Posted by Tim Sneath, Group Product Manager for Flutter
Today, at Flutter Live, we're announcing Flutter 1.0, the first stable release of Google's UI toolkit for creating beautiful, native experiences for iOS and Android from a single codebase.
Cross-platform mobile development today is full of compromise. Developers are forced to choose between either building the same app multiple times for multiple operating systems, or to accept a lowest common denominator solution that trades native speed and accuracy for portability. With Flutter, we believe we have a solution that gives you the best of both worlds: hardware-accelerated graphics and UI, powered by native ARM code, targeting both popular mobile operating systems.
Flutter doesn't replace the traditional Apple and Android app models for building mobile apps; instead, it's an app engine that you can either embed into an existing app or use for an entirely new app.
We think of the characteristics of Flutter along four dimensions:
Put this all together, combine it with best-in-class tooling for Visual Studio Code, Android Studio, IntelliJ or the programmer's editor of your choice, and you have Flutter -- a development environment for building beautiful native experiences for iOS or Android from a single codebase.
We announced the first beta of Flutter at Mobile World Congress ten months ago, and we've been excited to see how quickly it has been adopted by the broader community, as evidenced by the thousands of Flutter apps that are already published to the Apple and Google Play stores even before our 1.0 release. It's clear that developers are ready for a new approach to UI development.
Internally, Flutter is being used at Google for a wide array of products, with Google Ads already having switched to Flutter for their iOS and Android app. And even before 1.0, a wide range of global customers including Abbey Road Studios, Alibaba, Capital One, Groupon, Hamilton, JD.com, Philips Hue, Reflectly, and Tencent are developing or shipping apps with Flutter.
Michael Jones, Senior Director of Engineering from the Capital One team, says the following about their experiences with Flutter:
"We are excited by Flutter's unique take on high-performing cross-platform development. Our engineers have appreciated the rapid development promise and hot reload capabilities, and over the past year we have seen tremendous progress in the framework and especially the native integration story. "Flutter can allow Capital One to think of features not in an 'iOS or Android-first' fashion, but rather in a true mobile-first model. We are excited to see Flutter 1.0 and continue to be impressed with the pace of advancement and the excitement in the engineering community."
"We are excited by Flutter's unique take on high-performing cross-platform development. Our engineers have appreciated the rapid development promise and hot reload capabilities, and over the past year we have seen tremendous progress in the framework and especially the native integration story.
"Flutter can allow Capital One to think of features not in an 'iOS or Android-first' fashion, but rather in a true mobile-first model. We are excited to see Flutter 1.0 and continue to be impressed with the pace of advancement and the excitement in the engineering community."
At the Flutter Live event today, the popular payment service Square announced two new Flutter SDKs that make it easy to accept payments for goods and services with Flutter, whether in-person using a Square payment reader or by taking payments inside a mobile app. Square demonstrated an example of using their payments SDK using an app from Collins Family Orchards, a family farm that grows and sells fruit in farmers markets around the Pacific Northwest.
The developer of the Collins Family Orchards app, Dean Papastrat, had this to say about his experience:
"I was blown away by the speed of all the animations and transitions in production builds. As a web developer, it was super easy to make the transition to Flutter, and I can't believe I was able to build a fully working app that can take payments in just a week."
Also at Flutter Live, 2Dimensions announced the immediate availability of Flare, a remarkable new tool for designers to create vector animations that can be embedded directly into a Flutter app and manipulated with code. Flare eliminates the need to design in one app, animate in another, then convert all of that to device-specific assets and code.
Animations built with Flare can be embedded into an existing Flutter app as a widget, allowing them to participate in the full compositor and be overlaid with other text, graphical layers or even UI widgets. Integrating in this way frees animations from the 'black box' limitations of other architectures, and allows ongoing collaboration between designers and developers right up to the completion of the app. Such tight integration between Flutter and Flare provides a uniquely compelling offering for digital designers and animators who want to create highly-polished mobile experiences.
Another partner who has bet on Flutter is Nevercode, a fast-growing provider of continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) tooling for mobile apps. At Flutter Live, they announced Codemagic, a new tool designed specifically for Flutter to make it easy to automate the process of building and packaging Flutter apps for both Android and iOS from a single automation. Available today in beta, Codemagic allows you to select a GitHub repo containing a Flutter project, and with just a few clicks, create continuous build flows that run tests, and generate binary app bundles that you can upload to the Apple and Google Play stores.
