Android Developers Blog

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 Jay Kong, Gaming and Graphics Product Manager With the rollout of Android 11 on Pixel, Android GPU Inspector (AGI) has graduated from a limited developer preview to an open beta. During the preview, AGI has been helpful in finding performance bottlenecks for developers we've been working with, and we're looking forward to hearing your feedback. What is Android GPU Inspector? AGI is a graphics profiling tool that allows you to look into the GPU of Android devices to better understand graphics bottlenecks and optimize the performance of games and apps that leverage 3D graphics APIs. It shows a timeline of events for your running game or app, which includes system activities, high frequency GPU hardware counters, and, if you are using Vulkan, GPU activity information. What devices can I use it on? AGI relies on updated firmware and video drivers to get information it needs; the first devices to support it are the Pixel 4 and 4XL running Android 11. While we are work...

Posted by Alex Musil, Director of Product Management, Google Play This blog post is part of a weekly series for #11WeeksOfAndroid . Each week we’re diving into a key area of Android so you don’t miss anything. This week, we spotlighted app distribution and monetization on Google Play ; here’s a look at what you should know. Thanks for joining us for this week of 11 Weeks of Android, where we focused on app distribution and monetization. The developments we announced will enable you to deliver the exciting improvements to the Android platform you’ve been hearing about since week 1. Google Play partners with developers to deliver amazing digital experiences to billions of Android users. From the start, we’ve committed to providing the tools and insights you need to reach more users and grow your business. This week, we launched even more features — and improved existing ones — to help you continue to maximize your success. Key takeaways We released several webinars about the new Google P...

Posted by Dan Galpin , Developer Advocate Two years ago, we introduced the Android App Bundle, a new publishing format that allows Google Play to help optimize your app delivery. The app bundle is now Play’s recommended publishing format; with almost 50% of all top apps & games already using it. It replaces the traditional monolithic APK at publishing time, allowing you to package all of your languages, screen densities and device architectures into a single artifact. The bundle itself can't be installed; Play takes care of generating APKs optimized for each requesting device from the single bundle that you publish. Dynamic Delivery with App Bundle Produces Optimized APKs Apps have seen great success with app bundles, but games often have different delivery challenges. Today, large Android games rely on APK Expansion Files and custom Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to deliver content. APK Expansion Files, also known as OBBs, support large resources but require you to maintain ...

Posted by Greg Hartrell, Head of Product Management, Games on Android & Google Play While we're sorry we didn't get to see you all in person at GDC, we hope you are all staying healthy and safe. As many of us look to press on with work as much as possible, we’d like to share with you what our teams have been working on at the digital Google for Games Developer Summit. We couldn’t be happier with the continued growth of the vibrant Android gaming ecosystem. In fact, Android remains the world's most popular mobile platform with more than 2.5 billion monthly active devices and great news for game developers, we’re seeing more than 1.4 trillion minutes played per month in your games on Google Play. It’s important to us that our platforms are highly useful to every kind of game developer, so our payment system helps games monetize in more than 65 countries. Moreover, we offer our users more than 275 local forms of payment, including more than 180 carrier billing options, wit...

Posted by Kacey Fahey, Games Developer Marketing, Google Cross-posting from the Google Developers Blog . Join us online or live* at the Google Developer Summits during the Game Developers Conference on March 16 and 17 to learn about the latest tools and updates to build great games, reach more players, and improve discovery of your game. Google has lots to share with the game development community at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in March. Check out our plans and sign up to keep up to date with the latest GDC news and announcements from Android, Google Play, Firebase, and more. For one week, tens of thousands of creators from the gaming community come together at GDC to hear the latest industry innovations and network with peers to enable better gaming experiences for players around the world. Below is a preview of what to expect from Google, and remember, it’s just the beginning. Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter as we reveal more leading up to the event, or you can c...

Posted by Patricia Correa, P&E Developer Marketing Director The last 12 months have seen Google Play continue to grow, with over 116 billion downloads of the apps and games that you created. We’ve been working hard to build the latest technology and tools for modern Android development and distribution, improving Google Play and the Play Console to offer you new and better ways for your app to be discovered, promoted, and monetized. A key focus has been addressing the challenge of keeping users safe and maintaining trust in Google Play. Modern Android development We are focused on building great tools and services and your feedback is crucial in helping us do so. You have told us that you love Android’s openness, but we have also heard that you would like us to marry it with an opinion about the right way to do things. We call this approach modern Android development: opinionated and powerful, for fast, easy development, taking away everything that slows you down so you can focus ...

Posted by Tom Grinsted, Product Manager, Google Play At this year’s Google I/O, we announced a slate of new features to help you take your business further with Google Play. Launching today, these changes include several improvements designed to help you make better decisions about your business by providing clearer, more actionable data. We know the right data is critical to help you improve your app performance and grow your business. That’s why we’re excited to share a major update that enables you to better measure and analyse your core statistics — the most fundamental install and uninstall metrics by user and device. We’ve also enhanced the Statistics page on the Play Console to show change over time, enable more granular configurations, and, coming soon, exclusive benchmarks for core stats! More granular configurations are now available on the Statistics page to help you better understand your acquisition and churn. More accurate and more expansive than before, the new metrics ...

Posted by Kosuke Suzuki, Product Manager, Google Play Every month, more than 2 billion users from over 190 countries visit the Google Play Store to browse and discover new apps and games. As part of making Google Play a great discovery experience, we continue to increase our focus on quality. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be updating our featuring and ranking logic to further prioritize high quality apps and games with strong technical performance and engaging content. If you’re looking for ways to improve your app quality, below are three key areas to focus on. Along with these suggestions, we've highlighted several tools available in the Google Play Console to help you better understand user behavior, monitor technical performance, and deliver the best in-app experience for users. Remember, app quality will impact where and how prominently you're eligible to surface in the store, so always look to create the most compelling and delightful experience possible. Good in-app user ...

Posted by Vlad Radu, Product Manager, Play and Diana Wong, Product Manager, Android 64-bit CPUs deliver faster, richer experiences for your users. Adding a 64-bit version of your app provides performance improvements, makes way for future innovation, and sets you up for devices with 64-bit only hardware. We want to help you get ready and know you need time to plan. We’ve supported 64-bit CPUs since Android 5.0 Lollipop and in 2017 we first announced that apps using native code must provide a 64-bit version (in addition to the 32-bit version). Today we’re providing more detailed information and timelines to make it as easy as possible to transition in 2019. The 64-bit requirement: what it means for developers Starting August 1, 2019: All new apps and app updates that include native code are required to provide 64-bit versions in addition to 32-bit versions when publishing to Google Play. Extension: Google Play will continue to accept 32-bit only updates to existing games that use Unit...