Android Developers Blog

Posted by Posted by Purnima Kochikar, Director, Business Development, Games & Applications Today, we announced Google Play’s annual Best of 2020 awards , highlighting the year’s best apps, games and digital content. None of this would be possible without the developers that created the amazing content that made a profound impact on us in 2020, or should we say a Genshin Impact … From miHoYo Limited to Loona Inc, the makers behind your favorite apps and games were unafraid to experiment, challenge the status quo, and design incredible experiences we never thought possible. Check out the full rundown of the developers behind the best apps and games of 2020 in the U.S. on Google Play: Best App of 2020 Loóna: Bedtime Calm & Relax by Loona Inc. Best Personal Growth Apps Paired: App for Couples | Relationship Advice by Better Half Ltd. Centr, by Chris Hemsworth by Loup Pty Ltd Speekoo by LearnMyLanguage Intellect by The Intellect Company Jumprope: How-to Videos by Jumpr...

Posted by Lily Sheringham, Global Marketing, Platforms & Ecosystems We are launching the second series of the Apps, Games, & Insights podcast. Over the summer, we teamed up with a new group of leading industry insiders and experts to bring you 8 new podcast episodes over the next couple of months. We are bringing you their exceptional business stories, experiences and discussion on some of the latest big questions in the apps and games industry. We are joined again by your hosts—Tamzin Taylor, who heads up Apps & Games Business Development for Google Play in Western Europe, and Dirk Primbs, who leads the Ecosystem Developer Relations team in Europe— and you can find out who they have been cajoling and corralling in the new series, below. In the first series , the guests covered topics ranging from responsible growth and building for the long term, through advice from mergers and acquisitions and venture capital experts, to hot topics such as privacy and accessibi...

Posted by Yafit Becher, Product Manager & Dan Galpin , Developer Advocate Play Asset Delivery downloads the best supported texture for the device Google Play Asset Delivery allows you to publish an Android App Bundle to Google Play containing all the resources your game needs. It offers multiple delivery modes, auto-updates, compression, and delta patching, all hosted at no cost to you. As of today, you can use Google Play Asset Delivery to include textures in multiple texture compression formats in your Android App Bundle and Google Play will automatically deliver the assets with the best supported texture compression format for each device. With Texture Compression Format Targeting, you can start using ASTC for devices that support it while falling back to ETC2/ETC1 to devices that don’t. The Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) format offers advantages, such as improved rendering performance, faster load times, a smaller in-memory footprint, better battery life, and...

Posted by Dan Galpin , Developer Advocate This blog post is part of a weekly series for #11WeeksOfAndroid . For each of the #11WeeksOfAndroid, we’re diving into key areas so you don’t miss anything. This week, we spotlighted games, media, and 5G; here’s a look at what you should know. What's the buzz in Android 11? You can now control media applications from a dedicated space within the notification area while enabling features such as playback resumption and seamless transfer. New and updated 5g APIs help you unlock transformative new user experiences. Adds new support for key game tools and technologies. On top of that foundation, we're building tools to both improve your game developer experience and help you better characterize the performance of your game, services to help you expand the reach of your game to more devices and new audiences, and new and improved features to support your games' go-to-market with Google Play. Android 11 media We covered how to take adva...

Posted by Greg Hartrell, Head of Product Management, Games on Android & Google Play Welcome to our latest Android games update and the start of our #11WeeksOfAndroid week focused on games, media and 5G. With all of your interest and feedback in our developer previews, tools and services, we have lots to share in our ongoing efforts to help you better understand your game’s performance, expand your reach to more devices and new audiences, and support your go-to-market with Google Play. Get the latest updates below and follow us at @AndroidDev for additional games resources and more. Android tools for mobile game development Android Studio 4.1 : We've enhanced the CPU Profiler to expose more data with an improved UI, and we've added memory visualization, startup profiling capabilities, and sampling rate configuration to our Native Memory Profiler. Additionally, you can now open the Android Studio Profilers in a standalone UI. Checkout the System Trace and Native Memory ...

This blogpost is a collaboration between Google and Excelliance Tech. Authored by Zhuo Chen with support from Zhihai Wang, Gao Huang from Excelliance Tech. Excelliance Tech improved the stability and compatibility of their LeBian SDK by moving away from non-SDK APIs, toward stable, official APIs. Their collaboration with the Android team during the process also led to a new public API for resource loading that all developers can use - the ResourcesLoader API in Android 11. Helping game developers keep users engaged Games are becoming increasingly complex, and a loading progress bar is not only a countdown to a new adventure, but also a bridge which connects players and developers. Players want the game to load right away, so "loading" has its own priorities: resources that will be used in the first few minutes need to be packed into the APK, while the rest of the content can be downloaded in the background after the game starts. Developers are always creating new content fo...

Posted by Greg Hartrell, Head of Product Management, Games on Android & Google Play In March of this year, at the Google for Games Developer Summit, we shared several new tools and services Google has been working on to help game developers. They make it easier to see how your Android games are performing, expand your reach to more devices and new audiences, and support your go-to-market with Google Play. From the level of interest shown by game developers and the great feedback provided in our developer previews , we’re excited to share the progress we’ve made on these tools, and more. Discover more about these updates below, and in addition to these, we’ll be back August 17-21, 2020 with even more information during a full week dedicated to Android gaming products, as part of #11WeeksOfAndroid . Android tools for mobile game development To support you in building a great Android game, we’re working on tools that help improve productivity and overall game performance. Learn about ...

Posted by Dan Galpin , Developer Advocate Android vitals is the destination for managing your app's technical quality. Over 80,000 developers take advantage of its performance and stability metrics every month. As part of our work to help you deliver better game experiences to more Android users, we're introducing Android Performance Tuner - a new library in the Android Game SDK that unlocks game performance insights in Android Vitals. This gives you a scalable way to measure and optimize your frame rate and graphical fidelity across the whole Android device ecosystem. Unity Boat Attack Sample with Different Optimizations Once you have integrated Android Performance Tuner into your game and published it on Play, you'll be able to see how it performs across real users and devices with the following new features in Android vitals. Frame rate performance Frame Rate Performance by Quality Level and Device Model We chart the frame time distribution across your users’ devices, br...

Posted by Michael Watson, Product Manager, Google Play With more kids spending time at home, parents are looking for ways to find apps and games for children that are both enriching and entertaining. Today, we’re announcing an update that will make it easier for parents to find this content on the Google Play Store. We’re launching the Teacher Approved program , an editorial program to highlight high-quality, teacher-approved apps for kids. This is part of our ongoing effort to create a safer Google Play for kids . What’s changing We consulted with academic experts to develop a framework for rating apps for kids. Specially trained teachers across the US will rate apps for kids based on this framework, evaluating things like: Design quality Appeal to children Enrichment potential Ads & in-app purchases Age appropriateness Teacher-approved apps will: Be eligible to appear in the new Kids section on Google Play Be eligible for featuring in banners or collections on Google Play Displa...