We put together a short video to highlight the range and variety of the apps developers have been building with Flutter since the beta:
Since the first beta, we've been working to add features and polish to Flutter. In particular, we rounded out our support for pixel-perfect iOS apps with new widgets; added support for nearly twenty different Firebase services; and worked on improving performance and reducing the size of Flutter apps. We've also closed out thousands of issues based on feedback from the community.
Flutter also includes the latest version of the Dart platform, 2.1, an update to Dart 2 that offers smaller code size, faster type checks, and better usability for type errors. Dart 2.1 also has new language features to improve productivity when building user experiences. Developers who have already adopted Dart 2.1 tell us they're seeing significant speed improvements just by switching to the latest engine:
While the primary focus of the 1.0 release is bug fixes and stabilization, we're also introducing previews of two major new features for developers to try out in preview mode that we anticipate will ship in our next quarterly release in February 2019: Add to App and platform views.
When we first built Flutter, we focused on productivity for the scenario where someone is building a new application from scratch. But of course, not everyone has the luxury of being able to start with a clean slate. Talking to some of our larger customers, it was clear that they wanted to use Flutter for new user journeys or features within an existing application, or to convert their existing application to Flutter in stages.
The architecture of Flutter supports this model well: after all, every Flutter app includes a host Android and iOS container. But we've been working to make it easier to incrementally adopt Flutter by updating our templates, tooling and guidance for existing apps. We've made it easier to share assets between Flutter and host code. And we've also reworked the tooling to make it easy to attach to an existing Flutter process without launching the debugger with the application.
We will continue to work to make this experience even better. Even though a number of customers are already using our guidance on Add to App successfully, we're continuing to add samples and expand support for complex scenarios. In the meantime, our instructions for adding Flutter to existing apps are on our wiki, and you can track the remaining work on the GitHub project board.
While Add To App is useful as a way to gradually introduce Flutter to an existing application, sometimes it's useful to go the other way round and embed an Android or iPhone platform control in a Flutter app.
So we've introduced platform view widgets (AndroidView and UiKitView) that let you embed this kind of content on each platform. We've been previewing Android support for a couple of months, but now we're expanding support to iOS, and starting to add plug-ins like Google Maps and WebView that take advantage of this.
AndroidView
UiKitView
Like other components, our platform view widgets participate in the composition model, which means that you can integrate it with other Flutter content. For example, in the screenshot above, the floating action button in the bottom right corner is a Flutter widget that has background color with 50% alpha. This demonstrates the unique architectural advantages of Flutter well.
While this work is ready for developers to try out, we're continuing to work on improving performance and device compatibility, so we recommend caution if deploying apps that depend on PlatformViews. We're continuing to actively optimize platform views and expect them to be ready for production in time for our next quarterly update.
The primary target for Flutter has so far been iOS and Android. Yet our ambitions for Flutter extend beyond mobile to a broader set of platforms. Indeed, from the outset Flutter was architected as a portable UI toolkit that is flexible enough to go wherever pixels are painted.
Some of this work has already been taking place in the open. Flutter Desktop Embedding is an early-stage project that brings Flutter to desktop operating systems including Windows, MacOS, and Linux. We also recently published informal details of using Flutter on Raspberry Pi, as a way to demonstrate Flutter embedding support to smaller-scale devices that may not include a full desktop environment.
This week, at Flutter Live, we gave the first sneak peek of an experimental project we're working on in the labs that significantly expands where Flutter can run.
Hummingbird is a web-based implementation of the Flutter runtime that takes advantage of the capability of the Dart platform to compile not just to native ARM code but also to JavaScript. This enables Flutter code to run on the standards-based web without change.
We have a separate blog article on Medium that describes the technical implementation details of Hummingbird. And we'll have a lot more to share on Hummingbird at Google I/O in 2019: hope to see you there!
Of course, mobile remains our immediate priority, and you can expect to see the bulk of our investment in these core mobile scenarios over the coming months.
