fidzu : Android

It's easy enough these days to just ask Google Search what interesting places can be found nearby, but that's still a few taps or spoken words away. What if you … Continue reading

24 Jul 2014 2:00am GMT

Because users look at their mobile devices' keyboards an average of 180 times or a minimum of 1.5 hours per day, it would really help if you had a nice-looking … Continue reading

24 Jul 2014 1:00am GMT

Android has no dearth of games, but sometimes, they tend to congregate on tried and tested money makers or "safe bets". There are some, however, that do try to strike … Continue reading

23 Jul 2014 8:00pm GMT

Just like other OEMs like Motorola and Sony, HTC has also now "consciously uncoupled" (thank you Gwyneth Paltrow for that phrase) one of its system apps and made it available … Continue reading

23 Jul 2014 7:00pm GMT

After being pirated prior to its official release, Modern Combat 5: Blackout is now available in the Play Store. It was originally scheduled for a July 24 release. Gameloft must have decided that it was not necessary to wait any longer for a game that was being pirated and gaining attention for the wrong reason. […]

Come comment on this article: Modern Combat 5: Blackout arrives in the Play Store one day early

23 Jul 2014 6:26pm GMT

People are starting to become more conscious of how fragile their easy-to-remember passwords are, but that doesn't mean they're actively taking steps to protect their precious online accounts. To ease … Continue reading

23 Jul 2014 6:00pm GMT

On July 24, Verizon will have yet another handset under its belt. The HTC One Remix will be available on the carrier's network for $99 when signing a new two-year contract. The handset, known as the HTC One Mini 2 everywhere else, is essentially a watered-down, smaller version of the HTC One (M8). Like many […]

Come comment on this article: Verizon launching the HTC One Remix on July 24, $99 with two-year contract

23 Jul 2014 4:51pm GMT

According to reports, owners of the unlocked European version of the Samsung Galaxy S 5 are starting to receive a firmware update that promises general performance improvements. Sources indicate the update not only includes several "under-the-hood" improvements, it comes with a new kernel and baseband. The firmware version for this update is XXU1ANG2. No specific […]

Come comment on this article: Samsung appears to be rolling out firmware update to improve Samsung Galaxy S 5 performance

23 Jul 2014 4:49pm GMT

We have already seen a few images of the Sony Xperia Z3 surface, including some that contrast it with a Samsung Galaxy Note, but details about the hardware have been scant. Tipster @evleaks has supposedly unearthed some details about the hardware. According to a new post, the Xperia Z3 will feature a Snapdragon 801 running […]

Come comment on this article: New specs leak for Sony Xperia Z3

23 Jul 2014 4:37pm GMT

In the Android world, the third-party keyboard apps segment is a crowded one for app developers. That has not stopped developers from Fleksy from continuing to work on their version of a keyboard. The latest update that takes it up to version 3.0 introduces some new features and according to Fleksy, positions them to transition […]

Come comment on this article: Fleksy updates keyboard app to version 3.0 with new look and features

23 Jul 2014 4:26pm GMT

About a month ago we let you know that Motorola was working with a company called VivaInk to create digital tattoos that can be used to unlock the Moto X. Now, Motorola has made the product more official by releasing a promotional video about the tattoos. The tattoo (non-permanent) is an adhesive unit that can […]

Come comment on this article: Motorola makes its digital tattoos for unlocking the Moto X more official with promotional video

23 Jul 2014 4:03pm GMT

Just how many files do you need to fit into your smartwatch? With an average of just around 4GB of internal storage (actually less because of various tools and apps), … Continue reading

23 Jul 2014 4:00pm GMT

Not too long ago, Google Search started returning results for eligible ads whenever you searched things like hotels or restaurants. These results quickly show you nearby and relevant locations, which is great if you're trying to find somewhere to eat or go and need to see what's in the area. Starting today, those ad extensions […]

Come comment on this article: Google Maps now show ad extensions in search results

23 Jul 2014 3:02pm GMT

Whether you're just traveling to the next city to visit a friend or taking a vacation in New Delhi, Google Maps has got your location needs covered. Today, Google has … Continue reading

23 Jul 2014 3:00pm GMT

Well, this is new. The LG G3′s QuickCircle case has a circular window which allows users to see important notification information and date/time data. But now, users will be able to use the window to actually play games while on the run. Starting today, users will be able to download "Puppy Pop," which will be […]

Come comment on this article: LG announces game that can be played inside the QuickCircle Case's window for the G3

23 Jul 2014 2:19pm GMT

JW Player, a video playing platform used by millions of sites, most notably including ESPN, Chevrolet, AT&T, EA Games and more, just received a major update that will bring Chromecast support to the platform. That means that with the new release (version 6.9), you'll now see the Chromecast button on the bottom of the screen, […]

Come comment on this article: JW Player gets Chromecast support in new update, bringing casting support to millions of sites

23 Jul 2014 2:10pm GMT

In continuing with its tradition of pulling no punches when mocking its competition, Samsung's newly-released ad for their Galaxy S5 has once again chosen rival Apple to receive its barbs. … Continue reading

23 Jul 2014 2:00pm GMT

Samsung has been building it's own ecosystem for a while now, and it can't continue without developer support. They hosted their first Developers Conference last October, so it's no surprise they are going to do it all over again this year. With the introduction of the Samsung Mobile SDK and the S Health SDK, how […]

Come comment on this article: Samsung announces next Developers Conference

23 Jul 2014 1:52pm GMT

Even in this digital age, where people almost have their faces glued to their smartphone or tablet screens, it is still possible, or even convenient, to miss a pending task … Continue reading

23 Jul 2014 1:00pm GMT

NVIDIA is trying to make waves in the mobile gaming industry again by announcing the NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet today. Although being an Android device, it has access to the entire … Continue reading

23 Jul 2014 7:30am GMT

Numerous games are in line both for PC and consoles and even more are coming as we slowly approach the gaming season. And what better way to watch other people … Continue reading

23 Jul 2014 6:30am GMT

Now that US carriers have started shipping LG's new flagship G3 and it will mostly be available in retail stores within this week, LG has now released a new quick … Continue reading

23 Jul 2014 6:15am GMT

Messaging app LINE has now also joined the ephemeral message bandwagon as it released the "hidden chat" function in its latest update. The feature now lets users send and receive … Continue reading

23 Jul 2014 5:30am GMT

Some people change wallpapers on their mobile devices as often as they change clothes (some even more than that!). But there comes a time when you'll run out of ideas … Continue reading

23 Jul 2014 4:00am GMT

After a storm, what do you get? Well, apparently for OnePlus, a blizzard. Since it just announced the availability of Bamboo StyleSwap covers for their first and only smartphone, it … Continue reading

23 Jul 2014 3:00am GMT

An inevitable change is coming ever since Google revealed its new Material Design aesthetic at Google I/O 2014 last month. Although the rest of Android 4.4 will remain stuck with … Continue reading

23 Jul 2014 1:43am GMT

Srikanth Rajagopalan, PM Director and Workplace aficionado

Recently at Google I/O, we announced a comprehensive set of new features that will allow IT organizations to easily deploy and manage Android devices in enterprise environments. These features will be built into the upcoming Android L release.

Samsung, with its KNOX technology, has been a thought leader in the enterprise mobility space. In order to accelerate Android adoption in the enterprise, we have partnered with Samsung to bring key KNOX functionality into Android, for the benefit of the entire Android ecosystem. We thank Samsung for their contributions. These new capabilities will make it easy for IT organizations to allow employees to bring their own Android devices to work (BYOD) and use them on the corporate network or to simply issue new Android devices to their employees. IT administrators will be able to manage a wide range of Android devices from many manufacturers, using third-party Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solutions that are built on top of the new enterprise APIs launching with Android L release.

