fidzu : Android

When Sonos made an announcement the other day that they were stopping updates on legacy products, it was already expected that owners of said products would not react kindly to it. Now CEO Patrick Spence had to issue a statement, apologizing to their customers for the misstep with their initial announcement and reassuring that their […]

24 Jan 2020 9:29am GMT

Progressive Web Apps are pretty useful for those who do not have the space anymore on their smartphones to install apps. It will still not give you the full app experience, but at least it's still better than the browser version. The latest Google service to be available as a PWA is Google Drive, following […]

24 Jan 2020 6:30am GMT

Microsoft's Windows team has just shared its plans for dual-screen devices. Not that Microsoft has plenty of dual-screen products to offer but it started working on this new device category by exploring standards proposals and preview SDKs. Doing so will hopefully optimize present and upcoming dual-screen devices in the market. The initial move is to […]

24 Jan 2020 5:00am GMT

The upcoming new foldable display from Samsung, reportedly called Galaxy Z Flip, may be launching soon and because of its form factor, there are rumors that the Korean OEM will be adding a new feature to it after launch: a native video chat service supported by the Android system. In fact, talks between Samsung, Google, […]

24 Jan 2020 3:46am GMT

Tetris has been a favorite game since childhood. There are several iterations of the classic game but our favorite is Tetris Blitz from EA. Tetris Blitz first made its way to Android devices in 2016 and has seen been very popular among gamers who want something fun and easy to pass time with. Unfortunately, some […]

23 Jan 2020 6:00pm GMT

LG isn't giving up in the mobile business but it definitely needs to get smarter when it comes to marketing strategies. The company is determined to turn profits before 2021 year-end so it needs to do everything in its power. The competition in the mobile industry is very tough but it can be done. LG […]

23 Jan 2020 4:00pm GMT

Motorola announced the RAZR, and then just sort of stepped back in the shadows and left us all wondering exactly where the phone was going. We haven't heard much else about it, and they were notably absent at CES, which would've been a perfect time to head off whatever new folding phone Samsung is slated […]

Come comment on this article: Moto RAZR pre-orders go live on January 26th, hopes to beat Samsung to the gate

23 Jan 2020 3:36pm GMT

Google has made an announcement about the software support of Chromebooks going forward. It's not a bad thing, either, with the company promising that newer devices should get around 8 years of Chrome OS updates. There are some catches to that, of course, but all in all, this seems like good news. Let's talk about […]

Come comment on this article: Chromebooks launched in 2020 will get a much improved eight years of Chrome OS updates

23 Jan 2020 3:26pm GMT

Qualcomm has announced several new processors, although these aren't the big 5G chips that get a ton of fanfare. But those non-flagship processors are probably some of the most important parts of Qualcomm's portfolio, considering how much of the market is made up of more budget-friendly phones, not the $1000 options. Qualcomm upgrades There are […]

Come comment on this article: Qualcomm hasn't forgotten about 4G phones, announces three non-5G processors for 2020

23 Jan 2020 3:11pm GMT

Could the "cloud" go even higher? We're not talking about the floating mass of condensed water vapor but the network of servers available on the Internet. Cloud services have been available for almost a decade now but they are not fully taken advantage of. Cloud is mainly for storage but it now allows other functions […]

23 Jan 2020 2:30pm GMT

Here we are again, featuring the latest Huawei P40 information. That is expected since the top Chinese mobile OEM's next-gen premium flagship smartphone series is about to be unveiled. No, it won't be announced alongside the Samsung Galaxy S20 or during the Mobile World Congress (MWC 2020) but sometime in March. By then, Huawei is […]

23 Jan 2020 1:00pm GMT

The Microsoft Project xCloud first came into our senses way back in October 2018. It was made for everyone in mind as cloud gaming was beginning to thrive. The developers were able to do a demo streaming with Forza Horizon 4 after a few months. We were told the game streaming service was almost ready […]

23 Jan 2020 11:49am GMT

Back in October, we told you that Android 10 OS updates are coming to LG smartphones. LG G8's Android 10 arrived before year-end and it's also now available for Verizon. The LG G7 One also started receiving the same OS update. The LG V50 ThinQ in South Korea got it as well earlier this month. […]

23 Jan 2020 10:00am GMT

Even when you use Google Search a lot for your daily work-related and personal needs, you can sometimes still forget about things you previously searched for but may actually need in the future. Google is now bringing some improvements to mobile search and is using artificial intelligence to suggest new Collections that you can create […]

23 Jan 2020 8:00am GMT

The new generation of Motorola RAZR is here-well, almost. The folding phone was made official by the Lenovo-owned company back in November. It arrived as an old icon going more modern like a smartphone that "folds". We have raved about how Motorola may have solved the foldable screen crease problem. We've only been waiting for […]

23 Jan 2020 6:26am GMT

Digital Wellbeing is probably the most useful tool that you can use if you want to balance your smartphone usage with your "real life". It already has several features that you can use but it doesn't hurt to always have more. Some of the Experiments by Google features Digital Wellbeing apps and now there are […]

23 Jan 2020 3:00am GMT

As much as you'd want to have all your devices get continuous updates, all good things must eventually come to an end, at least in the world of technology. Sonos announced that some of their legacy products, or rather their "oldest products", will stop receiving software updates later this year. While you can still use […]

23 Jan 2020 1:30am GMT

Verizon now has a new partnership with Google for their gaming-crazy users. New subscribers to the Verizon Fios Gigabit Internet service will also have the Stadia Premium Edition for free. This comes with a bundle including three months of access to Stadia Pro, a wireless gaming controller, and a Google Chromecast Ultra so you can […]

23 Jan 2020 12:12am GMT

If you want your (legal) fill of Baby Yoda and its hot, helmeted babysitter, you will have to wait a couple more months if you live in Western Europe. Disney has announced that their streaming service Disney+ will launch in markets in that part of the world by March 24. This is actually earlier than […]

