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Posted by Steve Suppe, Product Manager, Google Play and Manuel Wang, Product Manager, Google Play; Ashley Marshall, UX Writing Lead, Google Play Google Play Console is constantly evolving to improve how you manage and publish your apps. We know that launch moments are really important to you. Whether that's launching a new version of your app, or updating your store listing - you need the right tools to help you launch with confidence.

One challenge you've shared with us is a lack of predictability and control over the app review process. Previously, it was hard to predict which changes would be sent to Google for review, and which changes would be published immediately. There was also no way to send multiple changes for review together, for example, if you wanted to update your app at the same time as one of your store listing screenshots.

As a result of your feedback, we're making some changes to give you more flexibility and control over the app review process.

Control when changes are sent to Google for review

On the Publishing overview page in Play Console, you'll soon see a new section called "Changes ready to send for review." Whenever you save a change in Play Console that is subject to review, it will be listed here - instead of it being automatically sent for review. You can then send these changes for review together, whenever you're ready.

On the Publishing overview page in Play Console, you'll soon see a new "Changes ready to send for review" section where your changes will be saved for you to send for review.

How this works with managed publishing

Once you send changes to Google for review, they'll appear in the "Changes in review" section on the Publishing overview page.

If you have managed publishing turned on, these changes will appear in the "Ready to publish" section as soon as they're approved. You can then publish these changes whenever you're ready.

If you have managed publishing turned off, changes will be published automatically as soon as they're approved. We recommend turning managed publishing on when you want more control over app changes or wish to push an app update live at a specific time.

Remove changes that are ready to publish or in review

To give you even more flexibility, we're also adding the ability for you to remove changes that have already been sent for review, or that are ready to publish.

Changes you remove will once again appear in the "Changes ready to send for review" section.

How it works

Here's an example of how we think these new changes will add predictability and control to your app publishing process, and how they will enable more flexible workflows.

Imagine you have a major update to your app that is due to go live and requires several changes to happen at the same time, such as publishing a new release, updating your store listing screenshots, and making changes to your Data safety form. Here's how this would look with all of the new improvements that we've made in Play Console.

1. Make changes to your app, store listing, and Data safety form in Play Console

You can make changes to all of the different parts of your app at your own pace, with confidence that these changes won't be sent for review or published until you're ready.

2. Send changes for review when you're ready

On the Publishing overview page, you'll now see all of the changes that have been made. You can send them for review together when you decide you're ready.

3. Remove changes if you've made a mistake

Imagine that you've made a change to something else by accident, or your marketing team has told you that some of the screenshots you originally uploaded need to be changed. On the Publishing overview page, you can now remove these changes from the review, make any necessary updates, and send the changes for review - again.

4. Publish according to your schedule with managed publishing

Plans change all the time. Imagine that your marketing team tells you that your launch date has been delayed by a week. Or, what if you don't want your changes to go live on a weekend, when no one is in the office? You can choose to turn on managed publishing and control exactly when approved changes are published.

We're really excited to share these upcoming features with you, and hope these changes give you more predictability and control over the app publishing process.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

24 Jan 2023 6:00pm GMT

Posted by Paris Hsu, Product Manager, Android Developer

Android Studio Electric Eel splash screen

Today, we are ⚡️electrified⚡️ to announce the latest stable release of the official IDE for building Android applications: Android Studio Electric Eel (2022.1.1)!

Design

Compose Preview updates automatically

Compose Preview Device Spec

Layout Inspector recomposition rendering highlights

Visual Linting for Views

Universal Problems Panel

Build & Dependencies

Download impact in Build Analyzer: The Build Analyzer tool provides you insight into what happens during your builds. This now includes a summary of any dependency downloads that happened. You can use this information to determine the impact of downloads on your build, and to spot problems such as downloads happening during incremental builds.

Download impact in Build Analyzer

Upgrade Assistant post-upgrade report and rollback support

SDK Index integration

Baseline Profile fix for App Bundles: Under certain circumstances Baseline Profiles could have been compressed when the app was built as an Android App Bundle. This resulted in the profile not being picked up when installing the app locally. In this local only scenario, benchmark results would be slower than anticipated. The bundletool version shipping with Electric Eel addresses and fixes this problem.

Inspect

All-new Logcat: Logcat has been rewritten from the ground up to make it easier to parse, query, and track logs. The new Logcat UI has been available to try as an opt-in feature in Dolphin, and it's now enabled by default in Electric Eel, including a number of quality-of-life and stability fixes. Some highlights include better formatting for logs, a smarter search field with autocomplete support to filter for the logs you want to see, ability to persist log output across app restarts, and options to customize what's displayed.

Logcat New UI

App Quality Insights window: The new App Quality Insights tools let you browse and investigate crash data from Firebase Crashlytics directly in Android Studio without having to jump back and forth between the IDE and a browser.

The IDE displays your top issues, which you can filter to show only the most recent crashes, or crashes from a specific version of your app. For each issue, you can see the number of affected users and the stack trace, which allows you to quickly navigate to the place in your code where the crash occurred. Moreover, you'll see gutter icons in your source files, which indicate parts of your code that show up in your app's top crash reports. Simply click on the link to navigate from the code to the crash report in the App Quality Insights window. To get started, read the official documentation.