Google and Samsung together designed the new enterprise APIs around three major concepts:

• Device and data security
• Support for IT policies and restrictions
• Mobile application management

Device and data security

At the core of the expanded enterprise capabilities being introduced in Android 'L' lies a set of technologies that are designed to keep personal and corporate data both separate and safe. We achieve the data separation by building on the existing multi-user support in Android: personal and corporate applications will run as two separate Android users. Data is kept safe by using block-level disk encryption as well as verified boot technology. For those of you familiar with KNOX, this is analogous to KNOX Workspace. EMMs will be able to take advantage of new Android SDK APIs to enable the creation of a managed profile, which is where all corporate applications and data will reside.

Support for IT restrictions and policies

EMMs can use new Android SDK APIs , which have evolved from KNOX APIs, to allow IT admins to enforce a wide set of policies, ranging from system settings and certificate provisioning to application-specific (e.g. Chrome) configurations and restrictions.

Mobile application management

EMMs will be able to use new backend APIs, adapted from KNOX APIs and built around strong security principles for on-device app deployment, to allow IT admins to curate the corporate application catalog and to remotely deploy applications to the managed profile on the employees' devices.

We encourage developers interested in the new Enterprise APIs to download and test the Android L Developer Preview. For developers who have already built applications using Samsung KNOX APIs, Samsung will be providing a KNOX Compatibility Library that will let such applications run on all Android L devices.

You can read more about this collaboration on the Samsung KNOX blog. Stay tuned for additional details.

21 Jul 2014 4:16pm GMT

Today's post on #AndroidWear is from +Wayne Piekarski.

Now that the full Android Wear SDK is available, it's time to port your existing wearable-enabled notification code from the Developer Preview. In the process, you'll switch to using the latest Android support library, and there are some small API changes that will require you to update your code. This article will show you how to update my previous code samples that were released earlier for stacks and pages, which you can use to guide the conversion of your own code as well.

To get started with an existing project in Android Studio, you should update to the 0.8 or later release. You also need to make sure you've downloaded the Google Support Library version 20 or later from the SDK Manager. Since this is only a notification-based example, there's no need to download the full Android Wear SDK, which is only needed if you want to create an APK to run on the wearable device.

Unix diff output is used to show the necessary changes in an easy to understand way. Do not copy the + or - symbols at the start of each line, and ignore the lines starting with @@ which are used to indicate the line number that changed. For the curious, I used the following command to generate the diff output from the last commit in my GIT repository (the -U1 shows one line of context to keep the output simple):

git show HEAD -U1

Gradle changes

To add the new support-v4 library, you need to edit your build.gradle file like so:

@@ -24,2 +24,3 @@ dependencies {
     compile 'com.android.support:appcompat-v7:19.+'
+    compile 'com.android.support:support-v4:20.0+'
 }

Make sure you remove the wearable-preview-support.jar that was provided with the Developer Preview from your libs directory and build.gradle file, since these features are now in the standard support library.

Package imports

Since the APIs and package names have changed, the import statements at the top of MainActivity.java need to be adjusted like this:

@@ -7,3 +7,2 @@ import android.view.MenuItem;
-import android.support.v4.app.NotificationCompat;
 import android.app.Notification;
@@ -13,4 +12,9 @@ import android.graphics.Bitmap;
 import android.graphics.BitmapFactory;
-import android.preview.support.v4.app.NotificationManagerCompat;
-import android.preview.support.wearable.notifications.WearableNotifications;
+import android.support.v4.app.NotificationCompat;
+import android.support.v4.app.NotificationManagerCompat;
+
+// Extra dependencies needed for the pages example
+import java.util.ArrayList;
+import java.util.List;
+import android.support.v4.app.NotificationCompat.BigTextStyle;

Stacking notifications

Since the preview SDK, we have simplified how notifications are implemented. The existing NotificationCompat.Builder() was extended to support groups directly, instead of a separate WearableNotifications class. The steps are a lot simpler, as can be seen with the following changes to showStackNotifications():

@@ -63,3 +67,3 @@ public class MainActivity extends ActionBarActivity {
         // Group notification that will be visible on the phone
-    NotificationCompat.Builder builderG = new NotificationCompat.Builder(this)
+    Notification summaryNotification = new NotificationCompat.Builder(this)
             .setContentTitle("2 Pet Notifications")
@@ -67,5 +71,5 @@ public class MainActivity extends ActionBarActivity {
             .setSmallIcon(R.drawable.ic_launcher)
-                .setLargeIcon(bitmapMila);
-    Notification summaryNotification = new WearableNotifications.Builder(builderG)
-            .setGroup(GROUP_KEY_MESSAGES, WearableNotifications.GROUP_ORDER_SUMMARY)
+                .setLargeIcon(bitmapMila)
+            .setGroup(GROUP_KEY_MESSAGES)
+            .setGroupSummary(true)
             .build();
@@ -76,3 +80,3 @@ public class MainActivity extends ActionBarActivity {
             PendingIntent.getActivity(this, notificationId+1, viewIntent1, 0);
-    NotificationCompat.Builder builder1 = new NotificationCompat.Builder(this)
+    Notification notification1 = new NotificationCompat.Builder(this)
             .addAction(R.drawable.ic_action_done, "Treat Fed", viewPendingIntent1)
@@ -81,4 +85,3 @@ public class MainActivity extends ActionBarActivity {
                     + "Can we have steak?")
-                .setSmallIcon(R.drawable.ic_launcher);
-    Notification notification1 = new WearableNotifications.Builder(builder1)
+            .setSmallIcon(R.drawable.ic_launcher)
             .setGroup(GROUP_KEY_MESSAGES)
@@ -89,3 +92,3 @@ public class MainActivity extends ActionBarActivity {
             PendingIntent.getActivity(this, notificationId+2, viewIntent2, 0);
-    NotificationCompat.Builder builder2 = new NotificationCompat.Builder(this)
+    Notification notification2 = new NotificationCompat.Builder(this)
             .addAction(R.drawable.ic_action_done, "Water Filled", viewPendingIntent2)
@@ -93,4 +96,3 @@ public class MainActivity extends ActionBarActivity {
             .setContentText("Can you refill our water bowl?")
-            .setSmallIcon(R.drawable.ic_launcher);
-        Notification notification2 = new WearableNotifications.Builder(builder2)
+            .setSmallIcon(R.drawable.ic_launcher)
             .setGroup(GROUP_KEY_MESSAGES)

Page notifications

Page notifications have also changed to use a WearableExtender() class instead of the WearableNotifications class, as can be seen here in showPageNotifications():

@@ -151,3 +153,3 @@ public class MainActivity extends ActionBarActivity {
             PendingIntent.getActivity(this, notificationId+1, viewIntent1, 0);
-    NotificationCompat.Builder builder1 = new NotificationCompat.Builder(this)
+    Notification notification1 = new NotificationCompat.Builder(this)
             .addAction(R.drawable.ic_action_done, "Returned", viewPendingIntent1)
@@ -155,5 +157,4 @@ public class MainActivity extends ActionBarActivity {
             .setContentText("You have " + numOverdue + " books due at the library")
-            .setSmallIcon(R.drawable.ic_launcher);
-    Notification notification1 = new WearableNotifications.Builder(builder1)
-            .addPages(extras)
+                .setSmallIcon(R.drawable.ic_launcher)
+            .extend(new NotificationCompat.WearableExtender().addPages(extras))
             .build();

Conclusion

If you want to download the final source code of showStackNotifications() and showPageNotifications(), you can download the MainActivity.java file. You can build this file easily by creating a new project in Android Studio, adding the support library, and then copying in this MainActivity.java.