With the release of Flutter 1.0, we've established a new 'stable' channel, in addition to the existing beta, dev, and master channels. The stable channel updates less often than other channels, but we have a higher confidence in its quality since builds have already been vetted through the other channels. We anticipate that we'll update our stable channel on a quarterly basis with our most battle-tested builds.
You can download Flutter 1.0 from our website at https://flutter.io, where you can also find documentation for developers transitioning from other frameworks, code labs, a cookbook of common samples, and technical videos.
We owe a particular debt to the early adopters who have joined us on the journey so far, providing feedback, identifying issues, creating content, and generally shaping the product. The Flutter community is one of our greatest assets as a project: a welcoming, diverse, helpful group of individuals who volunteer selflessly because they also care about this open source project. Thank you!
Flutter is ready for you. What will you build?
Grow with Google in partnership with Udacity, is awarding 5,000 Nanodegree program scholarships to help aspiring developers in the US continue their digital skills training and prepare for jobs as Android or Mobile Web developers.
As part of the Grow with Google Developer Scholarship program, scholars completed an initial challenge course at Udacity - completing on average over 100 hours of coursework, building coding project portfolios and engaging with their local developer community. Today, Google and Udacity are excited to recognize the 5,000 top performers in the challenge course, and offer them a chance to continue their training through a Nanodegree program with a full scholarship.
By successfully completing a Nanodegree program, scholars earn an industry-recognized credential helping to create a path for increased job opportunities as well as prepare for one of Google's Developer Certifications: Associate Android Developer or Mobile Web Specialist. These developer training programs offer scholars the opportunity to build their skills and become job-ready, helping to close the gap in the more than 500,000 open computing jobs in the US.
We are incredibly inspired by the hard work and passion shown by all our Grow with Google developer scholars -- including these stellar scholars:
Bela from Tennessee, a mother of two working toward her goal of becoming a web developer. Bela recently shared her personal story of determination to complete her developer training.
Desmend from Illinois, who is taking what he learns in his Android developer course and sharing it with local high school students that he mentors -- teaching them about technology and the type of career opportunities offered to developers.
Sean from Alabama, a veteran using his course training to transition into the civilian workforce as an Android developer.
And Demetra from New York, who utilized the online training and forums to achieve her goal of advancing her skills in web development.
This scholarship effort is part of the Grow with Google initiative, which is aimed at helping create economic opportunities for Americans by offering free tools, training, and events. Udacity is excited to partner with Google on this powerful effort and together we look forward to seeing what these scholars will achieve in the coming year.
Today, as part of Mobile World Congress 2018, we are excited to announce the first beta release of Flutter. Flutter is Google's new mobile UI framework that helps developers craft high-quality native interfaces for both iOS and Android. Get started today at flutter.io to build beautiful native apps in record time.
Flutter targets the sweet spot of mobile development: performance and platform integrations of native mobile, with high-velocity development and multi-platform reach of portable UI toolkits.
Designed for both new and experienced mobile developers, Flutter can help you build beautiful and successful apps in record time with benefits such as:
Since our alpha release last year, we delivered, with help from our community, features such as screen reader support and other accessibility features, right-to-left text, localization and internationalization, iPhone X and iOS 11 support, inline video, additional image format support, running Flutter code in the background, and much more.
Our tools also improved significantly, with support for Android Studio, Visual Studio Code, new refactorings to help you manage your widget code, platform interop to expose the power of mobile platforms to Flutter code, improved stateful hot reloads, and a new widget inspector to help you browse the widget tree.
Thanks to the many new features across the framework and tools, teams across Google (such as AdWords) and around the world have been successful with Flutter. Flutter has been used in production apps with millions of installs, apps built with Flutter have been featured in the App Store and Play Store (for example, Hamilton: The Musical), and startups and agencies have been successful with Flutter.
For example, Codemate, a development agency in Finland, attributes Flutter's high-velocity dev cycle and customizable UI toolkit to their ability to quickly build a beautiful app for Hookle. "We now confidently recommend Flutter to help our clients perform better and deliver more value to their users across mobile," said Toni Piirainen, CEO of Codemate.
Apps built with Flutter deliver quality, performance, and customized designs across platforms.