22 Jan 2020 8:33pm GMT

Huawei lost access to Google Play Services with the US trade ban that was instituted last year, and that has some consequences that you probably don't think about at first. Obviously missing the Play Store is the biggest problem, but it also affects other functions of a smartphone. Gmail support is worse without the native […]

Come comment on this article: Huawei inks a crucial deal with TomTom for navigation to replace Google Maps

22 Jan 2020 3:22pm GMT

Looking for the easiest way to cancel Spotify Premium? It's not tough, but we'll walk you through the process to save you some time. If you're looking for alternatives to Spotify so you can use something else to listen to music, we'll cover you there, too. Keep reading to find out how. Cancel Spotify Premium […]

Come comment on this article: How to quickly and easily cancel Spotify Premium [2020]

21 Jan 2020 10:43pm GMT

After wowing us back in 2018 with the Poco F1 that boasted flagship specifications such as the Snapdragon 845 processor, 6GB/8GB of RAM, and upwards of 64GB of built-in storage with a starting price of just $300/$329, Xiaomi's budget brand was eerily silent during 2019. Now spun off from Xiaomi as its own brand, it […]

Come comment on this article: Poco Season 2 is incoming - could be rebadged Redmi K30 variant

21 Jan 2020 5:57pm GMT

Chrome has quite a few new features in the oven for 2020, and the newest one will make it easier than ever to quickly copy an image from the internet. That's not the biggest change in the world, but it will make it easier to share photos or paste them into other apps without clogging […]

Come comment on this article: Google Chrome's next new feature will copy images right to Android's clipboard

21 Jan 2020 5:25pm GMT

Opera, the company behind Opera Browser, apparently has a few other things in their portfolio besides middling browsers. According to a new report, there are several predatory loan apps available on the Play Store, and many of them are linked to Opera or Opera executives in some way. That's exactly what you want from your […]

Come comment on this article: Opera not only makes mediocre browsers, but apparently predatory loan apps, too

21 Jan 2020 5:14pm GMT

Samsung has announced that they'll be rolling with a new mobile chief for 2020, promoting Roh Tae-moon to the position at just 51 years old. He'll be the youngest mobile chief ever for Samsung, and hopes to keep Samsung competitive against a ton of fierce competition. Samsung executive shake-up This move comes at a very […]

Come comment on this article: Samsung tweaks executive lineup, appoints new mobile chief to fend off fierce competition in 2020

21 Jan 2020 4:39pm GMT

Aukey is here with a slew of discounted accessories to take care of your audio, video, charging, and lighting needs, and there's even an LED mouse included in the mix. There are savings ranging from 20-50% to be enjoyed on these latest deals, so join us after the break for more details. The deals are […]

Come comment on this article: [Deal] Save up to 50% on these discounted accessories from Aukey

21 Jan 2020 4:20pm GMT

After showing a roadmap of when it would begin rolling out beta versions of its Android 10-based EMUI 10 to a range of handsets, Huawei has begun rolling out stable builds of the new software to its P30 and Mate 20 series of smartphones. Those with global versions of the P30 and Mate 20 series […]

Come comment on this article: Stable EMUI 10 is now rolling out to Huawei's P30 and Mate 30 series via OTA

20 Jan 2020 7:41pm GMT

It doesn't matter if you are traveling by air, taking a road trip, chilling at home or camping in the wilderness, Anker is back with a range of discounted power banks and chargers to suit every occasion. There are savings ranging of up to $45 to be had, and all you need to do is […]

Come comment on this article: [Deal] Supercharge your week with these discounted charging accessories from Anker

20 Jan 2020 6:24pm GMT

A new GeekBench benchmark for the Pixel 4 has popped up in the wild, and it's bound to start some conversations about what's coming next from Google. The benchmark itself isn't very exciting, honestly, but it does show a Pixel 4 running Android R. Ready to dive in? Android R or Android 11? That software […]

Come comment on this article: Android R spotted on a Pixel 4 benchmark; time to start the rumor mill?

20 Jan 2020 6:05pm GMT

OnePlus has a new phone slated for release in the next few months, which means it's time to rev up the hype machine. One of the biggest features on the OnePlus 8 will be its high refresh rate display, and that's where OnePlus CEO Pete Lau is going to focus first. OnePlus 8 hype Lau […]

Come comment on this article: OnePlus starts to tease the 120Hz display on the OnePlus 8

20 Jan 2020 5:43pm GMT

Microsoft has worked hard to bring its own web browser back to compete with the big boys, but Microsoft Edge just hasn't taken off like they had hoped - but now, Microsoft is launching a Chromium version of its web browser, essentially handing the reigns over to Google. As you might expect, Edge now has […]

Come comment on this article: Microsoft's Chromium Edge now available to download

20 Jan 2020 2:44pm GMT

Posted by Patricia Correa, Director, Developer Marketing

The indie developer community released several fantastic titles on Google Play during 2019, showing the technical skill and innovative design that makes them an essential part of the gaming landscape.

To continue helping indie developers thrive, today we're announcing the 2020 edition of our annual Google Play Indie Games Festival. This year we will host three competitions for developers from several European countries*, Japan, and South Korea.

Prizes:

Prizes are designed to help you grow your business, including:

• The chance to exhibit at the final events in Warsaw, Tokyo or Seoul
• Promotions on the Google Play Store
• Promotions on our consumer and developer-facing channels
• Access to exclusive developer-focused Google events
• Personalized consultation sessions with Google team members
• And more!

Eligibility:

The contests are open to developers from selected countries, with no more than 50 employees. The submitted game must be new, released at least in open beta between May 7, 2019 and March 2, 2020. See other requirements in the terms and conditions for each of the contests.

Process:

Simply fill out the relevant form by clicking here. Submissions are open until March 2, 2020, at 3pm CET.

The Top 20 entries in each region will be announced in March and invited to showcase at the Festival events where the field will be narrowed to 10 by the event audience, industry experts and the Google team. The Top 10 will present their games on stage and the 3 winners will be selected.

Not submitting a game? Come and take part:

Even if you're not submitting a game to the competitions, we'd love to see you at one of the Festival events on the 25th of April 2020.