As you can see, porting this previous code over to the latest Android Wear SDK is really easy! It should take you hardly any time at all to get your experimental applications ported over and ready for publishing on the Google Play!

17 Jul 2014 11:08pm GMT

By Reto Meier, Head of Scalable Developer Advocacy

Today I'm proud to announce the latest resource for learning to develop Android apps: Developing Android Apps: Android Fundamentals.

Android Fundamentals is an online training course featuring Google Developer Advocates Reto Meier, Dan Galpin, and Katherine Kuan, working with the team at Udacity that's advanced and technical enough for experienced developers who are new to Android - maybe even new to mobile - but not new to programming.

The course offers step-by-step training in which you'll build an Android app, and learn best practices of mobile development in general and Android development in particular.

The full course materials - all the videos, quizzes, and forums - are available for free for all students by selecting "View Courseware". Personalized ongoing feedback and guidance from Coaches is also available to anyone who chooses to enroll in Udacity's guided program.

This guided course, along with UX Design for Mobile Developers and Mobile Web Development, complement our existing material-including documentation, samples, and videos - to offer a solid grounding in developing great experiences for people using mobile devices. Check out the trailer below for an overview of what's in the course.

Mobile devices are the platform that will bring the next five billion people online. With Android expanding rapidly into emerging markets, and growing beyond phones and tablets into wearables, auto, and TV, learning the fundamentals behind Android development represents an opportunity to affect and improve the lives of billions of people.

We look forward to seeing what the next wave of Android developers build, and we'll keep exploring new ways to help you become better developers.

15 Jul 2014 6:39pm GMT

By Ben Frenkel, Google Play Games team

There was a lot of excitement at Google I/O around Google Play Games, and today we're delighted to share that the following tools are now available:

• Updated Play Games cross-platform C++ SDK
• Updated Play Games SDK for iOS
• New game services alerts in the Developer Console

Here's a quick look at the cool new stuff for developers.

Updated Play Games C++ SDK

We've updated the Google Play Games C++ SDK with more cross-platform support for the new services and experiences we announced at I/O. Learn more»

The new C++ SDK now supports all of the following:

• Turn-based Multiplayer (TBMP). Learn more»
• Quests and Events. Learn more»
• Saved Games. Learn more»

Cocos2D-x, a popular game engine, is an early adopter of the Play Games C++ SDK and is bringing the power of Play Games to their developers. Additionally, the Cocos2D-x team created Wagon War, a prototype game showcasing the capabilities of the Cocos2D-x engine with Play Games C++ SDK integration.

Wagon War is also a powerful reference for developers - it gives you immediately usable code samples to accelerate your C++ implementations. You can browse or download the game sources on the Wagon War page on GitHub.

Updated Play Games iOS SDK

The Play Games iOS SDK is now updated with support for Quests and Saved Games, enabling iOS developers to integrate the latest services and experiences with the Objective-C based tool-chains they are already familiar with. Learn more»

The new Play Games SDK for iOS now supports all of the following:

• Quests and Events. Learn more»
• Saved Games. Learn more»
• Game Profile and related Player XP APIs - the SDK now also provides the UI for Game Profile and access to Player XP data for players.

New types of games services alerts

Last, you can now see new types of games services alerts in the Developer Console to learn about issues that might be affecting your users' gameplay experiences. For example, if your app implements Game Gifts, you'll now see an alert when players are unable to send a gift; if your app implements Multiplayer, you'll now see an alert when players are unable to join a match. Learn more»

10 Jul 2014 5:07pm GMT

We have a workaround to enable paid apps (and other apps that use Google Play's forward-lock mechanism) on Android Wear. The assets/ directory of those apps, which contains the wearable APK, cannot be extracted or read by the wearable installer. The workaround is to place the wearable APK in the res/raw directory instead.

As per the documentation, there are two ways to package your wearable app: use the "wearApp" Gradle rule to package your wearable app or manually package the wearable app. For paid apps, the workaround is to manually package your apps with the following two changes, and you cannot use the "wearApp" Gradle rule. To manually package the wearable APK into res/raw, do the following:

1. Copy the signed wearable app into your handheld project's res/raw directory and rename it to wearable_app.apk, it will be referred to as wearable_app.
2. Create a res/xml/wearable_app_desc.xml file that contains the version and path information of the wearable app:

   <wearableApp package="wearable app package name">
       <versionCode>1</versionCode>
       <versionName>1.0</versionName>
       <rawPathResId>wearable_app</rawPathResId>
   </wearableApp>
   

   The package, versionCode, and versionName are the same as values specified in the wearable app's AndroidManifest.xml file. The rawPathResId is the static variable name of the resource. If the filename of your resource is wearable_app.apk, the static variable name would be wearable_app.

3. Add a <meta-data> tag to your handheld app's <application> tag to reference the wearable_app_desc.xml file.

   <meta-data android:name="com.google.android.wearable.beta.app"
              android:resource="@xml/wearable_app_desc"/>
   

4. Build and sign the handheld app.

We will be updating the "wearApp" Gradle rule in a future update to the Android SDK build tools to support APK embedding into res/raw. In the meantime, for paid apps you will need to follow the manual steps outlined above. We will be also be updating the documentation to reflect the above workaround. We're working to make this easier for you in the future, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

09 Jul 2014 4:26am GMT

Google Play services 5.0 is now rolled out to devices worldwide, and it includes a number of features you can use to improve your apps. This release introduces Android wearable services APIs, Dynamic Security Provider and App Indexing, whilst also including updates to the Google Play game services, Cast, Drive, Wallet, Analytics, and Mobile Ads.

Android wearable services

Google Play services 5.0 introduces a set of APIs that make it easier to communicate with your apps running on Android wearables. The APIs provide an automatically synchronized, persistent data store and a low-latency messaging interface that let you sync data, exchange control messages, and transfer assets.

Dynamic security provider

Provides an API that apps can use to easily install a dynamic security provider. The dynamic security provider includes a replacement for the platform's secure networking APIs, which can be updated frequently for rapid delivery of security patches. The current version includes fixes for recent issues identified in OpenSSL.

Google Play game services

Quests are a new set of APIs to run time-based goals for players, and reward them without needing to update the game. To do this, you can send game activity data to the Quests service whenever a player successfully wins a level, kills an alien, or saves a rare black sheep, for example. This tells Quests what's going on in the game, and you can use that game activity to create new Quests. By running Quests on a regular basis, you can create an unlimited number of new player experiences to drive re-engagement and retention.

Saved games lets you store a player's game progress to the cloud for use across many screen, using a new saved game snapshot API. Along with game progress, you can store a cover image, description and time-played. Players never play level 1 again when they have their progress stored with Google, and they can see where they left off when you attach a cover image and description. Adding cover images and descriptions provides additional context on the player's progress and helps drive re-engagement through the Play Games app.

App Indexing API

The App Indexing API provides a way for you to notify Google about deep links in your native mobile applications and drive additional user engagement. Integrating with the App Indexing API allows the Google Search app to serve up your app's history to users as instant Search suggestions, providing fast and easy access to inner pages in your app. The deep links reported using the App Indexing API are also used by Google to index your app's content and surface them as deep links to Google search result.

Google Cast

The Google Cast SDK now includes media tracks that introduce closed caption support for Chromecast.

