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Googlebook introduces a new category of laptops built on a shared Android foundation. High-performance hardware from partners such as HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, and Asus, combines mobile convenience with desktop power. Googlebook offers high-resolution OLED touchscreens, dedicated keyboards, and precision trackpads with all-day battery life and OS-level Gemini Intelligence. With Googlebook, users can transition fluidly from quick interactions on their phones to rich, immersive sessions on their laptop.

Bringing your app to Googlebook opens up valuable opportunities for you across the Android ecosystem. Google Play highlights optimized titles with dedicated badging, enhanced search, and featured spots across curated store homepages. Delivering this level of quality also prepares your app for the Apps Experience Program, where you can enroll to unlock a new program rate card designed to drive business growth. Even better, when users set up their new Googlebook using their Android phone, optimized apps are prominently highlighted for easy transfer, giving your app day-one presence on their new device.

The best part? You don't need to build a separate app from the ground up to take advantage of this reach. Adaptive development is how modern Android apps naturally scale across large displays, new device postures, and emerging form factors. If your app already embraces adaptive layouts, it is primed for Googlebooks. By building on your existing foundation of adaptive UI, window size classes, and multi-input support, you can deliver an optimized experience.

Anchor your app in desktop fundamentals

On a laptop, your app operates within a desktop environment where user expectations shift toward higher information density, precision input, and active multitasking. Following desktop development and design guidance provides the principles needed to make the most of this experience. Instead of simply stretching mobile interfaces across a wide screen, an adaptive layout reorganizes content into functional groupings.

Adopt a multi-pane architecture to allow your UI to expand, reflow, or reveal richer detail as window boundaries change. With Navigation 3, you can implement adaptive scene strategies to coordinate multi-pane layouts directly from your back stack. Use ListDetailSceneStrategy and SupportingPaneSceneStrategy to enable side-by-side layouts when expanded window space is available. Scene decorators let you wrap screens with persistent desktop navigation rails. Pair these patterns with layout primitives like Grid and FlexBox, and soon alongside experimental MediaQuery and Styles APIs, to organize complex content and adjust visual styles dynamically for desktop displays.

In free-form desktop windowing, app windows can be resized dynamically at any time. Your layout decisions should respond directly to the available window space using window size classes rather than the physical display dimensions.

Desktop design also accounts for ergonomic viewing distances and precise pointer targets. Adjust your type scale for comfortable viewing across larger displays, set layout max widths to keep line lengths readable, and define explicit click targets to prevent misclicks. Explore complete design patterns in our design principles guide and discover real world inspiration in the desktop design gallery.

Deliver differentiated experiences for Googlebooks

Once your core layout is adaptive, you can enrich your app with differentiated features that take full advantage of a desktop environment. Everyday productivity in these setups relies on versatile input methods. Jetpack Compose natively supports physical keyboard navigation and pointer selection. Elevate your app's usability by integrating contextual cursors that provide visual feedback for text entry, pane resizing, and tool selection. Implement right click context menus and hover states; make your shortcuts discoverable through the Keyboard Shortcuts Helper.

On Googlebook, apps run in free-form windows where users can tackle multiple tasks simultaneously. Unlock side-by-side workflows by enabling multi-instance support, giving users the ability to launch independent windows for comparing content or managing multiple documents. Pair this with drag and drop to let users move text, images, and files fluidly between windows or even drop items onto an empty workspace to spin up a new task.

Go all in and customize your window frame. In desktop windowing, apps include a caption header bar that you can style with custom backgrounds, search bars, or tabs while respecting system window controls.

Beyond individual app windows, Continue On keeps experiences connected across phones, tablets, and Googlebooks with bidirectional handoff that lets users start a task on one screen and pick up seamlessly on another. Passing state through HandoffActivityData preserves context such as document position or active tabs, with optional web fallbacks to ensure smooth transitions.

Complement this by surfacing actionable information at a glance with customizable widgets. And, as you refine your app experience, benchmark against our comprehensive desktop app quality guidelines.