Learn more and sign up on g.co/play/indiefestival

* The European competition is open to developers from the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland).

How useful did you find this blog post?

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

09 Jan 2020 8:00am GMT

Posted by Florina Muntenescu, Developer Advocate (@FMuntenescu)

At Google I/O 2019 we announced that Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first. Together with JetBrains, we also launched Kotlin/Everywhere - a global series of community led events focusing on the potential of using Kotlin everywhere; on Android, servers, web front-end and other platforms.

Kotlin/Everywhere events took place from May through December and we want to thank everyone for getting involved

👨‍💻👩‍💻30,000+ developers participated in-person at Kotlin/Everywhere events

🎥🍿200,000 views of live-streams and event recordings like Kotlin/Everywhere Bengaluru, Minsk, Chicago, Buenos Aires and more.

📅 500+ events: from short evening meetups, half-day sessions, and full day events, to Kotlin/Everywhere tracks at larger events like DevFests, or even StudyJams that spanned several weeks.

🎤~30 speakers from Google and JetBrains gave ~70 talks at events around the world.

🌎 85+ countries/regions: from United States to Chile, Kenya, Greece, Taiwan, New Zealand

💻 Many of the resources used or created for Kotlin/Everywhere by Google and JetBrains are available online:

General Kotlin:

• Intro to Kotlin: Kotlin Koans
• Refactoring to Kotlin: codelab in English, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese
• Kotlin for Java developers (Coursera course available in the free "Audit" mode)
• Kotlin Bootcamp for Programmers (free Udacity course)
• Coroutines hands-on tutorial

Kotlin in Android:

• Kotlin Android fundamentals codelabs
• Developing Android Apps with Kotlin (free Udacity course)
• Using Kotlin Coroutines in your Android app
• Advanced Coroutines with Kotlin Flow and LiveData

Kotlin in Google Cloud Platform:

• Build a Kotlin Spring Application with Google Cloud Platform
• Extend an Android frontend with a Kotlin backend running on App Engine
• Run a Kotlin Spring Boot app on App Engine standard environment
• Run a Kotlin Spring Boot application on Google Kubernetes Engine
• Run a Spring Boot application on Google Compute Engine

Multi-platform Kotlin:

• Intro to Kotlin Native
• Kotlin Multi-platform with Kotlin/JVM and Kotlin/JS

We're grateful for this engagement with Kotlin from communities around the world, as well as for all the organisers, speakers and attendees who made these events possible! To participate in more Kotlin events, check out JetBrains' KotlinConf'19 Global initiative, happening through March 2020.

With all of the resources available, there's never been a better time to adopt Kotlin… Everywhere!

18 Dec 2019 5:08pm GMT

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 on building incredible experiences. You can see modern Android development come to life in a number of investments we made this year:

• We previewed Jetpack Compose, a modern declarative UI toolkit built for the next 10 years. Inspired by Kotlin, Compose makes it easy to build beautiful, native apps with code that is more intuitive and concise. Check out the Compose tutorial to learn more.
• This year, Android Jetpack saw many stable library releases from background scheduling with WorkManager, in-app navigation with Navigation to app performance measurement with Benchmark . In 2019 , we also gave you early versions of more building blocks for your production apps with Jetpack CameraX library, BiometricPrompt and encryption & security. Check them all out here.
• For everyone who wants to get started with Kotlin there are a range of courses available on Udacity. We've added the Advanced Android course with Kotlin to help every developer grow their skills and get the most from Kotlin. For those who are already experts, we're launching a new Android Developer Certification in Kotlin, which is available at a discount until early 2020.
• We recently released the first canary version of Android Studio 4.0 with powerful, integrated tooling support for Compose. It also has a new Motion Editor, Java 8 Language library desugaring, full support for KTS files, Kotlin live templates, and more.

Android 10

Android 10, released earlier this year, 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.

Modern app and game distribution

We introduced Android App Bundles last year as a mechanism to simplify and streamline app distribution, overcome the constraints of APK publishing, and introduce advanced distribution features such as dynamic delivery. There are now over 300K app bundle apps and games in production, covering nearly 30% of all active installs. If this doesn't include your app or game, check out 16 reasons to publish your apps and games with the Android App Bundle.

This year we've made it much easier to test and implement app bundles and dynamic delivery. Internal app sharing makes it easy to share test builds with others. You can easily grant anyone on your team the ability to upload a test build to Play and get a download link to share with your testers. With internal app sharing, you can be sure that each device is receiving exactly what Play would deliver in the wild. You don't need to use version codes or the prod signing key, and can even upload debuggable artifacts.You can also get download links for old versions of your app from the Play Console, whether they're app bundles or APKs.

Protecting the ecosystem

In 2019, you helped us make Google Play even safer, building user trust in your apps and Google Play as a whole. Thanks to your hard work, we have:

• Made Google Play safer for children and families by helping ensure apps and games for children have appropriate content, show suitable ads, and handle personally identifiable information correctly.
• Reduced access to sensitive data by restricting SMS and call log permissions to apps whose core functionality needs them, resulting in 98% fewer apps accessing this sensitive data.

To help you protect your apps, we've improved our ability to detect impersonators, repackaging, bad content, and other forms of abuse. Additionally, we're investing in resources like policy-focused Play Academy courses to help you better understand and navigate our policy changes.

Because the threats are always changing, it'll take all of us working together to keep users safe and our platform secure. Thank you for continuing to work with us on this.

Building better app businesses

During 2019 we continued to look for new ways to help you market and monetize your apps and games:

• Google Play got a visual refresh which improves app discovery and accessibility for the wide diversity of store visitors.
• App tags improve discoverability, enabling you to describe the content and functionality of your game with up to five tags.
• Your app's rating is now weighted towards your most recent ratings, instead of a lifetime cumulative average, so that it better reflects your app's current state.
• Improved and more granular benchmarks in the Google Play Console's User Acquisition-, Ratings-, and Android Vitals-reports; and new benchmarks for core statistics against 200 curated peer-sets; with period-on-period growth rates, including user and device acquisitions, churn, actives, and more.
• If you're using subscriptions, the pause subscription report offers you new insights including the length users paused for and whether they returned or churned at the end of their pause period.
• We expanded our buyer support so you can now sell apps and games to people in Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Iraq, and Turks and Caicos. We also welcomed many new developers to the Google Play Store's family with Seller Support, with more than 35 additional countries launched this year. Find out more.

