Android 5.1 Lollipop SDK

By Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

Yesterday we announced Android 5.1, an updated version of the Android Lollipop platform that improves stability, provides better control of notifications, and increases performance. As a part of the Lollipop update, we are releasing the Android 5.1 SDK (API Level 22) which supports the new platform and lets you get started with developing and testing.

What's new in Android 5.1?

For developers, Android 5.1 introduces a small set of new APIs. A key API addition is support for multiple SIM cards, which is important for many regions where Android One phones are being adopted. Consumers of Android One devices will have more flexibility to switch between carriers and manage their network activities in the way that works best for them. Therefore you, as a developer, can create new app experiences that take advantage of this new feature.

In addition to the new consumer features, Android 5.1 also enhances enterprise features to better support the launch of Android for Work.

Android 5.1 supports multiple SIM cards on compatible devices like Android One.

Updates for the Android SDK

To get you started with Android 5.1, we have updated the Android SDK tools to support the new platform and its new APIs. The SDK now includes Android 5.1 emulator system images that you can use to test your apps and develop using the latest capabilities and APIs. You can update your SDK through the Android SDK Manager in Android Studio.

For details on the new developer APIs, take a look at the API Overview.

Coming to Nexus devices soon

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out updates for Android 5.1 to the following Nexus devices: Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 7 [2012], Nexus 7 [2012] (3G), Nexus 7 (2013), Nexus 7 [2013] (3G/LTE), Nexus 9, Nexus 9 (LTE), Nexus 10, and Nexus Player.

Next Steps

As with all Android releases, it’s a good idea to test your apps on the new platform as soon as possible. You can get started today using Android 5.1 system images with the emulator that’s included in the SDK, or you can download an Android 5.1 Nexus image and flash the system image to your Nexus device.

If you have not had a chance to update your app to material design, or explore how your app might work on Android Wear, Android TV, or even Android Auto, now is a good time to get started with the Android 5.1 SDK update.

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Android 5.0 Lollipop SDK and Nexus Preview Images

Two more weeks!

By Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

At Google I/O last June, we gave you an early version of Android 5.0 with the L Developer Preview, running on Nexus 5, Nexus 7 and Android TV. Over the course of the L Developer Preview program, you’ve given us great feedback and we appreciate the engagement from you, our developer community. Thanks!

This week, we announced Android 5.0 Lollipop. Starting today, you can download the full release of the Android 5.0 SDK, along with updated developer images for Nexus 5, Nexus 7 (2013), ADT-1, and the Android emulator.

The first set of devices to run this new version of Android -- Nexus 6, Nexus 9, and Nexus Player -- will be available in early November. In the same timeframe, we'll also roll out the Android 5.0 update worldwide to Nexus 4, 5, 7 (2012 & 2013), and 10 devices, as well as to Google Play edition devices.

Therefore, now is the time to test your apps on the new platform. You have two more weeks to get ready!

What’s in Lollipop?

Android 5.0 Lollipop introduces a host of new APIs and features including:

• Material Design theme & APIs
• Enhanced Notifications for your apps
• Project Volta and Battery Historian for better power efficiency for apps
• Enhanced app runtime with Android Runtime (ART)
• OpenGL ES 3.1, Android Extension Pack & 64-bit support for better game & app performance

There's much more, so check out the Android 5.0 platform highlights for a complete overview.

What’s in the Android 5.0 SDK?

The Android 5.0 SDK includes updated tools and new developer system images for testing. You can develop against the latest Android platform using API level 21 and take advantage of the updated support library to implement Material Design as well as the leanback user interface for TV apps.

You can download these components through the Android SDK Manager and develop your app in Android Studio:

• Android 5.0 SDK Platform & Tools
• Android 5.0 Emulator System Image - 32-bit & 64-bit (x86)
• Android 5.0 Emulator System Image for Android TV (32-bit)
• Android v7 appcompat Support Library for Material Design theme backwards capability
• Android v17 leanback library for Android TV app support

For developers using the Android NDK for native C/C++ Android apps we have:

• NDK r10c with API level 21 support

For developers on Android TV devices we have:

• Android 5.0 system image over the air (OTA) update for ADT-1 Developer Kit. OTA updates will appear over the next few days.