Flutter's beta also works with a pre-release of Dart 2, with improved support for declaring UI in code with minimal language ceremony. For example, Dart 2 infers new and const to remove boilerplate when building UI. Here is an example:
// Before Dart 2 Widget build(BuildContext context) { return new Container( height: 56.0, padding: const EdgeInsets.symmetric(horizontal: 8.0), decoration: new BoxDecoration(color: Colors.blue[500]), child: new Row( ... ), ); } // After Dart 2 Widget build(BuildContext context) => Container( height: 56.0, padding: EdgeInsets.symmetric(horizontal: 8.0), decoration: BoxDecoration(color: Colors.blue[500]), child: Row( ... ), );
widget.dart on GitHub
We're thrilled to see Flutter's ecosystem thriving. There are now over 1000 packages that work with Flutter (for example: SQLite, Firebase, Facebook Connect, shared preferences, GraphQL, and lots more), over 1700 people in our chat, and we're delighted to see our community launch new sites such as Flutter Institute, Start Flutter, and Flutter Rocks. Plus, you can now subscribe to the new Flutter Weekly newsletter, edited and published by our community.
As we look forward to our 1.0 release, we are focused on stabilization and scenario completion. Our roadmap, largely influenced by our community, currently tracks features such as making it easier to embed Flutter into an existing app, inline WebView, improved routing and navigation APIs, additional Firebase support, inline maps, a smaller core engine, and more. We expect to release new betas approximately every four weeks, and we highly encourage you to vote (👍) on issues important to you and your app via our issue tracker.
Now is the perfect time to try Flutter. You can go from zero to your first running Flutter app quickly with our Getting Started guide. If you already have Flutter installed, you can switch to the beta channel using these instructions.
We want to extend our sincere thanks for your support, feedback, and many contributions. We look forward to continuing this journey with everyone, and we can't wait to see what you build!
Today, we're launching a new interactive education program for Universal App campaigns (UAC). UAC makes it easy for you to reach users and grow your app business at scale. It uses Google's machine learning technology to help find the customers that matter most to you, based on your business goals — across Google Play, Google.com, YouTube and the millions of sites and apps in the Display Network.
UAC is a shift in the way you market your mobile apps, so we designed the program's first course to help you learn how to get the best results from UAC. Here are a few reasons we encourage you take the course:
So, take the course today and let us know what you think. You can also read more about UAC best practices here and here.
Happy New Year and hope to see you in class!
We recently partnered with Awwwards, an awards platform for web development and web design, to launch a Mobile Excellence Badge on awwwards.com and a Mobile Excellence Award to recognize great mobile web experiences.
Starting this month, every agency and digital professional that submits their website to Awwwards can be eligible for a Mobile Excellence Badge, a guarantee of the performance of their mobile version. The mobile website's performance will be evaluated by a group of experts and measured against specific criteria based on Google's mobile principles on speed and usability. When a site achieves a minimum score, it will be recognized with the new Mobile Excellence Badge. All criteria are listed at the Mobile Guidelines.
The highest scoring sites with the Mobile Excellence Badge will be nominated for Mobile Site of the Week. One of them will then go on to win Mobile Site of the Month.
All Mobile Sites of the Month will be candidate for Mobile Site of the Year, with the winner receiving a physical award at the Awwwards Conference in Berlin, 8-9 February 2018.
In a time where mobile is playing a dominant role in how people access the web, it is necessary that web developers and web designers build websites that meet users' expectations. Today, 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load1 and despite the explosion of mobile usage, performance and usability of existing mobile sites remain poor and are far from meeting those expectations. At the moment, the average page load time is 22s globally2, which represents a massive missed opportunity for many companies knowing the impact of speed on conversion and bounce rates3.
If you created a great mobile web experience and want it to receive a Mobile Excellence Badge and compete for the Mobile Excellence Award submit your request here.
Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=3.7K, Global, March 2016 ↩
Google Research, Webpagetest.org, Global, sample of more than 900,000 mWeb sites across Fortune 1000 and Small Medium Businesses. Testing was performed using Chrome and emulating a Nexus 5 device on a globally representative 3G connection. 1.6Mbps download speed, 300ms Round-Trip Time (RTT). Tested on EC2 on m3.medium instances, similar in performance to high-end smartphones, Jan. 2017. ↩
Akamai.com, Online Retail Experience Report 2017 ↩
Posted by Arudea Mahartianto, Google AMP Specialist
From conception, the open source Accelerated Mobile Pages Project has had a clear goal --- to make the mobile web experience better and faster for users. This extends beyond content to creating a user-first approach to advertising as well.