And that's a wrap

With such scale comes responsibility. We're committed to ensuring our users' safety for the future, to making development easier and distribution faster, and to offering you more effective ways for your app to be discovered and monetized.

On this note, we hope we can all continue working together to make Android and Google Play better for billions of people around the world, in 2020, and the years to come. From everyone on our team, we wish you all a happy holiday season and a prosperous new year.

How useful did you find this blog post?

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

17 Dec 2019 8:00pm GMT

Posted by Jeff Bailey, AOSP Engineering Manager; Ally Sillins, AOSP Program Manager; Kris Hildrum, Open Source Code Search Tech Lead; Jay Sachs, Kythe Tech Lead/Manager

Searching for "it's all about the code" open source on Google returns more than a million hits. Today we're introducing a public code search tool for the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).
Link: https://cs.android.com
The Android repository is made up of a collection of git repositories which are managed together using our 'repo' tool. Because of this, most tools (such as github, gitweb, etc) can't see the source code the way that it's laid out when it's checked out on the system. In partnership with our colleagues who run Google's internal Code Search and Kythe, we're pleased to present a code search tool that presents a view of all of the Android source code as you actually use it.
Here are some features you can take advantage of starting today:

• View the source code
• Navigate cross-references across the entire code base that allow you to click through one part of the source code to another
• Switch between Android's open source branches (not all branches will have cross-reference information)
• View tool documentation on https://source.android.com/setup/contribute/code-search

This is the beginning of our journey, and while today not all parts of the Android code base are cross-referenced, you can expect to see this grow over time.
We hope this makes it easier to engage with the Android code base!

10 Dec 2019 10:00pm GMT

Posted by Paul Lammertsma, Developer Advocate

Technology has changed the way media and entertainment is accessed and consumed in the home. While the living room experience is evolving with the addition of smart devices, TVs still remain the largest and most frequently used screen for watching content.

When Android TV was first introduced in 2014, we set out to bring the best of Android into the connected home on the TV. We worked closely with the developer community to grow our content and app ecosystem and bring users the content they want. Since then, we've seen tremendous momentum with OEM and operator partners as well as consumer adoption worldwide.

Today, we are bringing Android API level 29 with the recent performance and security updates made with Android 10 to Android TV. We're excited to provide faster updates through Project Treble and more secure storage with encrypted user data. TLS 1.3 by default also brings better performance benefits and is up to date with the TLS standard. In addition, Android 10 includes hardening for several security-critical areas of the platform.

ADT-3

To make sure developers have the ability to build and test Android TV app implementations on Android 10 prior to rollout, we're introducing a new, developer-focused streaming media device called ADT-3.

With a quad-core A53, 2GB of DDR3 memory and 4Kp60 HDR HDMI 2.1 output, we've designed this pre-certified TV dongle with updates and security patches to help developers design for the next generation of Android TV devices. By providing a way to test on physical and up to date hardware, developers can better validate their Android TV app's compatibility.

ADT-3 will be made available to developers in the coming months for purchase online through an OEM partner.

10 Dec 2019 5:00pm GMT

Posted by David Winer, Kotlin Product Manager

When we announced Kotlin as a supported language for Android, there was a tremendous amount of excitement among developers. Since then, there has been a steady increase in the number of developers using Kotlin. Today, we're proud to say nearly 60% of the top 1,000 Android apps contain Kotlin code, with more and more Android developers introducing safer and more concise code using Kotlin.

During this year's I/O, we announced that Android development will be Kotlin-first, and we've stood by that commitment. This is one of the reasons why Android is the gold partner for this year's KotlinConf.

Seamless Kotlin on Android

In 2019, we focused on making programming in Kotlin on Android a seamless experience, with modern Kotlin-first APIs across the Android platform. Earlier this year, we launched a developer preview of Jetpack Compose, a modern UI toolkit for Android built using a Kotlin domain-specific language (DSL). We also incorporated coroutines into several of the flagship Jetpack libraries, including Room and Lifecycle. Finally, we brought Kotlin extensions (KTX) to even more major Google libraries, including Firebase and Play Core.

On the tooling side, we strengthened our commitment to Kotlin in Android Studio and the Android build pipeline. Significant updates to R8 (the code shrinker for Android) brought the ability to detect and handle Kotlin-specific bytecode patterns. Support was added for .kts Gradle build scripts in Android Studio, along with improved Kotlin support in Dagger. We worked closely with the JetBrains team to optimize support for the Kotlin plugin, and make the Kotlin editing experience in Android Studio fluid and fast.

Better Kotlin learning

This year we've also invested in quality Kotlin on Android learning content.

We released two free video learning courses in partnership with Udacity: Developing Android Apps in Kotlin and Advanced Android in Kotlin. This content was also released as the Codelab courses Android Kotlin Fundamentals and Advanced Android in Kotlin, for those who prefer text-based learning. The popular Kotlin Bootcamp for Programmers Udacity course was also published as a Codelabs course, helping provide a Kotlin foundation for non-Kotlin developers. Kotlin-based instructional Codelabs were also created for topics including Material Design, Kotlin coroutines, location, refactoring to Kotlin, billing in Kotlin, and Google Pay in Kotlin. It hasn't been just about new content: we've updated Kotlin Codelab favorites to take advantage of important features such as coroutines.

Looking ahead

In 2020, Android development will continue to be Kotlin-first. We've been listening to your feedback, and will continue partnering with JetBrains to improve your experience with Kotlin.

This includes working with JetBrains to improve the Kotlin compiler over the next year. Our teams are making the compiler more extensible with a new backend, and making your builds faster with a significantly faster frontend. We're also working with many of the largest annotation processors to make compilation faster for Kotlin code. You can also expect more Kotlin-first updates to Android, including more Jetpack libraries that make use of Kotlin features such as coroutines.