Drive

The Google Drive API adds the ability to sort query results, create folders offline, and select any mime type in the file picker by default.

Wallet

Wallet objects from Google take physical objects (like loyalty cards, offers) from your wallet and store them in the cloud. In this release, Wallet adds "Save to Wallet" button support for offers. When a user clicks "Save to Wallet" the offer gets saved and shows up in the user's Google Wallet app. Geo-fenced in-store notifications prompt the user to show and scan digital cards at point-of-sale, driving higher redemption. This also frees the user from having to carry around offers and loyalty cards.

Users can also now use their Google Wallet Balance to pay for Instant Buy transactions by providing split tender support. With split tender, if your Wallet Balance is not sufficient, the payment is split between your Wallet Balance and a credit/debit card in your Google Wallet.

Analytics

Enhanced Ecommerce provides visibility into the full customer journey, adding the ability to measure product impressions, product clicks, viewing product details, adding a product to a shopping cart, initiating the checkout process, internal promotions, transactions, and refunds. Together they help users gain deeper insights into the performance of their business, including how far users progress through the shopping funnel and where they are abandoning in the purchase process. Enhanced Ecommerce also allows users to analyze the effectiveness of their marketing and merchandising efforts, including the impact of internal promotions, coupons, and affiliate marketing programs.

Mobile Ads

Google Mobile Ads are a great way to monetise your apps and you now have access to better in-app purchase ads. We've now added a default implementation for consumable purchases using the Google Play In-app Billing service.

And that's another release of Google Play services. The updated Google Play services SDK is now available through the Android SDK manager. For details on the APIs, please see New Features in Google Play services 5.0.

02 Jul 2014 7:00pm GMT

By Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

At the Google I/O keynote yesterday we announced the L Developer Preview - a development version of an upcoming Android release. The Developer Preview lets you explore features and capabilities of the L release and get started developing and testing on the new platform. You can take a look at the developer features and APIs in the API Overview page.

Starting today, the L Developer Preview is available for download from the L Developer Preview site. We're also announcing that Android Studio is now in beta, and making great progress toward a full release.

Let's take a deeper dive into what's included in the preview and what it means for you as a developer as you prepare your apps for the next Android release.

What's in the L Developer Preview

The L Developer Preview includes updated SDK tools, system images for testing on an emulator, and system images for testing on a Nexus 5 or Nexus 7 device.

You can download these components through the Android SDK Manager:

• L Developer Preview SDK Tools
• L Developer Preview Emulator System Image - 32-bit (64-bit experimental emulator image coming soon)
• L Developer Preview Emulator System Image for Android TV (32-bit)

(Note: the full release of Android Wear is a part of Android KitKat, API Level 20. Read more about Android Wear development here.)

Today, we are also providing system image downloads for these Nexus devices to help with your testing as well:

• Nexus 5 (GSM/LTE) "hammerhead" Device System Image
• Nexus 7 [2013] - (Wifi) "razor" Device System Image

You can download both of these system images from the L Developer Preview site.

With the SDK Tools, and Nexus device images, you can get a head start on testing out your app on the latest Android platform months before the official launch. You can use the extra lead time to take advantage of all the new app features and APIs in your apps. The Nexus device images can help you with testing, but keep in mind that they are meant for development purposes only and should not be used on a production device.

Notes on APIs and publishing

The L Developer Preview is a development release and does not have a standard API level. The APIs are not final, and you can expect minor API changes over time.

To ensure a great user experience and broad compatibility, you can not publish versions of your app to Google Play that are compiled against L Developer Preview. Apps built for L Developer Preview will have to wait until the full official launch to publish on Google Play.

Android Studio Beta

To help you develop your apps for the upcoming Android version and for new Android device types, we're also happy to announce Android Studio Beta. Android Studio Beta helps you develop apps by enabling you to:

• Incorporate the new material design and interaction elements of the L Developer Preview SDK
• Quickly create and build apps with a new app wizard and layout editor support for Android Wear and Android TV

Building on top of the build variants and flavors features we introduced last year, the Android Studio build system now supports creating multiple apks, such as for devices like Android Wear. You can try out all the new features with the L Developer Preview by downloading the Android Studio Beta today.

How to get started

To get started with the L Developer Preview and prepare your apps for the full release, just follow these steps:

1. Try out Android Studio Beta
2. Visit the L Developer Preview site
3. Explore the new APIs
4. Enable the material theme and try out material design on your apps
5. Get the emulator system images through the SDK Manager or download the Nexus device system images.
6. Test your app on the new Android Runtime (ART) with your device or emulator
7. Give us feedback

As you use the new developer features and APIs in the L Developer Preview, we encourage you to give us your feedback using the L Developer Preview Issue Tracker. During the developer preview period, we aim to incorporate your feedback into our new APIs and adjust features as best as we can.

You can get all the latest downloads, documentation, and tools information from the L Developer Preview site on developer.android.com. You can also check our Android Developer Preview Google+ page for updates and information.

We hope you try the L Developer Preview as you start building the next generation of amazing Android user experiences.

26 Jun 2014 8:52pm GMT

By Monica Tran, Head of Developer Marketing

Today at Moscone, we kicked off our 7th annual Google I/O. This year, we're focusing on three key themes: design, develop, distribute, helping you build your app from start to finish.

It's been amazing to see how far you've come: in fact, since the last Google I/O, we've paid developers more than $5 billion, a testament to the experiences you're creating. In the keynote, we had a number of announcements geared towards meeting the user wherever they go: on the TV, in the car and on your wrist. Below is a taste of some of the goodies we unveiled to help you along the way.

DESIGN

• Material design - we introduced material design, which uses tactile surfaces, bold graphic design, and fluid motion to create beautiful, intuitive experiences.
• L-Release of Android, with material design - Bringing material design to Android is a big part of the L-Release of Android: we've added the new Material theme (which you can apply to your apps for a new style) and the ability to specify a view's elevation, allowing you to cast dynamic, real-time shadows in your apps.
• Bringing material design to Polymer - As a developer, you'll now have access to all the capabilities of material design via Polymer, bringing tangibility, bold graphics, and animations to your applications on the web, all at 60fps.

DEVELOP

• Android L Developer Preview - Get extra lead time to make great apps for the next version of Android, with lots of new APIs to make Android simpler and more consistent on screens everywhere
• Google Play services 5.0 is rolling out worldwide with great new features for developers.
• Android TV SDK - Explore, learn and build apps and games for the biggest screen in the home. Your hard work will pay off in the fall when Asus, Razer and other partners launch their first Android TV devices.
• Google Cast SDK - Help users find your content more easily with the improved Google Cast SDK developer console, which lets your app get discovered on chromecast.com/apps and on Google Play.
• Android Auto SDK coming - Bring your app experience to the car by extending your existing app with Android Auto APIs. Be in millions of cars - with just one app.
• Google Fit - An open fitness platform giving users control of their fitness data so that developers can focus on building smarter apps and manufacturers can focus on creating amazing devices.
• Gaming - Learn what's new about Google Play Games and the Android platform to take games to the next level.
• Google Cloud Platform - Get help with debugging, tracing, and monitoring applications in with new developer productivity tooling. Also, try Cloud Dataflow, a new fully managed service that simplifies the process of creating data pipelines.
• The new Gmail API - Add Gmail features to your app with RESTful access to threads, messages, labels, drafts and history.
• Android features for Enterprise - Secure apps and data without complicating the user experience. Build for the enterprise with no changes to the apps you're already developing. Learn more here.