To realize this vision, the AMP team created an advertising solution that follows four core principles:
Ads in AMP are delivered using the amp-ad component. Using this component you can configure your ads in a number of ways such as the width, length, layout mode and ad loading strategy. Different ad networks might allow even more options.
Here is an example of an DoubleClick responsive ad implementation in AMP:
<amp-ad width="414" height="457" layout=”responsive” type="doubleclick" data-slot="/35096353/amptesting/image/flex"> </amp-ad>
The type attribute informs the amp-ad component which ad platform to use. In this case we want DoubleClick and therefore the type value is doubleclick. For above the fold responsive ad implementation please use layout="fixed-height" instead and limit the ad height so users will get a fast loading content-focused experience from the very start.
type
doubleclick
layout="fixed-height"
Any attributes starting with data- in amp-ad are ad platform-specific attributes, including the data-slot attribute in the snippet above. Each ad platform will have different attributes available to configure. For example, compare the above DoubleClick example with another AMP ad example that uses the Rubicon platform:
data-
data-slot
<amp-ad width=320 height=50 type="rubicon" data-method="smartTag" data-account="14062" data-site="70608" data-zone="335918" data-size="43"> </amp-ad>
For more amp-ad implementation examples, please check out AMP By Example. You can also check out the amp-ad documentation for the complete list of supported ad networks and their configuration semantics.
The team is also developing newer, better ways to bring the benefits of AMP to the ads ecosystem with initiatives like AMP for Ads and AMP Ad Landing Pages. These solutions will enable advertisers to design creatives and ad landing pages that are more consistent with the AMP experience publishers are bringing to users. We believe this will bring us closer to the goal of making the entire mobile web experience faster and better for everybody.
Posted by Michael Winser, Product Lead, Google Apps and Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google Apps
Last week, we clarified the expectations and responsibilities when accessing Google user data via OAuth 2.0. Today, we’re announcing that in order to better protect users, we are increasing account security for enterprise Gmail users effective October 5, 2016. At this time, a new policy will take effect whereby users in a Google Apps domain, while changing their passwords on or after this date, will result in the revocation of the OAuth 2.0 tokens of apps that access their mailboxes using Gmail-based authorization scopes. Please note that users will not notice any specific changes on this date and their applications will continue to work. It is only when a user changes their password from that point moving forward that their Gmail-related tokens become invalid.
Developers should modify their applications to handle HTTP 400 or 401 error codes resulting from revoked tokens and prompt their users to go through the OAuth flow again to re-authorize those apps, such that they can access the user’s mailbox again (additional details below). Late last year, we announced a similar, planned change to our security policy that impacted a broader set of authorization scopes. We later decided not to move forward with that change for Apps customers and began working on a less impactful update as described above.
What is a revoked token?
A revoked OAuth 2.0 token no longer provides access to a user’s resources. Any attempt to use a revoked token in API calls will result in an error. Any existing token strings will no longer have any value and should be discarded. Applications accessing Google APIs should be modified to handle failed API calls.
Token revocation itself is not a new feature. Users have always been able to revoke access to applications in Security Checkup, and Google Apps admins have the ability to do the same in the Admin console. In addition, tokens that were not used for extended periods of time have always been subject to expiration or revocation. This change in our security policy will likely increase the rate of revoked tokens that applications see, since in some cases the process will now take place automatically.
What APIs and scopes are impacted?
To achieve the security benefits of this policy change with minimal admin confusion and end-user disruption, we’ve decided to limit its application to mail scopes only and to exclude Apps Script tokens. Apps installed via the Google Apps Marketplace are also not subject to the token revocation. Once this change is in effect, third-party mail apps like Apple Mail and Thunderbird―as well as other applications that use multiple scopes that include at least one mail scope―will stop accessing data upon password reset until a new OAuth 2.0 token has been granted. Your application will need to detect this scenario, notify the user that your application has lost access to their account data, and prompt them to go through the OAuth 2.0 flow again.
Mobile mail applications are also included in this policy change. For example, users who use the native mail application on iOS will have to re-authorize with their Google account credentials when their password has been changed. This new behavior for third-party mail apps on mobile aligns with the current behavior of the Gmail apps on iOS and Android, which also require re-authorization upon password reset.
