Android Developers Blog

Posted by Eddie Hsu (Technical Program Manager), Brent VerWeyst (Product Manager), Maya Ben Ari (Product Manager), Amith Dsouza (Technical Account Manager), Iliyan Malchev (Project Treble Architect) Over the past few years we’ve introduced new capabilities that enable us to deliver updates more uniformly, quickly, and efficiently to Android devices. These capabilities include: Oreo’s introduction of Project Treble created a system/vendor split for a much cleaner separation of OEM and SoC dependencies from the rest of the code base. This effort sped up the adoption of Android Pie by 2.5X. Every Android device that preloads the Google Play Store has been Treble compliant since that point. In Pie, we started publishing the Generic System Images (GSI) so that developers can use them for app-compat testing on real hardware. Treble compliance means that every device is compatible with our GSIs, even if it does not ship with them. We also worked with our major partners to launch an OEM dev...

Posted by Jeff Sharkey, Software Engineer, and Seb Grubb, Product Manager Application Sandboxing is a core part of Android’s design, isolating apps from each other. In Android Q, taking the same fundamental principle from Application Sandboxing, we introduced Scoped Storage . Since the Beta 1 release , you’ve given us a lot of valuable feedback on these changes -- thank you for helping shape Android! Because of your feedback, we've evolved the feature during the course of Android Q Beta. In this post, we'll share options for declaring your app’s support for Scoped Storage on Android Q devices, and best practices for questions we've heard from the community. Updates to help you adopt Scoped Storage We expect that Scoped Storage should have minimal impact to apps following current storage best practices . However, we also heard from you that Scoped Storage can be an elaborate change for some apps and you could use more time to assess the impact. Being developers ourselv...