Similar to our previous release of the preview, we are also providing updated system image downloads for Nexus 5 & Nexus 7 (2013) devices to help with your testing as well. These images support the Android 5.0 SDK, but only have the minimal apps pre-installed in order to enable developer testing:

• Nexus 5 (GSM/LTE) “hammerhead” Device System Image
• Nexus 7 (2013) - (Wifi) “razor” Device System Image

For the developer preview versions, there will not be an over the air (OTA) update. You will need to wipe and reflash your developer device to use the latest developer preview versions. If you want to receive the official consumer OTA update in November and any other official updates, you will have to have a factory image on your Nexus device.

Validate your apps with the Android 5.0 SDK

With the consumer availability of Android 5.0 and the Nexus 6, Nexus 9, and Nexus Player right around the corner, here are a few things you should do to prepare:

1. Get the emulator system images through the SDK Manager or download the Nexus device system images.
2. Recompile your apps against Android 5.0 SDK, especially if you used any preview APIs. Note: APIs have changed between the preview SDK and the final SDK.
3. Validate that your current Android apps run on the new API 21 level with ART enabled. And if you use the NDK for your C/C++ Android apps, validate against the 64-bit emulator. ART is enabled by default on API 21 & new Android devices with Android 5.0.

Once you validate your current app, explore the new APIs and features for Android 5.0.

Migrate Your Existing App to Material Design

Android 5.0 Lollipop introduces Material Design, which enables your apps to adopt a bold, colorful, and flexible design, while remaining true to a small set of key principles that guide user interaction across multiple screens and devices.

After making sure your current apps work with Android 5.0, now is the time to enable the Material theme in your app with the AppCompat support library. For quick tips & recommendations for making your app shine with Material Design, check out our Material Design guidelines and tablet optimization tips. For those of you new to Material Design, check out our Getting Started guide.

Get your apps ready for Google Play!

Starting today, you can publish your apps that are targeting Android 5.0 Lollipop to Google Play. In your app manifest, update android:targetSdkVersion to "21", test your app, and upload it to the Google Play Developer Console.

Starting November 3rd, Nexus 9 will be the first device available to consumers that will run Android 5.0. Therefore, it is a great time to publish on Google Play, once you've updated and tested your app. Even if your apps target earlier versions of Android, take a few moments to test them on the Android 5.0 system images, and publish any updates needed in advance of the Android 5.0 rollout.

Stay tuned for more details on the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9 devices, and how to make sure your apps look their best on them.

Next up, Android TV!

We also announced the first consumer Android TV device, Nexus Player. It’s a streaming media player for movies, music and videos, and also a first-of-its-kind Android gaming device. Users can play games on their HDTVs with a gamepad, then keep playing on their phones while they’re on the road. The device is also Google Cast-enabled, so users can cast your app from their phones or tablets to their TV.

If you’re developing for Android TV, watch for more information on November 3rd about how to distribute your apps to Android TV users through the Google Play Developer Console. You can start getting your app ready by making sure it meets all of the TV Quality Guidelines.

Get started with Android 5.0 Lollipop platform

If you haven’t had a chance to take a look at this new version of Android yet, download the SDK and get started today. You can learn more about what’s new in the Android 5.0 platform highlights and get all the details on new APIs and changed behaviors in the API Overview. You can also check out the latest DevBytes videos to learn more about Android 5.0 features.

Enjoy this new release of Android!

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New in Android: L Developer Preview and Google Play Services 5.0

By Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

Earlier today, at Google I/O, we showed a number of projects we’ve been working on to the thousands of developers in the audience and the millions more tuning in on the livestream. These projects extend Android to the TV (Android TV), to the car (Android Auto) and to wearables (Android Wear), among others.

At Google, our focus is providing a seamless experience for users across all of the screens in their lives. An important component to that is making sure that you as developers have all of the tools necessary to easily deploy your apps across to those screens. Increasingly, Android is becoming the fabric that weaves these experiences together, which is why you’ll be excited about a number of things we unveiled today.

