Android Developers Blog

Posted by Stephanie Cuthbertson, Senior Director of Product Management, Android After more than a year of development and months of testing by early adopters, we’re ready to introduce Android 10 to the world! Android 10 is built around three important themes. First, Android 10 is shaping the leading edge of mobile innovation with advanced machine-learning and support for emerging devices like foldables and 5G enabled phones. Next, Android 10 has a central focus on privacy and security, with almost 50 features that give users greater protection, transparency, and control. Finally, Android 10 expands users' digital wellbeing controls so individuals and families can find a better balance with technology. Today we're releasing the Android 10 source code to Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and making it available to the broader ecosystem. We’re also starting the official Android 10 rollout to all three generations of Pixel devices worldwide. Many partner devices, including those ...

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering Android Q Beta 5 launches today! Today we're rolling out Beta 5, bringing Android Q Beta very close to the system behaviors you'll see in the final release. Developer APIs were already finalized in the previous update . So, now is the time to test your apps for compatibility and make sure they are ready! You can get Beta 5 today on Pixel devices by enrolling here . If you're already enrolled and received Beta 4 on your Pixel device, you'll automatically get the update to Beta 5. Partners participating in the Android Q Beta program will also be updating their devices to Beta 5 over the coming weeks. To get started with Android Q Beta, visit developer.android.com/preview . What’s in Beta 5? The Beta 5 update includes the latest Android Q system images for Pixel and Android jEmulator, along with the final Android Q developer APIs (API level 29), the official API 29 SDK, and updated build tools for Android Studio. These give you ev...

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering Last month at Google I/O we talked about what’s new for Android developers, from new features in Android Q to the latest in Kotlin and Jetpack . With Android Q, we highlighted three themes: innovation, security and privacy, and digital wellbeing. We want to help you take advantage of the latest new technology -- 5G, foldables, edge-to-edge screens, on-device machine learning, and more -- while making sure users' security, privacy, and wellbeing are always a top priority. We also talked about how we’re going increasingly Kotlin -first, and continuing to expand Jetpack with new libraries like CameraX , Jetpack Security and Jetpack Compose -- a modern reactive-style UI toolkit for Android that takes advantage of Kotlin. If you missed the livestream for the keynotes or tech sessions, make sure to check out the full playlist of Android and Play sessions . Today we’re releasing Beta 4 with the final Android Q APIs and official SDK -- the time is...

Posted by Rene Mayrhofer and Xiaowen Xin, Android Security & Privacy Team With every new version of Android, one of our top priorities is raising the bar for security. Over the last few years, these improvements have led to measurable progress across the ecosystem, and 2018 was no different. In the 4th quarter of 2018, we had 84% more devices receiving a security update than in the same quarter the prior year. At the same time, no critical security vulnerabilities affecting the Android platform were publicly disclosed without a security update or mitigation available in 2018, and we saw a 20% year-over-year decline in the proportion of devices that installed a Potentially Harmful App . In the spirit of transparency, we released this data and more in our Android Security & Privacy 2018 Year In Review. But now you may be asking, what’s next? Today at Google I/O we lifted the curtain on all the new security features being integrated into Android Q. We plan to go deeper on each fea...

Posted by Jeff Vander Stoep, Android Security & Privacy Team and Chong Zhang, Android Media Team Android Q Beta versions are now publicly available . Among the various new features introduced in Android Q are some important security hardening changes. While exciting new security features are added in each Android release, hardening generally refers to security improvements made to existing components. When prioritizing platform hardening, we analyze data from a number of sources including our vulnerability rewards program (VRP). Past security issues provide useful insight into which components can use additional hardening. Android publishes monthly security bulletins which include fixes for all the high/critical severity vulnerabilities in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) reported through our VRP. While fixing vulnerabilities is necessary, we also get a lot of value from the metadata - analysis on the location and class of vulnerabilities. With this insight we can apply t...

Posted by Jeff Vander Stoep, Android Security & Privacy Team and Chong Zhang, Android Media Team Android Q Beta versions are now publicly available . Among the various new features introduced in Android Q are some important security hardening changes. While exciting new security features are added in each Android release, hardening generally refers to security improvements made to existing components. When prioritizing platform hardening, we analyze data from a number of sources including our vulnerability rewards program (VRP). Past security issues provide useful insight into which components can use additional hardening. Android publishes monthly security bulletins which include fixes for all the high/critical severity vulnerabilities in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) reported through our VRP. While fixing vulnerabilities is necessary, we also get a lot of value from the metadata - analysis on the location and class of vulnerabilities. With this insight we can apply t...