DISTRIBUTE

• Building successful global app businesses - Scalable solutions to help you find more users, understand and engage them, and effectively convert your active users into buyers.

25 Jun 2014 9:47pm GMT

By Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

Earlier today, at Google I/O, we showed a number of projects we've been working on to the thousands of developers in the audience and the millions more tuning in on the livestream. These projects extend Android to the TV (Android TV), to the car (Android Auto) and to wearables (Android Wear), among others.

At Google, our focus is providing a seamless experience for users across all of the screens in their lives. An important component to that is making sure that you as developers have all of the tools necessary to easily deploy your apps across to those screens. Increasingly, Android is becoming the fabric that weaves these experiences together, which is why you'll be excited about a number of things we unveiled today.

Android L Developer Preview

For the first time since we launched Android, we're giving you early access to a development version of an upcoming release. The L Developer Preview, available starting tomorrow, lets you explore many of the new features and capabilities of the next version of Android, and offers everything you need to get started developing and testing on the new platform. This is important because the platform is evolving in a significant way - not only for mobile but also moving beyond phones and tablets. Here are a few of the highlights for developers:

• Material design for the multiscreen world - We've been working on a new design language at Google that takes a comprehensive approach to visual, motion, and interaction design across a number of platforms and form factors. Material design is a new aesthetic for designing apps in today's multi-device world. The L Developer Preview brings material design to Android, with a full set of tools for your apps. The system is incredibly flexible, allowing your app to express its individual character and brand with bold colors and a variety of responsive UI patterns and themeable elements.
• Enhanced notifications - New lockscreen notifications let you surface content, updates, and actions to users at a glance, without unlocking. Visibility controls let you manage the types of information shown on the lockscreen. Heads-up notifications display content and actions in a small floating window that's managed by the system, no matter which app is in the foreground. Notifications are material themed and you can express your brand through accent colors and more.
• Document-centric Recents - Now you can organize your app by tasks and present these concurrently as individual "documents" in the Recents screen. Users can flip through Recents to find the specific task they want and then jump deep into your app with a single tap.
• Project Volta - New tools and APIs help your app run efficiently and conserve power. Battery Historian is a new tool that lets you visualize power events over time and understand how your app is using battery. A job scheduler API lets you set the conditions under which your background tasks and other jobs should run, such as when the device is idle or connected to an unmetered to a charger, to minimize battery impact.
• BLE Peripheral Mode - Android devices can now function in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) peripheral mode. Apps can use this capability to broadcast their presence to nearby devices - for example, you can now build apps that let a device to function as a pedometer or health monitor and transmit data to another BLE device.
• Multi-networking - Apps can work with the system to dynamically scan for available networks with specific capabilities and then automatically connect. This is useful when you want to manage handoffs or connect to a specialized network, such as a carrier-billing network.
• Advanced camera capabilities - A new camera API gives you new capabilities for image capture and processing. On supported devices, your app can capture uncompressed YUV capture at full 8 megapixel resolution at 30 FPS. The API also lets you capture raw sensor data and control parameters such as exposure time, ISO sensitivity, and frame duration, on a per-frame basis.
• New features for game developers - Support for OpenGL ES 3.1, gives you capabilities such as compute shaders, stencil textures, and texture gather for your games. Android Extension Pack (AEP) is a new set of extensions to OpenGL ES that bring desktop-class graphics to Android. Games will be able to take advantage of tessellation and geometry shaders, and use ASTC texture compression across multiple GPU techonolgies.
• Android Runtime (ART) - The L Developer Preview introduces the Android Runtime (ART) as the system default. ART offers ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation, more efficient garbage collection, and improved development and debugging features. In many cases it improves performance of the device with no action required by the developer.
• 64-bit support - The L Developer Preview adds support for 64-bit ABIs, for additional address space and improved performance with certain compute workloads. Apps written in the Java language can run immediately on 64-bit architectures with no modifications required. To support apps using native code, we're also releasing an updated NDK that includes 64-bit support.

Watch for more details coming out tomorrow (26 June) on what's in the L Developer Preview and how to get it.

Google Play Services 5.0

Along with the L Developer Preview, we also announced a new version of Google Play services that brings new capabilities and the latest optimizations to devices across the Android ecosystem. Google Play services ensures that you can build on the latest features from Google for your users, with the confidence that those services will work properly everywhere. The latest version has begun rolling out and here are some of the highlights:

• Services for Android wearables - Your apps can more easily communicate and sync with code running on Android wearables through an automatically synchronized, persistent data store and a reliable messaging interface.
• Play Games services - Build a great gaming experience with Quests, which allow event-based challenges for players to complete for rewards, Saved Games (a snapshot API allow synchronization of game data along with a cover-image and description), and Game Profile (providing experience points for players).
• App Indexing API - Surface deep content in your native mobile applications on Google search and drive additional user engagement.
• Google Cast - Use media tracks to enable closed-caption support for Chromecast.
• Drive - Sort query results, create offline folders, and select any mime type in the file picker by default.
• Wallet - Build a "Save to Wallet" button for offers directly into your app; use geo-fenced in-store notifications to prompt the user to show and scan digital cards. Split tender allows payment to be split between Wallet Balance and a credit/debit card in Google Wallet.
• Analytics - Get insights into the full user journey and understand how different user acquisition campaigns are performing with Enhanced Ecommerce, letting you measure product impressions, product clicks, and more.
• Mobile Ads - Use improved in-app purchase ads and integrations for the Play store in-app purchase API client.
• Dynamic Security Provider - Offers an alternative to the platform's secure networking APIs that can be updated more frequently, for faster delivery of security patches.

We expect the rollout of Google Play services 5.0 to take several days, after which time you'll be able to get started developing with these new APIs.

Join us at the Google I/O sessions

If you'd like to learn more, join us for sessions on Android development, material design, game development, and more. You'll find the full session list on the Google I/O 2014 site, and you can filter the schedule to find livestreamed sessions of interest.

25 Jun 2014 8:20pm GMT

By Greg Hartrell, Product Manager, Google Play games

With Google I/O '14 here, we see Android and Google Play as a huge opportunity for game developers: 3 in 4 Android users are playing games, and with over one billion active Android users around the world, games are reaching and delighting almost everyone.

At Google, we see a great future where mobile and cloud services bring games to all the screens in your life and connect you with others. Today we announced a number of games related launches and upcoming technologies across Google Play Games, the Android platform and its new form factors.

Google Play Games

At last year's Google I/O, we announced Google Play Games -- Google's online game platform, with services and user experiences designed to bring players together and take Android and mobile games to the next level.

Google Play Games has grown at tremendous speed, activating 100 million users in the past 6 months. It's the fastest growing mobile game network, and with such an incredible response, we announced more awesome enhancements to Google Play Games today.

Game Profile

The Play Games app now gives players a Game Profile, where they earn points and vanity titles from unlocking achievements. Players can also compare their profile with friends. Developers can benefit from this meta-game by continuing to design great achievements that reward players for exploring all the content and depth of their game.

Quests and Saved Games

Two new game services will launch with the next update for Google Play Services on Android, and through the Play Games iOS SDK:

• Quests is a service that enables developers to create online, time-based goals in their games without having to launch an update each time. Now developers can easily run weekend or daily challenges for their player community, and reward them in unique ways.
• Saved Games is a service that stores a player's game progress across many screens, along with a cover image, description and total time played. Players never have to play level 1 again by having their progress stored with Google, and cover images and descriptions are used in Play Games experiences to indicate where they left off and attract them to launch their favorite game again.

We have many great partners who have started integrating Quests and Saved Games, here are just a few current or upcoming games.