How can I determine if my token was revoked?
Both short-lived access tokens and long-lived refresh tokens will be revoked when a user changes their password. Using a revoked access token to access an API or to generate a new access token will result in either HTTP 400 or 401 errors. If your application uses a library to access the API or handle the OAuth flow, then these errors will likely be thrown as exceptions. Consult the library’s documentation for information on how to catch these exceptions. NOTE: because HTTP 400 errors may be caused by a variety of reasons, expect the payload from a 400 due to a revoked token to be similar to the following:
{ "error_description": "Token has been revoked.", "error": "invalid_grant" }
How should my application handle revoked tokens?
This change emphasizes that token revocation should be considered a normal condition, not an error scenario. Your application should expect and detect the condition, and your UI should be optimized for restoring tokens.
To ensure that your application works correctly, we recommend doing the following:
If your application uses incremental authorization to accrue multiple scopes in the same token, you should track which features and scopes a given user has enabled. The end result is that if your app requested and obtained authorization for multiple scopes, and at least one of them is a mail scope, that token will be revoked, meaning you will need to prompt your user to re-authorize for all scopes originally granted.
Many applications use tokens to perform background or server-to-server API calls. Users expect this background activity to continue reliably. Since this policy change also affects those apps, this makes prompt notification requesting re-authorization even more important.
What is the timeline for this change?
To summarize, properly configured applications should be expected to handle invalid tokens in general, whether they be from expiration, non-existence, and revocation as normal conditions. We encourage developers to make any necessary changes to give their users the best experience possible. The policy change is planned to take effect on October 5, 2016.
Please see this Help Center article and FAQ for more details and the full list of mail scopes. Moving forward, any additional scopes to be added to the policy will be communicated in advance. We will provide those details as they become available.
Posted by Jenny Gove, UX Research Lead, Google
Mobile has shaped the way users interact with businesses and brands alike. Nowadays, businesses cannot simply replicate their desktop strategy on mobile; they need to re-think how to build mobile experiences that are useful for clients in their moments of need - those I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do, and I-want-to-buy moments throughout the day.
To help app and mobile site developers learn what comprises a best-in-class mobile experience, we’re launching a new mobile design hub on Think with Google: Designing for Mobile Micro-Moments. The new hub features in-depth research on exactly what people expect from a mobile experience.
Learn what makes a best in class mobile experience
We partnered with AnswerLab to run user studies with more than 100 people, where we tested user's behavior on more than 100 different apps and mobile sites to undercover what led to a seamless experience and what design experiences were problematic or caused frustration to users. The results are two new sets of UX principles with specific recommendations to help you improve your mobile experience and drive conversions:
Start building better mobile sites and apps today
After you’ve identified how to improve your mobile experience, you can find tools and resources to start making improvements. Here are just a few of the resources that are available on the hub:
Learn More
Visit the Designing for Mobile Micro-Moments hub on Think with Google to view the studies and get additional resources to start developing and marketing great mobile sites and apps.
Originally Posted on DoubleClick Publisher Blog
Mobile app usage has grown 90% in the past two years and contributes to 77% of the total increase in time spent in digital media. People intuitively turn to mobile devices for information and entertainment, typically spending 37 hours per month in apps. This shift in the consumer mobile experience presents a significant opportunity for increased engagement and monetization for publishers with apps.
To help you effectively capture this mobile opportunity, we’ve gathered our most actionable research and best practices for reaching, engaging, and monetizing app audiences.
Learn something new and want to know more? For more details on our four strategies for app success, review the DoubleClick for Publishers ‘Mobile Bootcamp’ blog series on growing app audiences, engaging users, ensuring high app quality, and effectively monetizing.
Users continue to move across platforms and screens. Today, more than half the queries on our platform come from mobile devices, both on mobile web and apps. The balance between monetizing your app and providing a good user experience remains tricky yet essential.
Yesterday, we focused on ways to create a high quality app for your users. Continue reading to gather app monetization recommendations from Mark Wolly, Head of Mobile Publisher Solutions at Google, and find a happy medium between effective monetization and good user experience.
