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By Austin Robison, Android Wear team

Android Wear extends the Android platform to wearables. These small, powerful devices give users useful information just when they need it. Watches powered by Android Wear respond to spoken questions and commands to provide info and get stuff done. These new devices can help users reach their fitness goals and be their key to a multiscreen world.

We designed Android Wear to bring a common user experience and a consistent developer platform to this new generation of devices. We can't wait to see what you will build.

Getting started

Your app's notifications will already appear on Android wearables and starting today, you can sign up for the Android Wear Developer Preview. You can use the emulator provided to preview how your notifications will appear on both square and round Android wearables. The Developer Preview also includes new Android Wear APIs which will let you customize and extend your notifications to accept voice replies, feature additional pages, and stack with similar notifications. Head on over to developer.android.com/wear to sign up and learn more.

For a brief introduction to the developer features of Android Wear, check out these DevBytes videos. They include demos and a discussion about the code snippets driving them.

What's next?

We're just getting started with the Android Wear Developer Preview. In the coming months we'll be launching new APIs and features for Android Wear devices to create even more unique experiences for the wrist.

Join the Android Wear Developers community on Google+ to discuss the Preview and ask questions.

We're excited to see what you build!

18 Mar 2014 4:12pm GMT

Day 2 of Game Developers Conference 2014 is getting underway and today Google is hosting a special Developer Day at Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Join us at the sessions

Building on yesterday's announcements for game developers, we'll be presenting a series of sessions that walk you through the new features, services, and tools, explaining how they work and what they can bring to your games.

We'll also be talking with you about how to reach and engage with hundreds of millions of users on Google Play, build Games that scale in the cloud, grow in-game advertising businesses with AdMob, track revenue with Google Analytics, as well as explore new gaming frontiers, like Glass.

If you're at the conference, the Google Developer Day sessions are a great opportunity to meet the developer advocates, engineers, and product managers of the Google products that drive users, engagement and retention for your games. If you're remote, we invite you to sit-in on the sessions by joining the livestream below or on Google Developers channel on YouTube.

The Developer Day sessions (and livestream) kick off at 10:00AM PDT (5:00PM UTC). A complete agenda is available on the GDC Developer Day page.

LiquidFun 1.0

Last December we announced the initial release of LiquidFun, a C++ library that adds particle physics, including realistic fluid dynamics, to the open-source Box2D.

To get Google Developer Day started, we're releasing LiquidFun 1.0, an update that adds multiple particle systems, new particle behaviors, and other new features.

Check out the video below to see what Liquid Fun 1.0 can do, visit the LiquidFun home page, or join today's LiquidFun session at Google Developer Day to learn how LiquidFun works and how to use particle physics in your games. The session starts at 4:35PM PDT (11:35PM UTC).

18 Mar 2014 2:30pm GMT

Google Play services 4.3 has now been rolled out to the world, and it contains a number of features you can use to improve your apps. Specifically, this version adds some new members to the Google Play services family: Google Analytics API, Tag Manager, and the Address API. We've also made some great enhancements to the existing APIs; everything to make sure you stay on top of the app game out there.

Here are the highlights of the 4.3 release.

Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager

The Analytics API and Google Tag Manager has existed for Android for some time as standalone technologies, but with this release we are incorporating them as first class citizens in Google Play services. Those of you that are used to the API will find it very similar to previous versions, and if you have not used it before we strongly encourage you to take a look at it.

Google Analytics allows you to get detailed statistics on how you app is being used by your users, for example what functionality of your app is being used the most, or which activity triggers users to convert from an advertised version of an app to paid one. Google Tag Manager lets you change characteristics of your app on-the-fly, for example colors, without having to push an update from Google Play.

Google Play Games services Update

The furious speed of innovation in Android mobile gaming has not slowed down and neither have we when it comes to packing the Google Play Game services API with features.

With this release, we are introducing game gifts, which allows players to send virtual in-game requests to anyone in their Google+ circles or through player search. Using this feature, the player can send a 'wish' request to ask another player for an in-game item or benefit, or a 'gift' request to grant an item or benefit to another player.

This is a great way for a game to be more engaging by increasing cross player collaboration and social connections. We are therefore glad to add this functionality as an inherent part of the Games API, it is an much-wanted extension to the multi-player functionality included a couple of releases ago. For more information, see: Unlocking the power of Google for your games.

Drive API

The Google Drive for Android API was just recently added as a member of the Google Play services API family. This release adds a number of important features:

• Pinning - You can now pin files that should be kept up to date locally, ensuring that it is available when the user is offline. This is great for users that need to use your app with limited or no connectivity
  
• App Folders - An app often needs to create files which are not visible to the user, for example to store temporary files in a photo editor. This can now be done using App Folders, a feature is analogous to Application Data Folders in the Google Drive API
  
• Change Notifications - You can now register a callback to receive notifications when a file or folder is changed. This mean you no longer need to query Drive continuously to check if the data has changed, just put a change notification on it
  

In addition to the above, we've also added the ability to access a number of new metadata fields.

Address API

This release will also includes a new Address API, which allows developers to request access to addresses for example to fill out a delivery address form. The kicker is the convenience for the user; a user interface component is presented where they select the desired address, and bang, the entire form is filled out. Developers have been relying on Location data which works very well, but this API shall cater for cases where the Location data is either not accurate or the user actually wants to use a different address than their current physical location. This should sound great to anyone who has done any online shopping during the last decade or so.

That's it for this time. Now go to work and incorporate these new features to make your apps even better!
And stay tuned for future updates.

For the release video, please see:
DevBytes: Google Play Services 4.3

For details on the APIs, please see:
Google Analytics
Google Tag Manager
Google Play Games services Gifts
Google Drive Android API - Change Events
Google Drive Android API - Pinning
Google Drive Android API - App Folder
Address API

17 Mar 2014 11:36pm GMT