More tools for game developers

Other developer tools are now available for Play Games, including:

• Play Games Statistics - Play Games adopters get easy effort game analytics through the Google Play Developer console today, including visualization of Player & Engagement statistics. What's new is aggregated player demographic information for signed-in users, so you can understand the distribution of your player's ages, genders and countries.
• Play Games C++ SDK is updated with more cross-platform support for the new services and experiences we announced. Cocos2D-x, a popular game engine, is an early adopter of the Play Games C++ SDK bringing the power of Play Games to their developers.

Game enhancements for the Android Platform

With the announcement of the developer preview of the Android L-release, there are some new platform capabilities that will make Android an even more compelling platform for game development.

• Support for OpenGL ES 3.1 in the L Developer Preview - Introducing powerful features like compute shaders, stencil textures, and texture gather, enables more interesting physics or pixel effects on mobile devices. Additional API and shading language improvements improve usability and reduce overhead.
• Android Extension Pack (AEP) in the L Developer Preview - a new set of extensions to OpenGL ES that bring desktop class graphics to Android. Games will be able to take advantage of tessellation and geometry shaders, and use ASTC texture compression.

  We're pleased to be working with different GPU vendors to adopt AEP including Nvidia, ARM, Qualcomm, and Imagination Technologies.

• Google Gamepad standards - We recently published a standard for gamepad input for OEMs and partners who create and enable these awesome input devices on Android. The standard makes this input mechanism compatible across Google platforms on Android, Chrome and Chromebooks. You can learn more here: Supporting Game Controllers.

Play Games on Android TV

And Google's game network is a part of the Android TV announcement - so think of Android on a TV, with a rich interface on a large screen, and fun games in your living room! Players will be able to earn achievements, climb leaderboards and play online with friends from an Android TV. This is only available through the developer preview, so game developers seeking a hardware development kit (the ADT-1) can make a request at http://developer.android.com/tv.

Updates rolling out soon

That's a lot of games announcements! Our Play Games changes will roll out over the next few weeks with the update of Google Play Services and the Play Games App, and Android L-release changes are part of the announced developer preview. This gets us a big step closer to a world where Android and our cloud services enable games to reach all the screens in your life and connect you with others.

Greg Hartrell is the lead product manager for Google Play Games: Google's game platform that helps developers reach and unite millions of players. Before joining Google, he was VP of Product Development at Capcom/Beeline, and prior to that, led product development for 8 years at Microsoft for Xbox Live/360 and other consumer and enterprise product lines. In his spare time, he enjoys flying birds through plumbing structures, boss battles and pulling rare objects out of mystery boxes.

25 Jun 2014 7:02pm GMT

By: Purnima Kochikar, Director, Google Play Apps & Games

With over 1 billion active Android users, an increasing number of developers like you are building successful global businesses on Google Play. Since the last Google I/O, we've also paid out more than $5 billion to developers.

This week at Google I/O, we announced new ways to help you build a successful business. These solutions work together at scale to help you find more users, understand and engage them, and effectively convert your active users into buyers.

Build an engaging app

Last year, Google Play became an even better place to try new ideas. Since May 2013, Google Play offers Alpha and Beta Testing so that you can engage users early to get feedback on your new app. Feedback provided by users is private, allowing you to fix issues before publicly launching the app, and without impacting your public ratings and reviews. Over 80,000 apps on Google Play are actively using beta testing. You can also ensure new versions get a positive response by updating through staged rollouts.

Scale operations

As your app business grows, you dedicate more time to release management. Today we announced the Google Play Developer Publishing API to help you scale your release operations. The new API will let you upload APKs, manage your in-app products and localized store listings. You will be able to integrate publishing operations with your release processes and toolchain through a RESTful API. With the Google Play Developer Publishing API you'll spend less time managing your releases and more time managing your business. This API is currently in closed beta and we look forward to making it available to all developers.

Actionable insights

The Google Play Developer Console now offers more actionable insights into your app's performance by sending you email notifications for Alerts and providing Optimization Tips. We're also offering new revenue metrics including number of buyers and average revenue per paying user. You'll also be able to export user reviews for further analysis. Click on Announcements in the Developer Console for a list of new features.

For game developers, we recently launched enhanced Play Games statistics on the Google Play Developer Console. You get a daily dashboard that visualizes player and engagement statistics for signed in users, including daily active users, retention analysis, and achievement and leaderboard performance.

Enhance discovery and engagement

With AdWords, we're building a robust platform to help you promote your app and drive re-engagement. This week we are launching Installed App Category Targeting, a new way to promote your app to new users. It helps you reach potential customers across the AdMob network who have already installed apps from related categories on Google Play and other app stores. For example, an action-oriented game developer may wish to reach users who have previously installed apps from the category Action & Adventure Games.

Ads can also remind users about the apps they already have. Through Google mobile display and search ads deep linking, you can re-engage users who have already installed your Android app by taking them directly to specific pages in the app. Let's say someone has the Hotel Tonight app installed on their phone. If they search Google for "hotels in San Francisco," they'll see an ad that will open Hotel Tonight app and take them directly to a list of San Francisco hotels.

This deep-linking is also available through search for all apps that implement app indexing. If a user with the Walmart Android app searches for "Chromecast where to buy", they'll go directly to the Chromecast page in the Walmart app. The new App Indexing API is now open to all Android developers, globally. Get started now.

New services for game developers

For game developers using Play Games, we announced a new Game Profile that is automatically customized based on the gameplay and achievements earned in those games. Since its launch last year, users have loved saving their game progress in the cloud. We're now evolving this feature to Saved Games, where users can save up to 3 "bookmarks" of their progress in the Play Games app, complete with images and descriptions. Finally, we announced a new service called Quests - it you run online, time-based goals in your game; for example, players can collect bunch of in-game items on a specific day, and the quests services coordinates with your game to know who completed the goal. These APIs run events for your players, and reward them, without the need to update your game.

New monetization tools

Today, we announced that users who have set up Direct Carrier Billing on their smartphone can also make purchases on Google Play from their tablet, charging to the same mobile phone bill. In addition to our recent launch of payments through PayPal, these new user payment options expand monetization opportunities for your apps.

As announced earlier this year, Google Analytics is now directly available in the AdMob interface, giving you powerful segmentation tools to determine the best monetization strategy for each user. For example, you might want to display in-app purchase ads to users most interested in buying, while showing regular ads to those less likely to buy right now. Once you've segmented your audience in this way, you can use AdMob to build interstitial ads that promote in-app purchase items to users at a point in your app that's useful to them. This creates a more customized experience for users, can help prolong engagement and grow in-app purchase revenue. Learn more.

Join us

If you're at Google I/O 2014, please join us at our breakout sessions today and tomorrow, where we'll be talking about these features in much more detail. (Add us to your calendar!) And if you can't make I/O, you can always join us on the livestream or watch the videos online later.

25 Jun 2014 6:58pm GMT

By Dave Burke and Majd Bakar, Engineering Directors and TV Junkies

Last summer, we launched Chromecast, a small, affordable device that lets you cast online video, music and anything from the web to your TV. Today at Google I/O, we announced Android TV, the newest form factor to the Android platform, and a way to extend the reach of Google Cast to more devices, like televisions, set-top boxes and consoles.

Check out Coming to a Screen Near You for some details on everything we're doing to make your TV the place to be.

For developers though--sorry, you don't get to unwind in front of the TV. We need you to get to work and help us create the best possible TV experience, with all of the new features announced at I/O today.