Developers are already bringing these patterns to life across the ecosystem. When bringing Notability to Googlebook, prior investments in tablets and foldables gave the team an immediate head start. Because their layout already relied on window size classes and adaptive scene strategies, their canvas and toolbars reflowed naturally during window resizing, while existing keyboard and trackpad support carried straight over.

"We had already been targeting first-class experiences for tablets and foldables," explains Ryan Shea, Android Engineering Manager at Notability. "So by the time Googlebook came along, scaling Notability up to a laptop-class experience was mostly turning a dial we had already built. That left us free to spend our time on the things that only make sense on a bigger screen or with the newer APIs, like Continue On, which hands a note off from your phone to the laptop, and optimizing the side-by-side app experience for studying."

Accelerate your workflow with dedicated tooling

Testing and optimizing your app for Googlebook fits naturally into your existing development workflow.

With the desktop emulator in Android Studio, you can run a virtual desktop environment directly on your workstation to test free-form window resizing, verify multi-instance interactions, and debug mouse, trackpad, and keyboard interactions. Download Android Studio Canary to set up your virtual device today.

Help speed up your layout modernization with AI-assisted development. The adaptive skill gives your AI agents the necessary context to help refactor mobile layouts into responsive Compose containers automatically. Install the skill directly through the Android CLI to streamline your implementation.

Realize new possibilities on Googlebook

The Googlebook lineup marks an exciting new chapter for the Android ecosystem, giving your apps a premium platform to deliver richer, more capable experiences. By building adaptively, a single codebase ensures your app looks and performs optimally across phones, foldables, tablets, and Googlebooks while unlocking elevated visibility and badging across Google Play. Explore documentation at our Googlebook developer hub, review the desktop design guide, and start building for Googlebook today!

Today, the games category for Android Auto and cars powered by Android Automotive OS with Google built-in is officially graduating from beta to general availability. Our early access partners have already been bringing games to the parked-only experience for cars, and you can browse these in our latest collections of games for Android Auto and games for Android Automotive OS.

Bringing your game to cars lets you reach users in their vehicles during natural downtime, such as while waiting at a charging station or for a curbside order pickup. Today's milestone means that we're opening up access so developers can now publish games to the open testing and production tracks on Google Play. In this post, we'll cover how to adapt your existing Android game for the car screen, focusing on key technical requirements and publishing criteria.

Implement car support for your game

If you're already following best practices for building adaptive apps, bringing an existing Android game to cars primarily involves configuring your app manifest and ensuring your game respects the vehicle parked state.

Mark your app as a game

To distribute your app in the games category, you need to explicitly declare its category. Add the android:appCategory="game" attribute to the <application> element of your manifest file:

<application ... 
    android:appCategory="game">
    ...
</application>

Declare support for Android Auto

Games are supported on Android Auto on devices running Android 15 and higher. To declare that your game supports Android Auto, include this <category> element in the intent filter of an activity in your manifest file:

<activity ... 
    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />
        ...
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.CAR_LAUNCHER" />
    </intent-filter>
</activity>

Generally, the android.intent.category.CAR_LAUNCHER category element is placed in the same intent filter as the android.intent.category.LAUNCHER element, but it can be in another activity's intent filter if you prefer to launch a different activity.

Declare support for Android Automotive OS

To declare that your game supports Android Automotive OS, include the android.hardware.type.automotive <uses-feature> element in your manifest file.

<manifest ... 
    ...
    <uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.type.automotive"
                  android:required="false" />
    ...
</manifest>

The android:required value has different restrictions depending upon which track you choose to distribute your Android Automotive OS app. If you distribute your Android Automotive OS app on the mobile track, android:required must be set to "false". However, if you distribute on the Android Automotive OS dedicated track, you can set android:required to "true", "false", or leave it unset. Leaving the value unset has the same effect as setting android:required to "true", and means that your app is available only for distribution on Android Automotive OS devices.