Thank you for letting us be part of your app development journey this year. We look forward to continuing the journey with you in 2020.

06 Dec 2019 7:00pm GMT

Posted by Dan Galpin, Developer Advocate

With over 2.5 billion monthly active devices, the Android Platform gives incredible reach for game developers. Taking advantage of that opportunity can be a challenge, particularly if your game really tries to push the limits of what mobile can do. We've spent years working with game developers to try to both capture and address the biggest issues, and we're just beginning to see the fruits of that effort with the launch of the Android Game SDK. The Android Game SDK is a set of libraries that you can use to enhance your Android game.

The first library we are launching in the Android Game SDK helps developers with frame pacing, the synchronization of a game's rendering loop with the OS display subsystem and underlying display hardware. Android's display subsystem is designed to avoid tearing that occurs when the display hardware switches to a new frame in the middle of an update. To this end, it buffers past frames, detects late frame submissions, and repeats the display of past frames when late frames are detected. When a game render loop renders at a different rate than the native display hardware, such as a game running at 30 frames-per-second attempting to render on a device that natively supports 60 FPS, the optimal display flow involves synchronization between the game render loop, the system compositor, and the display hardware.

Optimal Display Flow

Any mismatch in synchronization can create substantial inconsistencies in frame times. If a frame takes substantially less time to render, it can shorten the presentation of the previous frame, causing something like a 33ms, 16ms, and a 50ms sequence.

Synchronization Mismatch: Rendering too Fast

If a frame takes too long to render, a similar problem occurs. The frame will be presented for an extra frame, causing something like a 50ms, 16ms, and 33ms sequence.

Synchronization Mismatch: Slow Frame

In either of these two scenarios, the game player will experience inconsistent delays between game input and screen updates. Visually, things will look less smooth and polished. Both visuals and game play can be impacted.

The Frame Pacing library uses Android's Choreographer API for synchronization with the display subsystem, using presentation timestamp extensions on both OpenGL and Vulkan APIs to make sure frames are presented at the proper time, and sync fences to avoid buffer stuffing. Multiple refresh rates are handled if supported by the device, giving a game more flexibility in presenting a frame. For a device that supports a 60 Hz refresh rate as well as 90 Hz, a game that cannot produce 60 frames per second can drop to 45 FPS instead of 30 FPS to remain smooth. The library detects the expected game frame rate and auto-adjusts frame presentation times accordingly. The Frame Pacing library allows games to take advantage of higher refresh rate 90 and 120 Hz displays, while also making it easy to lock the refresh rate to a desired value, regardless of the underlying display refresh rate.

The Frame Pacing library is built into Unity versions 2019.2 and beyond. Just select the optimized Frame Pacing checkbox under Android Settings to enable smoother frame rates for your game. If you have source to your game engine, it's straightforward to integrate the library into your OpenGL or Vulkan renderer. We've just added library binaries for download at developer.android.com/games/sdk/, or you can download the source code from the Android Open Source Project.

To learn more about Frame Pacing, check out the documentation at developer.android.com, along with the Frame Pacing section of the Optimizing Android Games Performance talk from Google I/O 2019. Be sure to subscribe to our Twitter channel and stay tuned for our announcements at GDC 2020 for more on how we're working to make Android game development better, so you can bring the best game experience to billions of devices.

05 Dec 2019 8:45pm GMT

Today is the last day to apply for the Android Developer Challenge! And to spark your imagination, we wanted to take a look at one of the original Android Developer Challenge winners, from over 10 years ago. Meet Maurizio Leo:

Maurizio and team have been working on Android for a while now. In fact, he was one of the winners of the original Android Developer Challenge, which launched with the start of Android over ten years ago. Their app, which won 3rd place worldwide at the time, has gone on to be downloaded over 30 million times!

If you've got a great idea that can help users get things done, we want to hear! We'll pick 10 concepts and provide expertise and guidance to those developers to help in their plans to bring their ideas to fruition, in part from this amazing set of experts we've assembled. And once the app is ready, we'll help showcase it in front of the billions of users on Google Play, through a collection and more. You can read more about all of the prizes here.

There's still time to submit your idea before the deadline today! Submitting your idea is as simple as creating a repository on GitHub, telling us what you'd build and how we can help (we've included all of the materials here), and then officially submitting your repository here. Ideas can be in a concept phase to something that's already complete; we can't wait to hear what you come up with, and to work with you on bringing helpful innovation powered by machine learning to more and more users!

02 Dec 2019 10:39pm GMT

Posted by Bram Bonné, Senior Software Engineer, Android Platform Security & Chad Brubaker, Staff Software Engineer, Android Platform Security

Android is committed to keeping users, their devices, and their data safe. One of the ways that we keep data safe is by protecting network traffic that enters or leaves an Android device with Transport Layer Security (TLS).

Android 7 (API level 24) introduced the Network Security Configuration in 2016, allowing app developers to configure the network security policy for their app through a declarative configuration file. To ensure apps are safe, apps targeting Android 9 (API level 28) or higher automatically have a policy set by default that prevents unencrypted traffic for every domain.

Today, we're happy to announce that 80% of Android apps are encrypting traffic by default. The percentage is even greater for apps targeting Android 9 and higher, with 90% of them encrypting traffic by default.

Percentage of apps that block cleartext by default.

Since November 1 2019, all apps on Google Play (updates as well as all new apps) must target at least Android 9. As a result, we expect these numbers to continue improving. Network traffic from these apps is secure by default and any use of unencrypted connections is the result of an explicit choice by the developer.

The latest releases of Android Studio and Google Play's pre-launch report warn developers when their app includes a potentially insecure Network Security Configuration (for example, when they allow unencrypted traffic for all domains or when they accept user provided certificates outside of debug mode). This encourages the adoption of HTTPS across the Android ecosystem and ensures that developers are aware of their security configuration.

Example of a warning shown to developers in Android Studio.

Example of a warning shown to developers as part of the pre-launch report.

What can I do to secure my app?

