Inside Android’s Easter Egg Tradition

Posted by, Natalie Hammel, ½ of Nat & Lo’s 20% Project

A bit more than five years ago, I got my first smartphone. It was the Nexus One. And I didn’t know it at the time, but it was hiding a zombie gingerbread painting inside it. The first (of now many) Android “platform” easter eggs.

Android actually has a long, rich history of various mysterious and silly things tucked away inside its code for developers to enjoy. But its “platform” or “version number” easter eggs are probably the most elaborate and well-known.

Earlier this summer, my friend at work Lo and I started this project to go find out about different Google stuff we’re curious about. And one of the things we wanted to know more about was how the Android lawn sculptures get made. Which lead to us also finding out about why Android names its releases after tasty treats, and making this video.

As we were digging deeper into Android traditions, I decided to head up to Cambridge to get the inside scoop about Android’s easter eggs tradition from Android Framework Engineer / Easter Egg Painter, Dan Sandler. Which we just made this video about.

We hope you enjoyed, and maybe discovered a thing or two. And if you’re still in the mood for more Android video fun, the Android Developers YouTube channel was kind enough to recently compile all of our Android and Nexus videos to date in this playlist. (Take a look if you enjoy phone guts, silly songs, and/or stuffing your face with marshmallows.)

And since our project is ongoing, you can always subscribe to our YouTube channel if you want to check out what new stuff we’ll be learning about next.

Thanks for reading, watching, and easter-egging with us!

Android Development Patterns: A Series on Best Practices for Android Development

Posted by, Ian Lake, Developer Advocate

One of the benefits of Android development is the flexibility provided by the large number of APIs in the Android framework and Support Library, not even including the Google Play services APIs. However, that can be a lot to understand, particularly when confronted with multiple options or design decisions. Thankfully, things are about to get a lot clearer with a new series: Android Development Patterns.

The goal of Android Development Patterns is to focus on the fundamental components and best practices that can make the biggest difference in your app. We spend time talking about the why behind each API, so that you know exactly what is best for your situation.

Centered on Android framework APIs, the Android Support Library, and high level app structure and design, we’ll augment the many videos on the Android Developers YouTube channel to bring the focus back towards Android development at its core.

Android Development Patterns are more than just videos. You’ll find written pro-tips from in-house experts at Google, such as Joanna Smith and Ian Lake, every week through the Android Development Patterns Google+ Collection.

Watch all of Android Development Patterns!

Android Developer Story: Domain increases installs by 44% with Material Design and Google Play services

Posted by Lily Sheringham, Google Play team

Australian developer Domain is part of a multi-platform property business, which provides search tools and information for buyers, sellers, renters, investors, and agents across Australia. The Domain Real Estate & Property app was voted a top five lifestyle app in Australia and now has three dedicated Android developers who work closely with their design and UX teams.

Product Manager, Henrique Marassi, and Android Developer, Gary Lo, explain how Domain successfully improved their user rating from 2.8 to 4.1 and increased monthly downloads by 44 percent by adopting Material Design and Play services to create a better user experience.

Learn more about how Domain found success on Google Play:

• Material Design guidelines: How Material Design helps you create beautiful, engaging apps.
• Google Play services: Learn more about Google Play services and the APIs available to you through it.
• Find success on Google Play: Products and best practices to help your grow you business globally on Google Play.

New permissions requirements for Android TV

Posted by Anirudh Dewani, Developer Advocate

Android 6.0 introduces a new runtime permission model that gives users more granular control over granting permissions requested from their apps and leads to faster app installs. Users can also revoke these permissions from Settings at any point of time. If an app running on the M Preview supports the new permissions model, the user does not have to grant any permissions when they install or upgrade the app. Developers should check for permissions that require runtime grant from users, and request them if the app doesn’t already have them.

To list all permissions that require runtime grant from users on Android 6.0 -

adb shell pm list permissions -g -d 

RECORD_AUDIO

Apps should generally request as few permissions as possible. Voice search is an integral part of Android TV content discovery experience. When using the internal SpeechRecognizer to enable Voice Search, apps must declare RECORD_AUDIO permission in the manifest. RECORD_AUDIO requires explicit user grant during runtime in Android 6.0. When using the Android TV Leanback support library, apps can eliminate the need for requesting RECORD_AUDIO during runtime by using SpeechRecognitionCallback instead of SpeechRecognizer.