Android L Developer Preview

For the first time since we launched Android, we’re giving you early access to a development version of an upcoming release. The L Developer Preview, available starting tomorrow, lets you explore many of the new features and capabilities of the next version of Android, and offers everything you need to get started developing and testing on the new platform. This is important because the platform is evolving in a significant way — not only for mobile but also moving beyond phones and tablets. Here are a few of the highlights for developers:

• Material design for the multiscreen world — We’ve been working on a new design language at Google that takes a comprehensive approach to visual, motion, and interaction design across a number of platforms and form factors. Material design is a new aesthetic for designing apps in today’s multi-device world. The L Developer Preview brings material design to Android, with a full set of tools for your apps. The system is incredibly flexible, allowing your app to express its individual character and brand with bold colors and a variety of responsive UI patterns and themeable elements.
• Enhanced notifications — New lockscreen notifications let you surface content, updates, and actions to users at a glance, without unlocking. Visibility controls let you manage the types of information shown on the lockscreen. Heads-up notifications display content and actions in a small floating window that’s managed by the system, no matter which app is in the foreground. Notifications are material themed and you can express your brand through accent colors and more.
• Document-centric Recents — Now you can organize your app by tasks and present these concurrently as individual “documents” in the Recents screen. Users can flip through Recents to find the specific task they want and then jump deep into your app with a single tap.
• Project Volta — New tools and APIs help your app run efficiently and conserve power. Battery Historian is a new tool that lets you visualize power events over time and understand how your app is using battery. A job scheduler API lets you set the conditions under which your background tasks and other jobs should run, such as when the device is idle or connected to an unmetered to a charger, to minimize battery impact.
• BLE Peripheral Mode — Android devices can now function in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) peripheral mode. Apps can use this capability to broadcast their presence to nearby devices — for example, you can now build apps that let a device to function as a pedometer or health monitor and transmit data to another BLE device.
• Multi-networking — Apps can work with the system to dynamically scan for available networks with specific capabilities and then automatically connect. This is useful when you want to manage handoffs or connect to a specialized network, such as a carrier-billing network.
• Advanced camera capabilities — A new camera API gives you new capabilities for image capture and processing. On supported devices, your app can capture uncompressed YUV capture at full 8 megapixel resolution at 30 FPS. The API also lets you capture raw sensor data and control parameters such as exposure time, ISO sensitivity, and frame duration, on a per-frame basis.
• New features for game developers — Support for OpenGL ES 3.1, gives you capabilities such as compute shaders, stencil textures, and texture gather for your games. Android Extension Pack (AEP) is a new set of extensions to OpenGL ES that bring desktop-class graphics to Android. Games will be able to take advantage of tessellation and geometry shaders, and use ASTC texture compression across multiple GPU techonolgies.
• Android Runtime (ART) — The L Developer Preview introduces the Android Runtime (ART) as the system default. ART offers ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation, more efficient garbage collection, and improved development and debugging features. In many cases it improves performance of the device with no action required by the developer.
• 64-bit support — The L Developer Preview adds support for 64-bit ABIs, for additional address space and improved performance with certain compute workloads. Apps written in the Java language can run immediately on 64-bit architectures with no modifications required. To support apps using native code, we’re also releasing an updated NDK that includes 64-bit support.

Watch for more details coming out tomorrow (26 June) on what’s in the L Developer Preview and how to get it.

Google Play Services 5.0

Along with the L Developer Preview, we also announced a new version of Google Play services that brings new capabilities and the latest optimizations to devices across the Android ecosystem. Google Play services ensures that you can build on the latest features from Google for your users, with the confidence that those services will work properly everywhere. The latest version has begun rolling out and here are some of the highlights:

• Services for Android wearables — Your apps can more easily communicate and sync with code running on Android wearables through an automatically synchronized, persistent data store and a reliable messaging interface.
• Play Games services — Build a great gaming experience with Quests, which allow event-based challenges for players to complete for rewards, Saved Games (a snapshot API allow synchronization of game data along with a cover-image and description), and Game Profile (providing experience points for players).
• App Indexing API — Surface deep content in your native mobile applications on Google search and drive additional user engagement.
• Google Cast — Use media tracks to enable closed-caption support for Chromecast.
• Drive — Sort query results, create offline folders, and select any mime type in the file picker by default.
• Wallet — Build a "Save to Wallet" button for offers directly into your app; use geo-fenced in-store notifications to prompt the user to show and scan digital cards. Split tender allows payment to be split between Wallet Balance and a credit/debit card in Google Wallet.
• Analytics — Get insights into the full user journey and understand how different user acquisition campaigns are performing with Enhanced Ecommerce, letting you measure product impressions, product clicks, and more.
• Mobile Ads — Use improved in-app purchase ads and integrations for the Play store in-app purchase API client.
• Dynamic Security Provider — Offers an alternative to the platform's secure networking APIs that can be updated more frequently, for faster delivery of security patches.

We expect the rollout of Google Play services 5.0 to take several days, after which time you’ll be able to get started developing with these new APIs.

Join us at the Google I/O sessions

If you’d like to learn more, join us for sessions on Android development, material design, game development, and more. You’ll find the full session list on the Google I/O 2014 site, and you can filter the schedule to find livestreamed sessions of interest.

Google I/O 2014 I/O Livestreams I/O Bytes Videos +Android Developers

L Developer Preview Material Design Android Wear Android TV Android Auto

Explore the conference with the Google I/O 2014 Android app:

Android SDK Tools, Revision 21

Posted by Xavier Ducrohet, Android SDK Tech Lead, and Angana Ghosh, Product Manager in Android

Along with the Android 4.2 SDK, we also launched a brand new update of the Android SDK Tools (Revision 21). The update includes new tools and capabilities that can help you work more efficiently as you create applications. Tools such as a new multi-config editor, and new Lint rules will help you develop apps more quickly, while a new UI test framework will give you more ways automate testing and QA for your apps. For new developers, one-click SDK download and new app templates help you get started more quickly.

Multi-config editor

A new multi-configuration editor allows you to develop and prototype your UI across various orientations, screen sizes and locales. For example, while editing your layout in portrait mode, you can see if your edits aren't visible in the shorter landscape orientation. You can see previews for other screen sizes from small phones to large tablets, you can see previews for the layout using all the available language translations in your app, and so on. You can even see how the layout appears when it is included as a fragment in a different larger layout. Finally, Android allows you to create specialized layouts for any of these configurations, and the multi configuration editor shows you these overridden layouts.

Here is a screenshot of the layout editor showing one of the layouts from the Google I/O application, across a variety of screen sizes.

More app templates

Tools R21 brings three new app templates to help you to easily add new screens to your app. There’s a new full-screen activity for use as a photo or video viewer, a settings activity to handle basic user preferences and a login activity to capture username/password.

UI Automator Test Framework

One common approach to UI testing is to run tests manually and verify that the app is behaving as expected. UI Automator is a new software testing framework available in Tools R21 that provides you with tools to easily automate UI testing tasks. It provides a GUI tool to scan and analyze the UI components of an Android application (uiautomatorviewer), a library containing APIs to create customized functional UI tests, and an execution engine to automate and run the tests against multiple physical devices. UI Automator runs on Android 4.1 (API level 16) or higher. To learn more head over to the UI Testing documentation.

One-click SDK installer

New Android SDK developers now have a convenient way to download all the various SDK components like Tools, Platform Tools, Eclipse ADT, and the latest system image with a single click. Existing developers can continue to manage their SDK components and get updates through the SDK Manager.

Revamped AVD creation dialog

The new dialog makes it easier to create Android Virtual Devices (AVDs) matching real device profiles. The AVDs will also appear in the layout editor to show you how the layouts will look.

More Lint rules

And to wrap things up there are 25 new lint rules which catch several common sources of bugs, for example deviations from Android design guide for icons, checks for mismanaged wakelocks, common sources of locale-related bugs and so on. So make sure you upgrade and let Lint loose on your projects before your next app update!

A minor bug-fix to the Android NDK is also available. For a complete list of what’s new, see the release notes for SDK Tools R21, ADT 21.0.0 and Android NDK R8c.

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