Handle the parked state

Cars introduce a unique physical context with a driving state and a parked state. Certain types of apps, like games, are considered parked apps and aren't permitted to run while the vehicle is in motion to avoid driver distraction. By default, Android Auto and Android Automotive OS block activities from being used or launched when the vehicle is in motion or when user experience (UX) restrictions are active. To make sure your game complies with driver distraction guidelines, don't include the distractionOptimized metadata element in any activity in your manifest. You must also ensure that your game audio stops when the user starts driving and can't be unpaused while the vehicle is in motion.

Additionally, when the user relaunches the app from the home screen, your game must restore the app state as closely as possible to the previous state. Test your game for responsiveness and ensure it doesn't freeze or stutter during gameplay.

Declare game controller support

Car screens support touch input, but many users prefer playing with a connected gamepad. If your game supports controller input, declare the android.hardware.gamepad feature in your manifest to help boost the visibility of your app in the Google Play Store to users specifically seeking controller-compatible experiences.

<uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.gamepad" android:required="false"/>

Set the android:required attribute to false to indicate your app supports controllers, but the use of controllers is optional. Don't set the android:required attribute to true unless a controller is mandatory for your game.

Support common screen sizes and aspect ratios

Car displays come in various shapes and aspect ratios, including portrait and wide landscape screens. For a great user experience, make your game fully adaptive to different screen sizes so that it runs full screen without letterboxing or pillarboxing. For Android Auto, refer to the guidance for testing against canonical screen sizes and use bundled hardware profiles when testing with the emulator for Android Automotive OS.

Publish your game to cars

After you've implemented the necessary changes, you can opt in to Android Auto and Android Automotive OS form factors in the Google Play Console. Before submitting to production, test your game against the car app quality guidelines for games.

Use the Desktop Head Unit to test your app's Android Auto compatibility, and use the Android Automotive OS emulator to test the experience on Android Automotive OS. Your game will be reviewed against the car app quality guidelines for the games category before it is approved for open testing or production.

Get your games on the road

With the games category now generally available, it is the perfect time to optimize your titles for cars. To learn more about implementation details, review the documentation at Build games for cars.

At Android, we are constantly working to provide developers and enterprise partners with the data they need to keep devices protected. Today, we're thrilled to announce the stable release of the AndroidX Security State version 1.1.0 and Security State Provider version 1.0.0 libraries which provides a centralized mechanism designed to bring further transparency to the comprehensive security posture and pending updates across the Android ecosystem.

Whether you develop security-critical, consumer-facing apps (such as banking, fintech, or healthcare) or Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions, these libraries enable you to programmatically verify the security state of the device per component. Rather than relying on a coarse, monolithic Security Patch Level (SPL), you can evaluate true component-level protection and whether remediations are actively pending via the androidx.security.state library. For OEMs and Over-The-Air (OTA) client developers, the companion androidx.security.state.provider library allows you to expose update availability via standardized mechanisms.

Understanding Security Patch Levels (SPL)

As Android has evolved to deliver rapid, independent component updates through modular systems like Google Play system updates, relying on a single SPL build property is no longer the best way to determine a device's true security posture. To provide component level visibility, the Security State libraries provide APIs for three distinct patch levels:

• Device SPL (DSPL): The security patch level currently installed and running on the device for specific system components, queried from device properties and configs without network calls.
• Published SPL (PSPL): The latest patch level officially published in the Android Security Bulletin for those components.
• Available SPL (ASPL): The patch level ready to be downloaded and installed on the specific device, queried asynchronously via inter-process communication (IPC) with on-device update clients.

The Security State libraries track these patch levels across the following components:

• System: The core Android operating system, updated via standard/OEM system OTA updates.
• System modules: Modular OS subsystems updated seamlessly in the background via Google Play system updates (Project Mainline).
• Kernel: The foundational layer connecting the device's hardware and software, evaluated via Long-Term Support (LTS) release versions (such as 5.15.159 or 6.1.91) rather than monthly calendar dates.