For apps targeting Android 9 and higher, the out-of-the-box default is to encrypt all network traffic in transit and trust only certificates issued by an authority in the standard Android CA set without requiring any extra configuration. Apps can provide an exception to this only by including a separate Network Security Config file with carefully selected exceptions.

If your app needs to allow traffic to certain domains, it can do so by including a Network Security Config file that only includes these exceptions to the default secure policy. Keep in mind that you should be cautious about the data received over insecure connections as it could have been tampered with in transit.

<network-security-config>
    <base-config cleartextTrafficPermitted="false" />
    <domain-config cleartextTrafficPermitted="true">
        <domain includeSubdomains="true">insecure.example.com</domain>
        <domain includeSubdomains="true">insecure.cdn.example.com</domain>
    </domain-config>
</network-security-config>

If your app needs to be able to accept user specified certificates for testing purposes (for example, connecting to a local server during testing), make sure to wrap your <trust-anchors> element inside a <debug-overrides> element. This ensures the connections in the production version of your app are secure.

<network-security-config>
    <debug-overrides>
        <trust-anchors>
            <certificates src="user"/>
        </trust-anchors>
    </debug-overrides>
</network-security-config>

What can I do to secure my library?

If your library directly creates secure/insecure connections, make sure that it honors the app's cleartext settings by checking isCleartextTrafficPermitted before opening any cleartext connection.

Android's built-in networking libraries and other popular HTTP libraries such as OkHttp or Volley have built-in Network Security Config support.

Acknowledgements

Giles Hogben, Nwokedi Idika, Android Platform Security, Android Studio and Pre-Launch Report teams

02 Dec 2019 10:28pm GMT

Posted by Jisha Abubaker, Product Manager

Last month's #AndroidDevSummit was jam-packed with announcements and technical news...so much that we wouldn't be surprised if you missed something. So all this month, we'll be diving into key areas from throughout the summit so you don't miss anything. We previously spotlighted Jetpack Compose, Kotlin and Android Studio, and today, we're highlighting the rest of Android Jetpack, with the top three things you should know:

#1: A number of new & updated Jetpack libraries ready to use:

WorkManager 2.2 (Stable) has landed significant updates in the last releases with features like on-demand initialization improving app startup time when using WorkManager and improved testing support. Hear more of the new features and best practices.

Room 2.2 (Stable) is packed with features you asked for too : pre-packaged databases, improved relationship support and now better support for Kotlin Flow as well. Check out the What's new in Room session to catch up.

Benchmarking (Stable) helps you measure the performance of tasks in your app with confidence. Here's a deep dive on how you can exercise the library in fighting performance regressions in CI, like we do ourselves for Jetpack libraries and Compose.

LiveData w/ support for Kotlin coroutines & Flow (RC) : Kotlin coroutines and Flows has been the Android developer community's interest in simplify async patterns in your apps. Learn how best to take advantage of the liveData builder in your app:

View binding (Beta) is type-safe solution bundled with Android Studio 3.6 Beta with minimal build-time impact, no more findViewById(), no more annotation processors. Check out What's new in Studio for a demo !

#2: We're busy baking more libraries

CameraX (Alpha) simplifies the development experience and lets you focus on your app instead by addressing the differences between the many devices in the Android ecosystem, like Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, Motorola, LG who are already unifying behind CameraX. Expected in Beta soon, learn what the Camera team has been up to since I/O 2019.

Security (Alpha) helps you simplify data at rest encryption for your app needs. Hear of best practices with encryption on Android from the Security library team.

#3:It's time to migrate to androidx!

With all the new and updated Jetpack libraries and upcoming release of Jetpack Compose, it is time to get your app updated and ready. Nick and Tiem share a great step by step plan and best practices from the community in migrating to androidx namespace.

...and we also heard from you!

But Android Dev Summit isn't just about what we've got to say; it's also about you telling us what you'd like to see worked on to make your life easier. And this year, one thing that we heard strongly from our community was the need to provide a simplified Dependency injection developer experience for Jetpack libraries and expand improved Kotlin support to other Jetpack libraries! We're on it!

You can find the entire playlist of Jetpack sessions at the Android Dev Summit sessions and videos here. We'll continue to spotlight other areas later this month, so keep an eye out and follow AndroidDevelopers on Twitter. Thanks so much for letting us be a part of this experience with you!

26 Nov 2019 6:00pm GMT

Just a little over a week left to finish your submission for the Android Developer Challenge, due December 2! Technology is enabling us to create a whole new era of helpful innovation by helping people get things done more quickly and surfacing patterns that would be difficult to detect using traditional methods. Ultimately, this helpful innovation is enabling us to live better, more productive, and safer lives.

Earlier this week, we highlighted the type of helpful innovation ideas powered by machine learning which are the sort of examples we're looking for, to help inspire you. Today, we wanted to share the names of the panel of experts we've assembled to help bring your projects to life as part of the Android Developer Challenge. These experts will be making the final decision on the 10 finalists of the Android Developer Challenge, and if you're selected as one of those finalists, we plan to have you meet them when we bring you to Google HQ for a bootcamp next year:

