Android Developers Blog

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 Wojtek Kaliciński, Developer Advocate, Android Last year, we launched Android App Bundles and Google Play's Dynamic Delivery to introduce modular development, reduce app size and streamline the release process. Since then, we've seen developers quickly adopt this new app model in over 60,000 production apps. We've been excited to see developers experience significant app size savings and reductions in the time needed to manage each release, and have documented these benefits in case studies with Duolingo and redBus . Thank you to everyone who took the time to give us feedback on our initial launch. We're always open to new ideas, and today, we're happy to announce some new improvements based on your suggestions: A new additional languages install API , which supports in-app language pickers A streamlined publishing process for instant-enabled app bundles A new enrollment option for app signing by Google Play The ability to permanently uninstall ...

Posted by Chris Banes, Chief Elf of Android Engineering Today, we pushed the source code for Google's Santa Tracker 2018 Android app at google/santa-tracker-android , including its 17 mini-games, Santa tracking feature, Wear app and more! Visually the app looks much the same this year, but underneath the hood the app has gone on a massive size reduction exercise to make the download from Google Play as small as possible. When a user downloads the app the initial download is now just 9.2MB , compared to last year's app which was 60MB. That's a 85% reduction! 🗜️ Android App Bundle We achieved that reduction by migrating the app over to using an Android App Bundle . The main benefit is that Google Play can now serve dynamically optimized APKs to users' devices. Moreover, we were also able to separate out all of the games into their own dynamic feature modules, downloaded on demand. This is why you might have seen a progress bar when you first opened a game, we are actu...