Get started with Android TV

In addition to Google Cast apps that send content to the TV, you can now build immersive native apps and console-style games on Android TV devices. These native apps work with TV remotes and gamepads, even if you don't have your phone handy. The Android L Developer Preview SDK includes the new Leanback support library that allows you to design smoother, simpler, living room apps.

And this is just the beginning. In the fall, new APIs will allow you to cast directly to these apps, so users can control the app with the phone, the remote, or even their Android Wear watch. You'll also start seeing Android TV set-top boxes, consoles and televisions from Sony, TP Vision, Sharp, Asus, Razer and more.

Help more users find your Google Cast app

We want to help users more easily find your content, so we've improved the Google Cast SDK developer console to let you upload your app icon, app name, and app category for Android, iOS and Chrome. These changes will help your app get discovered on chromecast.com/apps and on Google Play.

Additional capabilities have also been added to the Google Cast SDK. These include: Media Player Library enhancements, bringing easier integration with MPEG-DASH Smooth Streaming, and HLS. We've also added WebAudio & WebGL support, made the Cast Companion Library available, and added enhanced Closed Caption support. And coming soon, we will add support for queuing and ID delegation.

Ready to get started? Visit developer.android.com/tv and developers.google.com/cast for the SDKs, style guides, tutorials, sample code, and the API references. You can also request an ADT-1 devkit to bootstrap your Android TV development.

25 Jun 2014 6:55pm GMT

Posted by Manfred Zabarauskas, Product Manager on Google Cloud Platform

Many Android developers like Snapchat or Pulse build and host their app backends on the Google Cloud Platform, and enjoy automatic management, with simple expansion to support millions of users.

To quickly add a Google Cloud Platform backend to your Android app, you can now use a number of built-in features in Android Studio 0.6.1+.

Google App Engine backend module templates

Google App Engine enables you to run your backend applications on Google's infrastructure, without ever requiring you to maintain any servers.

To simplify the process of adding an App Engine backend to your app, Android Studio now provides three App Engine backend module templates which you can add to your app. You can find them under "New → Module" menu:

1. App Engine Java Servlet Module provides a simple App Engine Java backend servlet with minimal boilerplate code,
2. App Engine Java Endpoints Module template leverages Google Cloud Endpoints for your backend, and includes automated object marshalling/unmarshalling, generation of strongly-typed Java client libraries and so on,
3. App Engine Backend with Google Cloud Messaging includes both Google Cloud Endpoints and Google Cloud Messaging integration, which enables additional features like push notifications.

When you choose one of these template types, a new Gradle module with your specified module/package name will be added to your project containing your new App Engine backend. All of the required dependencies/permissions will be automatically set up for you.

You can then run it locally (on http://localhost:8080) by selecting the run configuration with your backend's module name, as shown in the image below.

For more information about these backend templates, including their deployment live to App Engine and code examples which show how to connect your Android app to these backends, see their documentation on GitHub. (Also, the code for these templates lives in the same GitHub repository, so do not hesitate to submit a pull request if you have any suggestions!)

Built-in rich editing support for Google Cloud Endpoints

Once you have added the backend module to your Android application, you can use Google Cloud Endpoints to streamline the communication between your backend and your Android app. Cloud Endpoints automatically generate strongly-typed client libraries from simple Java server-side API annotations, automate Java object marshalling to and from JSON, provide built-in OAuth 2.0 support and so on.

As a concrete example, "App Engine Java Endpoints Module" contains a simple annotated Endpoints API at <backend-name>/src/main/java/<package-name>/MyEndpoint.java file (shown below):

import javax.inject.Named;

@Api(name = "myApi",
     version = "v1",
     namespace = @ApiNamespace(ownerDomain = "<package-name>",
                               ownerName = "<package-name>",
                               packagePath=""))
public class MyEndpoint {
    @ApiMethod(name = "sayHi")
    public MyBean sayHi(@Named("name") String name) {
        MyBean response = new MyBean();
        response.setData("Hi, " + name);
        return response;
    }
}

On deployment, this annotated Endpoints API definition class generates a RESTful API. You can explore this generated API (and even make calls to it) by navigating to Endpoints API explorer as shown in the image below:

Google APIs explorer is available at http://localhost:8080/_ah/api/explorer once you deploy your app. Color overlays in this screenshot match the colors in the API snippet above (MyEndpoint.java).

To simplify calling this generated API from your Android app, Android Studio will automatically set up your project to automatically include all compile dependencies and permissions required to consume Cloud Endpoints, and will re-generate strongly-typed client libraries if your backend changes. This means that you can start calling the client libraries from your Android app immediately after defining the server-side Endpoints API:

Code completion for automatically generated, strongly-typed client libraries. Color overlays match the colors in the API snipped above (MyEndpoint.java)

As server-side Endpoints API definitions have to conform to a number of syntactic rules, Android Studio also includes a number of Endpoints-specific inspections and quick-fixes, which help you to avoid mistakes when writing Endpoints APIs.

For example, "@Named" annotation is required for all non-entity type parameters passed to server-side methods. If you forget to add this annotation when modifying sayHi method in MyEndpoint.java file, Android Studio will underline the problematic statement as-you-type:

Furthermore, to help you easily fix the problems with Cloud Endpoints, Android Studio will provide quick-fixes for the most common Cloud Endpoints development mistakes. To see these quick-fix suggestions, press Alt + Enter if you're running on Linux/Windows or ⌥ + Enter if you're running on Mac:

As expected, choosing the first quick-fix ("Add @Named") will automatically add "@Named" annotation to method's parameter, solving this problem in two key presses.

The underlying work-horses: Gradle, and Gradle plug-in for App Engine

Under the hood, Gradle is used to build both your app and your App Engine backend. In fact, when you add an App Engine backend to your Android app, an open-source App Engine plug-in for Gradle is automatically downloaded by Android Studio, and common App Engine tasks become available as Gradle targets. This allows you to use the same build system across your IDE, command-line or continuous integration environments.

For example, to deploy your backend to App Engine from Android Studio, you can launch the "appengineUpdate" task from the "Gradle tasks" tool window:

Similarly, if you want to integrate your backend's deployment into your command-line scripts, simply launch "./gradlew backend:appengineUpdate" command from your project's root directory.

Try out a codelab, or see these features live at Google I/O 2014!

If you want to give these features a spin in a more guided environment, try out our Cloud Endpoints codelab for Android. We will also be demonstrating some of these features live at Less Code, More Services, Better Android Apps session in Google I/O 2014 (as well as some of the new and even more exciting stuff), so don't forget to tune in!

We look forward to your questions or feedback, and learning about the amazing applications you have built using Android Studio and Google Cloud Platform. You can find us lurking on StackOverflow's App Engine and Cloud Endpoints forums!

18 Jun 2014 5:53pm GMT

By Wouter van Oortmerssen, Fun Propulsion Labs at Google

Game developers, we've just released FlatBuffers, a C++ serialization library that allows you to read data without unpacking or allocating additional memory, as an open source project.

FlatBuffers stores serialized data in buffers in a cross-platform way, supporting format evolution that is fully forwards and backwards compatible through a schema. These buffers can be stored in files or sent across the network as-is, and accessed in-place without parsing overhead.

The FlatBuffers schema compiler and runtime is written in platform independent C++ with no library dependencies outside the STL, which makes it possible to use on any platform that has a C++ compiler. We have provided methods to build the FlatBuffers library, example applications, and unit tests for Android, Linux, OSX and Windows. The schema compiler can generate code to read and write FlatBuffers binary files for C++ and Java. It can additionally parse JSON-formatted data into type-safe binaries.

