App Bundle is foundational to modern app and game distribution, replacing the monolithic APK. Since it launched 18 months ago, over 270K apps and games have made the switch, representing over 25% of active installs. Those that switched have seen an average size savings of 20% compared to a universal APK and more efficient releases as a result. A recent internal analysis revealed that users with storage-constrained devices a

Since Google Fit was released in 2015 , apps with an abundance of features for health and fitness tracking have integrated with the Google Fit APIs. Over the years, the number of users using Google Fit as a central repository for their fitness and wellness data has grown significantly. With Android 10, we're making further updates to give users even more control over this personal data. One key change concerns how Android apps can monitor a user’s physical activity and retrieve data from Android sensor APIs and the Google Fit platform. In Android 10: Activity recognition permission Android 10 introduces a new runtime permission for activity recognition for apps that make use of the user's step and calorie count or classify the user's physical activity, such as walking, biking, or moving in a vehicle through one of the following APIs: Android Step Counter Activity Recognition API Google Fit Recording API or History API If your app relies only on raw data from other built-

Posted by Paul Feng, Product Manager, Google Play At Google Play, we continue to build new experiences to delight users and help developers succeed. Today, we’re excited to announce that the Google Play Points rewards program is expanding to the United States following successful launches in Japan and Korea, where millions of people have already enrolled. The program is designed to show appreciation to our users and help increase engagement with your games and apps. Google Play Points rewards users for any purchase they make on Play — including apps, games, in-app items, music, movies, books, and subscriptions - and for downloading select apps and games. For all developers, if you’re on Play billing, users will earn points on your apps and games immediately. Play Points can then be redeemed for unique rewards like special items and discounts in Candy Crush, Homescapes, Lords Mobile and many others. We’re fortunate to be working with a select group of developers to offer these reward