App Quality Insights window

Emulators & devices

New "Desktop" category & Desktop AVD: In Electric Eel, you now have the option to create a Desktop emulator. This lets you test how your app behaves on devices such as Chromebooks. There are a handful of interactions that are different on these devices that you should test with your app. For example, apps can be freeform resized or minimized, which your app should handle gracefully.

Testing apps on new Desktop AVDs

Resizable Emulator (Experimental): The Resizable emulator helps you test your app on different screen sizes without having to run multiple emulators. After creating and launching a resizable emulator, you can use the Display Mode menu to switch between different reference device sizes and see how your app behaves.

Using the Resizable Emulator

Physical Devices Mirroring (Experimental, Opt-in): You can now mirror your physical device to Android Studio and interact with it similarly to how you'd use an emulator. This is an opt-in feature in Electric Eel so that you can share feedback with us. In order to use it, you need to first go to Preference > Experimental > Device Mirroring to enable it. Then, connect your physical device through ADB (either through wired or wireless), and it will show up in the Running Devices panel. Once mirrored, you can interact with it much like you're used to with emulators, such as multi-touch, physical buttons, and device rotation. Mouse and keyboard events are forwarded, and you can use the controls on the toolbar to input button presses, or to rotate the device.

You can also drag and drop files onto the mirrored device (just like on an emulator). If the file is an APK, it will be installed, which can be really useful for quickly testing a build. For other file types, the file will be copied to the device's Download folder.

Physical Devices Mirroring (Android Studio and Physical Deice)

IntelliJ

IntelliJ Platform Update - Android Studio Electric Eel (2022.1.1) includes the IntelliJ 2022.1 platform release, which has many new features such as Dependency Analyzer to facilitate dependency management and conflict resolution and the Notifications tool window that offers a new, streamlined way to receive notifications from the IDE. It also includes a number of other notable improvements that are covered here.

To recap, Android Studio Electric Eel (2022.1.1) includes these new enhancements & features:

Design

• Compose Preview updates automatically
• Compose Preview device spec
• Layout Inspector recomposition rendering highlights
• Visual Linting
• Universal Problems panel

Build & dependencies

• Improved Sync performance with parallel project imports
• Download impact in Build Analyzer
• Upgrade Assistant post-upgrade report and rollback support
• SDK Index integration
• Baseline Profile fix for App Bundles

Emulators & devices

• New "Desktop" category & Desktop AVD
• Resizable Emulator (Experimental)
• Physical Devices Mirroring (Experimental, Opt-in)

IntelliJ

• IntelliJ Platform 2022.1 Update

Check out the Android Studio release notes, Android Gradle plugin release notes, and the Android Emulator release notes for more details.

Download Studio Today!

It is a good time to download Android Studio Electric Eel (2022.1.1) to incorporate the new features into your workflow. As always, we appreciate any feedback on things you like and issues or features you would like to see. If you find a bug or issue, please file an issue and also check out known-issues. Remember to also follow us on Twitter, Medium, or YouTube for more Android Development updates!

12 Jan 2023 10:00pm GMT

Posted by Anton Hansson, Software EngineerAndroid 10 and higher support Modular System Components that allow us to expedite functional and security updates to the Android ecosystem outside of major API level releases and make new functionality backward compatible on already-released Android versions. These improvements help make development more flexible and broaden the reach for app developers. We've built a new Extension SDK framework for you to integrate with these APIs, and today, we're releasing the first public version of the Extension SDK (Extension Level 4).

Faster API and feature introductions

Having the ability to introduce new functionality outside of major API level releases allows faster innovations. As shared in a previous post, beginning this year we plan to roll out the initial Privacy Sandbox on Android Beta release to Android 13 devices. You can start using the Extension SDK to integrate your solutions with the AdServices APIs to prepare for limited production testing. Learn more on how to participate in the Privacy Sandbox Beta release, and set up your development environment with a test device or emulator.

Backward compatibility

Check for API availability

The alternative check, via Build.VERSION.SDK_INT, would look like this:

This check is still safe and correct, but this function would return false on some devices where the API is now available. As a result, the SDK_INT check is not optimal, and the extension version check is a better way to check for API availability. All devices with SDK_INT >= 33 also have an R extension version of >= 2, but there are devices with SDK_INT < 33 with R extension versions >= 2.

Similarly, the AdServices API reference may indicate that it's "added in Ad Services Extensions 4". The Ad Services extension uses the SdkExtensions.AD_SERVICES constant. The availability check looks like this:

For developer convenience, we are extending Jetpack to make it easier to work with extension versions. For example, you can use a Jetpack library function to check for PhotoPicker availability, which abstracts away the conditional version checks. We expect to be releasing more Jetpack libraries (such as the Privacy Preserving APIs in the Privacy Sandbox) to aid the correct use of APIs released via Extension SDKs.

Tooling support

Get familiarized with SDK extensions

We're just beginning the SDK Extension developer journey and plan to make more features available in the future. You can get the latest SDK extension 4 available in the SDK Manager today. Learn more about the SDK Extensions and our documentation on the Privacy Sandbox Beta and the photo picker.

09 Jan 2023 7:00pm GMT