• Dave Burke is Vice President of Engineering at Google where he leads engineering for the Android platform. Android is the largest mobile platform and ecosystem in the world, with over 2 billion active devices spanning smartphones, tablets, wearables, auto, TV, and IOT. Dave joined Google UK in 2007, becoming an engineering site lead and later moving to California in 2011. Prior to Google, Dave co-founded and was CTO of an internet/telecoms voice startup and helped define related Web and Internet standards.
• Stephanie Cuthbertson is Senior Director of Developer PM, DevRel and UX for Android. She previously worked on Google's Search & Ads businesses, as well as a range of developer tools used by Google employees internally. Prior to Google, she was at AWS where she led the product management team for Storage, including Amazon S3. Before AWS, she spent 10 years working on Visual Studio and developer tools.
• Brahim Elbouchikhi is a Director of Product Management on the Android team. On Android, Brahim is responsible for developer and consumer facing ML and Camera products including CameraX and ML Kit. Prior to Android, Brahim led Daydream's software team. Brahim was also a founding PM of the Google Play store where he led monetization, search, and discovery.
• Yossi Matias is Vice President, Engineering, at Google. He leads efforts in Search (Autocomplete, Live Results, Trends), Conversational AI (Google Duplex, Call Screen, Live Caption, Live Relay, Recorder, Pronunciation), and other Research initiatives. He is the lead of Google's Crisis Response and co-lead of Google's AI for Social Good. Yossi is the founding Head of Google's R&D Center in Israel, and the founding executive lead of Google for Startup Campus Tel Aviv and of Launchpad. In addition to his experience as an executive and entrepreneur, Yossi has a rich record of scientific research, published extensively, and has dozens of patents on his name. Yossi is a recipient of the Godel Prize and is an ACM Fellow.
• Sarah Sirajuddin is an engineering director working on TensorFlow at Google. She leads the teams working on on-device machine learning, TensorFlow Extended, and efforts around training models for the best accuracy and performance with Google's cutting-edge infrastructure, including TensorFlow and tensor processing units (TPUs).

If you've got a great idea that can help users get things done, we want to hear! We'll pick 10 concepts and provide expertise and guidance to those developers to help in their plans to bring their ideas to fruition, in part from this amazing set of experts we've assembled. And once the app is ready, we'll help showcase it in front of the billions of users on Google Play, through a collection and more. You can read more about all of the prizes here.

There's still time to submit your idea before the December 2 deadline. Submitting your idea is as simple as creating a repository on GitHub, telling us what you'd build and how we can help (we've included all of the materials here), and then officially submitting your repository here. Ideas can be in a concept phase to something that's already complete; we can't wait to hear what you come up with, and to work with you on bringing helpful innovation powered by machine learning to more and more users!

22 Nov 2019 3:30pm GMT

Last month, we kicked off the next Android Developer Challenge, and asked you to submit your ideas focused on helpful innovation, powered by on-device machine learning. But what exactly do we mean when we say helpful innovation? We're glad you asked! We rounded up a few of Google's on-device machine learning offerings, together with some great recent examples of this technology in action, to help inspire your submission. Don't forget, submit your idea by December 2!

Using machine learning to tackle Fall Armyworm

Take Nazirini Siraji. When she and a team of developers noticed a crop-pest threatening the livelihood of Ugandan farmers, they taught themselves TensorFlow to combat this pest. They collected training data from nearby fields in the form of images. With TensorFlow, they re-trained a MobileNet, a technique known as transfer learning and then used the TensorFlow Converter to generate a TensorFlow Lite FlatBuffer file which they deployed in an Android app. With the app, a farmer can snap a picture of their crop and the image frame is analysed to look for Fall armyworm damage. Depending on the results from this phase, a suggestion of a possible solution is given. It's pretty cool!

Helping doctors detect respiratory diseases using machine learning

Tambua Health is helping doctors determine the likelihood of respiratory diseases by turning any smartphone into a powerful non-invasive screening tool. They developed an app using TensorFlow Lite that can help doctors analyze lung sounds for the presence of abnormal sounds like wheezes, crackles, stridor, and other adventitious sounds.

adidas uses machine learning to make the shopping experience easier

Even brands are tapping the power of machine learning. Take adidas, who recently launched a new "Bring It to Me" experience for their London store. Shoppers can use Visual Lookup to scan products on their phones while they are in the store, and the app lets them check stock and request their size without the need for queues. Under the hood, ML Kit is helping power the experience. It's another way machine learning is helping users get things done more quickly.

The benefits of on-device machine learning

Running machine learning on a user's device comes with a number of benefits. First, you reduce the amount of data you send to your server, enhancing user privacy. And because it runs on device, it can also work offline - perfect for inaccessible areas such as the middle of a rainforest, a desert or the London Underground. Last but not least, the most exciting aspect of running your model on device is low latency and this can enable all kinds of new user experiences. Machine learning is not just for automating tasks, it can work alongside your users and give them super powers too!

At Google, we offer a number of different technologies to help you take advantage of this:

• ML Kit offers a turnkey SDK to help you tackle tasks with powerful Google Machine Learning models
• The TensorFlow Lite Framework lets you take a custom model and optimise it to run it on Android
• There's also the infrastructure of Firebase / Google Cloud, which can help you train on-device models using AutoML Vision Edge for specific model types or give you the raw processing power to train your own model

If you've got a great idea that can help users get things done, we want to hear from you! We'll pick 10 concepts and provide expertise and guidance to those developers to help in their plans to bring their ideas to fruition. And once the app is ready, we'll help showcase it in front of the billions of users on Google Play, through a collection and more. You can read more about all of the prizes here.

There's still time to submit your idea before the December 2 deadline. We can't wait to hear what you come up with, and to work with you on bringing helpful innovation powered by on-device machine learning to more and more users!

20 Nov 2019 9:34pm GMT

Posted by Caren Chang, Developer Programs Engineer

Android users care a lot about the battery life on their phones. In particular, how your app schedules deferrable background tasks play an important role in battery life. To help you build more battery-friendly apps, we introduced WorkManager as the unified solution for all deferrable background processing needs.

Starting November 1, 2020, we are unifying deferrable background tasks on Android around WorkManager, and GCMNetworkManager will be deprecated and no longer supported.

Why WorkManager

The WorkManager API incorporates the features of Firebase Job Dispatcher (FJD) and GcmNetworkManager solutions, providing a consistent job scheduling service back to API level 14 while being conscious of battery life. For example, if your app needs to send log files up to the server, it would be more efficient to wait until the device is both charging and connected to WiFi. In this case, WorkManager will ensure that the sync will execute when the given constraints (charging and connected to WiFi) are met. Additionally, it does not require Google Play Services, unlike FJD and GcmNetworkManager.

Some of the other key features of WorkManager include:

• Persist scheduled work across app updates and device restarts
• Schedule one-off or periodic tasks
• Monitor and manage tasks
• Chain tasks together

What it means for developers

Now that the WorkManager library has reached maturity, we have decided to deprecate alternative solutions to simplify the developer story and focus on WorkManager stability and features.