There is a fundamental shift amongst consumers in their use of mobile, making it indisputable that apps play a significant role in a consumer’s mobile experience. In the time that desktop audiences have grown 1%, mobile audiences have grown a staggering 41%1.
Focusing on ways to increase app discoverability, understand user engagement, optimize app quality, and effectively monetize your app, our mobile bootcamp outlines key steps for enhancing your mobile offerings in time for the holiday season of mobile frenzy.
Posted by Chandu Thota, Engineering Director and Matthew Kulick, Product Manager
Just like lighthouses have helped sailors navigate the world for thousands of years, electronic beacons can be used to provide precise location and contextual cues within apps to help you navigate the world. For instance, a beacon can label a bus stop so your phone knows to have your ticket ready, or a museum app can provide background on the exhibit you’re standing in front of. Today, we’re beginning to roll out a new set of features to help developers build apps using this technology. This includes a new open format for Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons to communicate with people’s devices, a way for you to add this meaningful data to your apps and to Google services, as well as a way to manage your fleet of beacons efficiently.
Working closely with partners in the BLE beacon industry, we’ve learned a lot about the needs and the limitations of existing beacon technology. So we set out to build a new class of beacons that addresses real-life use-cases, cross-platform support, and security.
At the core of what it means to be a BLE beacon is the frame format—i.e., a language—that a beacon sends out into the world. Today, we’re expanding the range of use cases for beacon technology by publishing a new and open format for BLE beacons that anyone can use: Eddystone. Eddystone is robust and extensible: It supports multiple frame types for different use cases, and it supports versioning to make introducing new functionality easier. It’s cross-platform, capable of supporting Android, iOS or any platform that supports BLE beacons. And it’s available on GitHub under the open-source Apache v2.0 license, for everyone to use and help improve.
By design, a beacon is meant to be discoverable by any nearby Bluetooth Smart device, via its identifier which is a public signal. At the same time, privacy and security are really important, so we built in a feature called Ephemeral Identifiers (EIDs) which change frequently, and allow only authorized clients to decode them. EIDs will enable you to securely do things like find your luggage once you get off the plane or find your lost keys. We’ll publish the technical specs of this design soon.
Eddystone offers two key developer benefits: better semantic context and precise location. To support these, we’re launching two new APIs. The Nearby API for Android and iOS makes it easier for apps to find and communicate with nearby devices and beacons, such as a specific bus stop or a particular art exhibit in a museum, providing better context. And the Proximity Beacon API lets developers associate semantic location (i.e., a place associated with a lat/long) and related data with beacons, stored in the cloud. This API will also be used in existing location APIs, such as the next version of the Places API.
Eddystone’s extensible frame formats allow hardware manufacturers to support multiple mobile platforms and application scenarios with a single piece of hardware. An existing BLE beacon can be made Eddystone compliant with a simple firmware update. At the core, we built Eddystone as an open and extensible protocol that’s also interoperable, so we’ll also introduce an Eddystone certification process in the near future by closely working with hardware manufacturing partners. We already have a number of partners that have built Eddystone-compliant beacons.
As businesses move from validating their beacon-assisted apps to deploying beacons at scale in places like stadiums and transit stations, hardware installation and maintenance can be challenging: which beacons are working, broken, missing or displaced? So starting today, beacons that implement Eddystone’s telemetry frame (Eddystone-TLM) in combination with the Proximity Beacon API’s diagnostic endpoint can help deployers monitor their beacons’ battery health and displacement—common logistical challenges with low-cost beacon hardware.
We’re also starting to improve Google’s own products and services with beacons. Google Maps launched beacon-based transit notifications in Portland earlier this year, to help people get faster access to real-time transit schedules for specific stations. And soon, Google Now will also be able to use this contextual information to help prioritize the most relevant cards, like showing you menu items when you’re inside a restaurant.
We want to make beacons useful even when a mobile app is not available; to that end, the Physical Web project will be using Eddystone beacons that broadcast URLs to help people interact with their surroundings.
Beacons are an important way to deliver better experiences for users of your apps, whether you choose to use Eddystone with your own products and services or as part of a broader Google solution like the Places API or Nearby API. The ecosystem of app developers and beacon manufacturers is important in pushing these technologies forward and the best ideas won’t come from just one company, so we encourage you to get some Eddystone-supported beacons today from our partners and begin building!
