Android Developers Blog

Posted by Jolanda Verhoef , Developer Relations Engineer We introduced Tiles in 2019 , and since then, Tiles have become one of the most helpful and useful features on Wear OS by Google smartwatches. They are fast to access, convenient, and designed to provide users with swipeable access to the things they need to know and get done right from their wrist. This also gives users control over what information and actions they want to see. Today, we're excited to announce that the Jetpack Tiles library is in alpha. This library enables developers to create custom Tiles on Wear OS smartwatches. These custom Tiles will become available to users later this Spring when we roll out the corresponding Wear OS platform update. Tiles can be designed for many use cases, like tracking the user’s daily activity progress, quick-starting a workout, starting a recently played song, or sending a message to a favorite contact. While apps can be immersive, Tiles are fast-loading and focus on the user...

Posted by Anna-Chiara Bellini , Product Manager, Nick Butcher , Developer Relations Today, we’re launching the beta release of Jetpack Compose , our new UI toolkit designed to make it faster and easier to build native apps across all Android platforms. Compose offers modern, declarative Kotlin APIs, helping you build beautiful, responsive apps with way less code. Built to integrate with existing Android apps and Jetpack libraries, you can adopt Compose at your own pace by combining Android Views and Compose. With this beta release, Compose is API complete and has all the features you need to build production-ready apps. Beta also means API stable, so we won’t change or remove APIs. Now is a great time to start learning Compose and begin planning for how you will use it in an upcoming project or feature once it reaches 1.0 later this year. What's In Beta Our team has been developing Compose in the open with feedback and participation from the community. Since open sourcing deve...

Posted by Hoi Lam , Android App Quality Since the launch of Android more than 10 years ago, the platform and the user’s expectations have grown. There are improvements from user experience through material design to the importance and advancement in privacy . We know you want your apps to offer a great user experience. At the same time, we also know that it’s not always straightforward to know which area to tackle first. That’s why we are launching a new App Quality section in our developer site to help you keep up-to-date with key aspects of app quality and provide related resources. In the first release, we have updated the Core App Quality checklist to take into account recent Android releases as well as the current trends of the app ecosystem. Here are some highlights in this update: Visual Experience - We highlight the best practice of using Material Design Components in place of platform components such as buttons. This will give your app a modern look as well as m...

Posted by Hoi Lam , Developer Relations Engineer, Android Platform In 2021, we are continuing with our annual target API level update, requiring new apps to target API level 30 (Android 11) in August and in November for all app updates. In addition, as announced earlier this year, Google Play will require new apps to use the Android App Bundle publishing format. This brings the benefits of smaller apps and simpler releases to more users and developers and supports ongoing investment in advanced distribution. Over 750,000 apps and games already publish to production on Google Play using app bundles. Top apps switching save an average size of 15% versus a universal APK. Users benefit from smaller downloads and developers like Netflix and Riafy see higher install success rates, which is especially impactful in regions with more entry level devices and slower data speeds. Developers switching can use advanced distribution features such as Play Asset Delivery and Play Feature Delive...

Posted by David Zeuthen, Shawn Willden and René Mayrhofer, Android Security and Privacy team In the United States and other countries a Driver's License is not only used to convey driving privileges, it is also commonly used to prove identity or personal details. Presenting a Driving License is simple, right? You hand over the card to the individual wishing to confirm your identity (the so-called “ Relying Party ” or “ Verifier ”); they check the security features of the plastic card (hologram, micro-printing, etc.) to ensure it’s not counterfeit; they check that it’s really your license, making sure you look like the portrait image printed on the card; and they read the data they’re interested in, typically your age, legal name, address etc. Finally, the verifier needs to hand back the plastic card. Most people are so familiar with this process that they don’t think twice about it, or consider the privacy implications. In the following we’ll discuss how the new and soon-to-b...

Posted by Eric Bahna, Product Manager In August, we announced plans to expand Android Auto’s app ecosystem to enable new navigation, parking, and electric vehicle charging apps. We’ve been hard at work collaborating with our early access partners to test and refine the Android for Cars App Library. Today, we’re releasing the library into an open beta, for any developer to use. This means you’ll now be able to design, develop, and test your navigation, parking or charging app on Android Auto. We’re looking forward to enabling Google Play Store publishing for your beta apps in the coming months. Three of our early access partners: ChargePoint, SpotHero, and Sygic The design phase is the time to familiarize yourself with our design guidelines and app quality guidelines . Driver safety is core to our mission and we want to help you optimize your app for the car. When it comes time to build your app, our new library will hopefully make development easy. Get started with the...

Posted by Kylie McRoberts, Program Manager and Alec Guertin, Security Engineer Google’s Android Security & Privacy team has launched the Android Partner Vulnerability Initiative (APVI) to manage security issues specific to Android OEMs. The APVI is designed to drive remediation and provide transparency to users about issues we have discovered at Google that affect device models shipped by Android partners. Another layer of security Android incorporates industry-leading security features and every day we work with developers and device implementers to keep the Android platform and ecosystem safe. As part of that effort, we have a range of existing programs to enable security researchers to report security issues they have found. For example, you can report vulnerabilities in Android code via the Android Security Rewards Program (ASR), and vulnerabilities in popular third-party Android apps through the Google Play Security Rewards Program . Google releases ASR reports in Andro...

Posted by Haining Chen, Vishwath Mohan, Kevin Chyn and Liz Louis, Android Security Team As phones become faster and smarter, they play increasingly important roles in our lives, functioning as our extended memory, our connection to the world at large, and often the primary interface for communication with friends, family, and wider communities. It is only natural that as part of this evolution, we’ve come to entrust our phones with our most private information, and in many ways treat them as extensions of our digital and physical identities. This trust is paramount to the Android Security team. The team focuses on ensuring that Android devices respect the privacy and sensitivity of user data. A fundamental aspect of this work centers around the lockscreen, which acts as the proverbial front door to our devices. After all, the lockscreen ensures that only the intended user(s) of a device can access their private data. This blog post outlines recent improvements around how users inte...

Posted by Karen Ng , Director, Product Management Today, we’re releasing the alpha of Jetpack Compose , our modern UI toolkit designed to help you quickly and easily build beautiful apps across all Android platforms, with native access to the platform APIs. Bring your app to life with dramatically less code, interactive tools, and intuitive Kotlin APIs. No matter where you’re working from -- whether it’s your kitchen table or an office, we know you need a programming language, an IDE and a powerful UI framework that can save you time and reduce how much code you need to write. So we built Jetpack Compose to make you (and us!) more productive with building UI. We started with Android Jetpack — taking the hardest, most common developer problems on Android and creating a suite of libraries that ensure high quality apps that work across all versions of the platform. Today, 84% of the top 10,000 apps in the Play store are using a Jetpack library. Then we heard how developers love Kotlin,...