Android Developers Blog

Posted by Calin Juravle, Software Engineer In Android Pie we launched ART optimizing profiles in Play Cloud , a new optimization feature that greatly improves the application startup time after a new install or update. On average, we have observed that apps start 15% faster (cold startup) across a variety of devices. Some hero cases even show 30%+ faster startup times. One of the most important aspects is that users get this for free, without any effort from their side or from developers! Source: Google internal data ART optimizing profiles in Play Cloud The feature builds on previous Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) work, which was introduced in Android 7.0 Nougat . PGO allows the Android Runtime to help improve an app's performance by building a profile of the app's most important hot code and focusing its optimization effort on it. This leads to big improvements while reducing the traditional memory and storage impact of a fully compiled app. However, it relies on the dev...

Posted by Vikrant Nanda and René Mayrhofer, Android Security & Privacy Team There is no better time to talk about Android dessert releases than the holidays because who doesn't love dessert? And what is one of our favorite desserts during the holiday season? Well, pie of course. In all seriousness, pie is a great analogy because of how the various ingredients turn into multiple layers of goodness: right from the software crust on top to the hardware layer at the bottom. Read on for a summary of security and privacy features introduced in Android Pie this year. Strengthening Android Making Android more secure requires a combination of hardening the platform and advancing anti-exploitation techniques. Platform hardening With Android Pie, we updated File-Based Encryption to support external storage media (such as, expandable storage cards). We also introduced support for metadata encryption where hardware support is present. With filesystem metadata encryption, a single key pres...