By surfacing these three distinct patch levels at the component level, developers and enterprises can now understand exactly how secure a device is, identify missing patches, and take proactive remediation steps. One way of doing so can be seen in the example below.

Rather than taking an all-or-nothing approach to device access, developers and enterprises can combine DSPL, PSPL, and ASPL to make smart, contextual security decisions. For example, a banking or enterprise app can compare a device's current security patch (DSPL) against pending updates (ASPL) before initiating sensitive workflows like high-value payments or credential enrollment. If an update is waiting to be installed, developers and enterprises can require the user to update their device first. For even finer control, developers and enterprises can query whether specific high-risk vulnerabilities (CVEs) have been patched on the device, such as verifying that critical NFC or Bluetooth fixes are in place before authorizing tap-to-pay or proximity data sharing.

High-level flow

For app developers and enterprise management

Client applications can use the androidx.security.state library to make informed, context-aware decisions:

• Synchronous Posture Checks (DSPL): Apps can immediately inspect the installed patch levels of the system, system modules, and kernel on app launch and compare with PSPL to verify whether the device meets an organization's required security baseline before unlocking sensitive corporate resources or biometric access.
• Pending Update Prompting (ASPL): Instead of immediately blocking an employee whose device is slightly behind on patches, enterprise apps can query ASPL to check if a pending system update or Google Play system update is staged and ready to install. If so, apps can display tailored in-app guidance directing the user to System Settings to complete the installation.
• Vulnerability-Level Auditing (CVEs): For high-assurance use cases, the library provides ability to download device-specific vulnerability reports from Open Source Vulnerabilities (OSV) to programmatically audit whether specific, critical CVEs have been resolved on the device.

For OEMs & update clients: Standardizing update availability

The companion androidx.security.state.provider library establishes a standardized, Android IPC mechanism for update clients to report update availability directly on the device. Historically, even if proprietary OTA clients surfaced update availability, this information was siloed and not queryable by third-party applications. Going forward, apps can access ASPL details through a single, unified API, regardless of whether the update is delivered via an OEM's dedicated OTA client or Google Play, as long as it is provided by the update client.

• Google Play system updates already expose ASPL across GMS Android devices.
• Google Over-The-Air (GOTA) has also been onboarded and we are working with OEMs worldwide to onboard their OTA clients to this standardized framework.

Incorporating bulletin-level data

Beyond a single SPL string, the Security State libraries provide clarity on what that patch level actually means for the device. By integrating with the Open Source Vulnerabilities (OSV) database to obtain Android Security Bulletin data, the libraries can look deeper than ever before. Instead of just asking if a specific threat, such as a CVE entry, is blocked, this data also allows the libraries to provide the "effective" and granular security state of the device.

Here are two ways this approach benefits enterprises and Android OEMs:

• Sometimes, a monthly security update does not contain any new threats for a specific component. In this case, the libraries automatically increments the security level for that component to reflect its "effective" security state. This ensures that a device is accurately credited for being fully protected against all known security threats.
• A new feature introduced in Android 17 allows OEMs to declare specific security fixes that have been applied above the SPL via a Supplemental Patches XML file. This feature allows OEMs who backport specific security fixes to immediately prove device compliance without having to wait for a full monolithic SPL bump, ensuring continuous patching efforts are properly credited. The Security State libraries surface this granular information to apps and services, ensuring that continuous patching efforts are recognized the moment they are implemented.

Get started

The Security State Libraries are built to empower the entire Android ecosystem.

• App Developers & MDMs: To start protecting your users and evaluating real-time patch posture, explore the official Understand device security state guide.
• OEMs and Update Clients: Onboard your update clients to expose ASPL using the AndroidX Security State Provider library. Claim immediate credit for backported patches by publishing Supplemental Patches XMLs.
• Release Notes: Check out the official AndroidX Release Notes for Security-State and Security-State-Provider libraries for complete changelogs and API signatures.

We value your feedback! Please try out the libraries and let us know your thoughts or report any issues on the public Android Issue Tracker.