Update (July 16, 2015 11.30am PST) To clarify, beacons registered with proper place identifiers (as defined in our Places API) will be used in Place Picker. You have to use Proximity Beacon API to map a beacon to a place identifier. See the post on Google's Geo Developer Blog for more details.
Posted by Akshay Kannan, Product Manager
Mobile phones have made it easy to communicate with anyone, whether they’re right next to you or on the other side of the world. The great irony, however, is that those interactions can often feel really awkward when you're sitting right next to someone.
Today, it takes several steps -- whether it’s exchanging contact information, scanning a QR code, or pairing via bluetooth -- to get a simple piece of information to someone right next to you. Ideally, you should be able to just turn to them and do so, the same way you do in the real world.
This is why we built Nearby. Nearby provides a proximity API, Nearby Messages, for iOS and Android devices to discover and communicate with each other, as well as with beacons.
Nearby uses a combination of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and inaudible sound (using the device’s speaker and microphone) to establish proximity. We’ve incorporated Nearby technology into several products, including Chromecast Guest Mode, Nearby Players in Google Play Games, and Google Tone.
With the latest release of Google Play services 7.8, the Nearby Messages API becomes available to all developers across iOS and Android devices (Gingerbread and higher). Nearby doesn’t use or require a Google Account. The first time an app calls Nearby, users get a permission dialog to grant that app access.
A few of our partners have built creative experiences to show what's possible with Nearby.
Edjing Pro uses Nearby to let DJs publish their tracklist to people around them. The audience can vote on tracks that they like, and their votes are updated in realtime.
Trello uses Nearby to simplify sharing. Share a Trello board to the people around you with a tap of a button.
Pocket Casts uses Nearby to let you find and compare podcasts with people around you. Open the Nearby tab in Pocket Casts to view a list of podcasts that people around you have, as well as podcasts that you have in common with others.
Trulia uses Nearby to simplify the house hunting process. Create a board and use Nearby to make it easy for the people around you to join it.
To learn more, visit developers.google.com/nearby?utm_campaign=nearby-api-714&utm_source=gdbc&utm_medium=blog.
Posted by Hillel Maoz, Engineering Lead, Search Console Team and Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst
Originally posted to the Webmaster Central blog
Wouldn’t it be nifty if you could track where your indexed app content shows up in search results, for which queries, which app pages are most popular, and which ones have errors? Yeah, we thought so too! So we’ve equipped our freshly renamed Search Console with new reports to show you how Google understands and treats your app content in search results.
Our goal is to make Search Console a comprehensive source of information for everyone who cares about search, regardless of the format of their content. So, if you own or develop an app, Search Console is your new go-to place for search stats.
Simply open Search Console and enter your app name: android-app://com.example. Of course, we’ll only show data to authorized app owners, so you need to use your Google Play account to let Search Console know you have access to the app. If you don’t have access to your app in Google Play, ask an owner to verify the app in Search Console and add you next.
Associating your site with your app is necessary for App Indexing to work. Plus, it helps with understanding and ranking the app content better.
The new Search Analytics report provides detailed information on top queries, top app pages, and traffic by country. It also has a comprehensive set of filters, allowing you to narrow down to a specific query type or region, or sort by clicks, impressions, CTR, and positions.
Use the Search Analytics report to compare which app content you consider most important with the content that actually shows up in search and gets the most clicks. If they match, you’re on the right track! Your users are finding and liking what you want them to see. If there’s little overlap, you may need to restructure your navigation, or make the most important content easier to find. Also worth checking in this case: have you provided deep links to all the app content you want your users to find?
If we encounter errors while indexing your app content, we won’t be able to show deep links for those app pages in search results. The Crawl Errors report will show you the type and number of errors we’ve detected.
We’ve created an alpha version of the Fetch as Google tool for apps to help you check if an app URI works and see how Google renders it. It can also be useful for comparing the app content with the webpage content to debug errors such as content mismatch. In many cases, the mismatch errors are caused by blocked resources within the app or by pop-ups asking users to sign in or register. Now you can see and resolve these issues.
To get started on optimizing and troubleshooting your own app, add it to Search Console now. If you want to know more about App Indexing, read about it on our Developer Site. And, as always, you’re welcome to drop by the help forum with more questions.
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