Game developers can use this library to store game data with less overhead than alternative solutions (e.g. Protocol Buffers or JSON). We're excited about the possibilities, and want to hear from you about how we can make this even better!

Download the latest release from the FlatBuffers page in GitHub and join our discussion list!

Fun Propulsion Labs is a team within Google that's dedicated to advancing gaming on Android and other platforms.

18 Jun 2014 12:05am GMT

By Roman Nurik and Timothy Jordan, Design and Developer Advocates on Android Wear

A few weeks ago, Timothy and I were chatting about designing apps for wearables to validate some of the content we're planning for Google I/O 2014¹. We talked a lot about how these devices require scrutiny to preserve user attention while exposing some unique new surface areas for developers. We also discussed user context and how the apps we make should be opportunistic, presenting themselves in contexts where they're useful; it's more important than ever to think of apps on wearable devices not as icons on a grid but rather as functional overlays on the operating system itself.

But while I'd designed a number of touch UIs for Android in the past and Timothy had a ton of experience with Glass, neither of us had really gone through the exercise of actually designing an app for Android Wear. So we set out to put our ideas in practice and see what designing for this new platform is like.

Before we got started, we needed an idea. Last year, I participated in an informal Glass design sprint in NYC run by Nadya Direkova, and my sprint team came up with a walking tour app. The idea was you'd choose from a set of nearby tours, walk between the stops, and at each stop on the tour, learn about the destination.

My rough mocks of a walking tour app from a Glass design sprint.

While the design sprint ended at rough mocks, the idea stuck around in my mind, and came up again during this exercise. It seemed like a perfect example of a contextually aware app that could enhance your Android Wear experience.

Designing a walking tour app for Android Wear

We started fleshing out the idea by thinking through the app's entry points: how will users "launch" this app? While exposing a "start XYZ walking tours app" voice command is pretty standard, it'd be interesting to also suggest nearby walking tours as you go about your day by presenting notifications in the user's context stream. These notifications would be "low priority," so you'd only see them after addressing the more important stuff like text messages from friends. And with today's geofencing and location functionality in Google Play services, this type of contextual awareness is possible in a battery-friendly way.

At this point we were pretty excited and decided to begin mocking up the UI. Rather than starting from scratch, we used Taylor Ling's excellent Android Wear 0.1 design template as a baseline, which includes templates for both square and round devices. We started with square since we were most familiar with rectangle UI design:

Idea: You get a notification in the context stream when a walking tour is available nearby.

I've got to admit, it was pretty thrilling designing in such a constrained environment. 140x140 dp (280x280 px @ XHDPI) isn't a lot of space to work with, so you need to make some tough choices about when and how to present information. But these are exactly the types of problems that make design really, really fun. You end up spending more time thinking and less time actually pushing pixels around in Photoshop or Sketch.

We pretty quickly fleshed out the rest of the app for square devices. They included just a handful of additional screens: a dynamic notification showing the distance to your next stop, and a 4-page detail screen when you arrive at the tour stop, where you can spend a few moments reading about where you're standing.

A notification guiding you to your next stop, and a multi-page stop detail screen for learning about the stop when you get there.

Seeing our design in real life

Here's the thing-there's only so much you can do in Photoshop. To truly understand a platform as a designer, you really need to use (and ideally live with) a real device, and see your work on that device. Only then can you fully evaluate the complexity of your flows, the size of your touch targets, or the legibility of your text.

Luckily, Timothy and I both had test devices-I sported an LG G Watch prototype and Timothy carried a Moto 360 prototype. We then needed a way to quickly send screens to our devices so we could iterate on the design. A few years ago I'd published the Android Design Preview tool that lets you mirror a part of your screen to a connected Android device. Much to our delight, the tool worked great with Android Wear! After seeing our mocks show up on my LG G Watch, we made a few small tweaks and felt much more confident that the overall idea "felt right" on the wrist.

Android Design Preview mirrors a part of your computer screen to an Android device. It's especially awesome seeing your UI running on an LG G Watch prototype.

Designing for round devices

We'd never designed round UIs before, so we weren't sure what this new adventure would be like. Quite frankly, it ended up being unbelievably easy: tweaking all 8 of our screen mocks for round took under an hour. When you're only showing the most important 2 or 3 pieces of information on screen at a time, that's only 2 or 3 pieces of information you need to optimize for round devices. All in all, there were only a few types of minor tweaks we made:

• Scaled up backgrounds to 160x160 dp (320x320 px @ XHDPI)
• Bumped up content margins from 12dp on square to 26dp on round; this means content was 116x116 dp on square and only a little smaller at 108x108 dp on round
• Pushed down circular actions like "Continue tour" to better vertically center with the watch frame
• Center-aligned certain short snippets of text on round devices as opposed to left-aligning on square
• Dropped the side padding for context stream cards (the platform automatically does this for notifications, so there isn't any actual work to do here)

These weren't completely different layouts-rather, the same layout with slightly tweaked metrics.

It's hard to articulate the excitement we felt when we mirrored the mocks to Timothy's Moto 360 prototype with Android Design Preview. To put it lightly, our minds were blown.

There's something special and awe-inspiring about seeing one of your UIs running on a round screen..

And that was it-with round and square mocks complete, and mirrored on our devices, we'd gotten our first glimpse at designing apps for this exciting new platform. Below are our completed mocks for the tour discovery and engagement flows, not a grid of app icons in sight. You can download the full PSDs here.

An eye-opening experience

Designing for Android Wear is pretty different from designing for the desktop, phones or tablets. Just like with Glass, you really need to think carefully about the information and actions you present to the user, and even more so about the contexts in which your app will come to the surface.

As a designer, that's the fun part-working with constraints involving scarce resources like device size and user attention means it's more important than ever to think deeply about your ideas and iterate on them early and often. The actual pixel-pushing part of the process is far, far easier.

So there we were, putting our ideas into practice, on real actual device prototypes that we could've only dreamed about only a few years ago. It was the most fun I've had designing UIs in a long time. Remember that feeling when you first dreamed up an app, mocked or even coded it up, and ran it on your Android phone? It was that same feeling all over again, but amplified, because you were actually wearing your app. I can't wait for you all to experience it!

¹ Have we mentioned #io14 will have tons of great content around both design and wearable computing? Make sure to tune in June 25th and 26th!

03 Jun 2014 7:30pm GMT

By Ben Frenkel, Google Play Games team

Hey game developers, back in March you may remember we added new game statistics in the Google Play Developer Console for those of you who had implemented Google Play Games: our cross-platform game services for Android, iOS and the web.

Starting today, we're providing more insights into how your games are being used by adding country, age, and gender dimensions to the existing set of reports available in the Developer console. You'll see demographics integrated into Overview stats as well as the Players reports for New and Active users.

With a better understanding of your users' demographic composition, you'll be able to make more effective decisions to improve retention and monetization. Here a few ways you could imagine using these new stats:

• You just launched your new game globally, and expected it do particularly well in Germany. Using country demographic data, you see that Germany is much less active than expected. After some digging, you realize that your tutorial was not properly translated to German. Based on this insight, you immediately roll out a fix to see if you can improve active users in Germany.

• After Looking at your new demographics report you realize that your game is really popular with women in their mid-20s. Your in-app purchase data corroborates this, showing that the one female hero character is the most popular purchase. Empowered by this data, you race to add female hero characters to your game.

Additionally, if you're already using Google Play game services, there's no extra integration needed! By logging in to the Google Play Developer Console you can start using demographics to better inform your decisions today.

02 Jun 2014 5:15pm GMT