• We announced the deprecation of the FirebaseJobDispatcher library in April 2019. In April 2020 the library will be archived and we will no longer provide support for issues filed on the library.
• In addition, we are now announcing the deprecation of GCMNetworkManager. The library is no longer receiving any new features and starting in November 2020, we will no longer provide support for issues relating to the library.
• Furthermore, once your app updates the target API level (targetSdkVersion) to above Android 10 (API level 29), FirebaseJobDispatcher and GcmNetworkManager API calls will no longer work on devices running Android Marshmallow (6.0) and above.

Migrating to WorkManager

Now is the time to migrate your apps to WorkManager if you haven't already done so! You can start by reading the official documentation for WorkManager.

If your app is still using FirebaseJobDispatcher, you can migrate your app to WorkManager by following the migration guide. A similar migration guide from GCMNetworkManager to WorkManager is also available.

YouTube recently moved over to WorkManager for their background scheduling needs and has reported improvements in app startup time as well as an 8% drop in crash rates.

Going forward

The team is dedicated to improving and continuing feature development on WorkManager. If you encounter issues using the library, have proposals for features you would like to see, or have any feedback about the library, please file an issue.

19 Nov 2019 6:29pm GMT

Posted by Aleks Haecky

Advanced Android in Kotlin, developed by Google together with Udacity, is our newly-released, free, self-paced online course. In this course expert instructors from the Android team at Google will introduce you to some of the advanced features you can build into your Android apps.

This course is intended for developers who have mastered the basics of building an Android app in Kotlin, and want to dive deeper into advanced functionality. To benefit most from this course, you need skills equivalent to what's taught in our Android Fundamentals Udacity or codelab courses.

Advanced Android in Kotlin teaches you about notifications, graphics and animations on Android, using third-party authentication for login, and how to add maps to your apps. Learn how to create custom views that can look like anything you want, draw to a canvas, and have eye-catching animations. And, most importantly, you will learn how to properly test your apps!

Here is a sample of apps you will build:

• An egg timer that implements various types of notifications.
• A painting app that converts what the user traces on the screen into a colorful drawing.
• Animations of the moon and a rain of falling stars.

Check out the YouTube course trailer below for additional information about the course and apps:

Different people like to learn in different ways, so we are offering this course as both a Udacity video-based course and as a series of codelabs with topics that you can explore in any order. Whether you prefer to work on your own with just the text and code, or to have an instructor help walk through the code with you on video, we've got you covered; just choose your path and get learning!

• Udacity course: https://www.udacity.com/course/advanced-android-with-kotlin--ud940
• Codelabs course: https://codelabs.developers.google.com/advanced-android-kotlin-training/

18 Nov 2019 9:16pm GMT

Posted by Deepanshu Madan, Product Manager

Last month's #AndroidDevSummit was jam-packed with announcements and technical news...so much that we wouldn't be surprised if you missed something. So all this month, we'll be diving into key areas from throughout the summit so you don't miss anything. Earlier this week, we spotlighted Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, and today, we're highlighting Android Studio, with the top three things you should know:

#1: Support for Jetpack Compose

For the best experience developing with Jetpack Compose, you can now use the latest version of Android Studio 4.0 in the canary channel, and benefit from smart editor features, such as New Project templates, code completion and the ability to immediately preview your Jetpack Compose UI.

#2: What's new in Android Studio session

We covered both new features and successes of our quality initiative called Project Marble. On the quality aspect, we discuss improvements around hangs and latency, memory leak detection, automatic IDE heap sizing and build speed. Also during the session you will find demos on new developments & features in Android Studio such as Build Attribution tool which helps you understand and diagnose problems with your build system, Java 8 library desugaring, View binding, Kotlin Android live templates, an updated live Layout inspector which allows you to drill into resources right from the view to find where a property value originates in the source code with a 3D visualization of your view hierarchy.

#3: Android Studio Design tools

We introduced new features of Layout & Navigation editor including a new split view, new tools such as Multi-preview which allows you to visualize your layout in different configurations and MotionEditor, visual design editor for the MotionLayout layout type, making it easier to create and preview animations. The Motion Editor provides a simple interface for manipulating elements from the MotionLayout library that serves as the foundation for animation in Android apps. In previous releases, creating and altering these elements required manually editing constraints in XML resource files. Now, the Motion Editor can generate this XML for you, with support for start and end states, keyframes, transitions, and timelines.

You can find the entire playlist of Android Dev Summit sessions and videos here. We'll continue to spotlight other areas later this month, so keep an eye out and follow AndroidDevelopers on Twitter. Thanks so much for letting us be a part of this experience with you!

15 Nov 2019 7:40pm GMT

Posted by Marcus Leal, Product Manager, Google Play Ads

How do people find your app? It's the million-dollar question for any developer, and the answer can help you make the right choices about your marketing strategy and budget. Accurate install referral data is crucial for understanding which traffic sources send users to download your app from the Google Play Store, as well as identifying fraudulent attempts to claim install attributions.

That's why in 2017, we launched the Play Install Referrer API, which provides a reliable and robust mechanism for apps to retrieve referral information directly from the Play Store. It was a big step forward from the old install_referrer intent broadcast, so many developers made the switch right away, including App Attribution Program partners like Adjust, AppsFlyer, and Kochava. Now, because it's been replaced by the new API, we've decided to deprecate the install_referrer intent broadcast mechanism on March 1, 2020. After this date, new versions of the Play Store app will no longer broadcast the install_referrer intent after app installs.

We are asking developers who still rely on the install_referrer to use the Play Install Referrer API instead. Among other advantages, the Install Referrer API offers better performance, uses a secure communication channel between your app and the Play Store, and offers a more robust solution against spoof and attribution fraud.

If you still use the Broadcast API and the install_referrer intent to track your referrals, be sure to make the switch by March 1, 2020. Migration is easy, and the cost of adoption is low. Learn how to use the Play Install Referrer API to track your app installs today.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

15 Nov 2019 5:38pm GMT