SearchActivity.java

Commit from Android TV Leanback Sample repository.

mFragment = (SearchFragment) getFragmentManager()
                .findFragmentById(R.id.search_fragment);

if (!USE_INTERNAL_SPEECH_RECOGNIZER) {
   
    mSpeechRecognitionCallback = new SpeechRecognitionCallback() {
        
        @Override
        public void recognizeSpeech() {
            if (DEBUG) Log.v(TAG, "recognizeSpeech");
        
            // ACTION_RECOGNIZE_SPEECH
            startActivityForResult(mFragment.getRecognizerIntent(), REQUEST_SPEECH);
        }
    };
    mFragment.setSpeechRecognitionCallback(mSpeechRecognitionCallback);
}

When SpeechRecognitionCallback is set, Android Leanback support library will let the your activity process the voice search action instead of using the internal SpeechRecognizer. The app can then use RecognizerIntent to support speech recognition.

If you have an Android TV app targeting API Level 23, please update the app to use SpeechRecognitionCallback and remove RECORD_AUDIO permission from your manifest.

New Course: Android Design for Developers

Posted by Nick Butcher, pixel pusher

What makes an app intuitive and easy to use? What makes it hard or frustrating? How can your app stand out in a competitive market? Learn the fundamentals of good Android design and the patterns that have proven to work on Android to help you to build better apps.

This 5-lesson series, available on Udacity, begins with a crash course on the fundamentals of Android UI design. It helps you to sort your DIPs from your pixels, to pick the right layouts and navigation structures and shows you how to style your app to match your brand. The rest of the course is a deep dive into the principles and implementation of material design to show you how to build beautiful consistent experiences that are right at home on Android.

Lesson 2 dives into the concept of tangible surfaces, and how they establish hierarchy to make your UI more understandable. Lesson 3 looks at applying bold graphic design, or how the principles of space, color, typography and imagery help you to create a beautiful, branded experience. Lesson 4 studies the use of meaningful motion to bring your apps to life and create a seamless and more intuitive experience. Finally, lesson 5 shows how adaptive design makes your app shine on any screen size.

This course is aimed at developers familiar with Android who want to boost their design skills or designers who want to understand more about the platform they’re creating for. The full course is available for free or you can enroll in Udacity’s Android Nanodegree for extra help and support. So sign up for the Android design for developers course and go build something brilliant!

Low-overhead rendering with Vulkan

Posted by Shannon Woods, Technical Program Manager

Developers of games and 3D graphics applications have one key challenge to meet: How complex a scene can they draw in a small fraction of a second? Much of the work in graphics development goes into organizing data so it can be efficiently consumed by the GPU for rendering. But even the most careful developers can hit unforeseen bottlenecks, in part because the drivers for some graphics processors may reorganize all of that data before it can actually be processed. The APIs used to control these drivers are also not designed for multi-threaded use, requiring synchronization with locks around calls that could be more efficiently done in parallel. All of this results in CPU overhead, which consumes time and power that you’d probably prefer to spend drawing your scene.

Lowering overhead and handing control to developers

In order to address some of the sources of CPU overhead and provide developers with more explicit control over rendering, we’ve been working to bring a new 3D rendering API, Vulkan™, to Android. Like OpenGL™ ES, Vulkan is an open standard for 3D graphics and rendering maintained by Khronos. Vulkan is being designed from the ground up to minimize CPU overhead in the driver, and allow your application to control GPU operation more directly. Vulkan also enables better parallelization by allowing multiple threads to perform work such as command buffer construction at once.

An API is only useful if it does what you expect

To make it easier to write an application once that works across a variety of devices, Android 5.0 Lollipop significantly expanded the Android Compatibility Test Suite (CTS) with over fifty thousand new tests for OpenGL ES, and many more have been added since. This provides an extensive open source test suite for identifying problems in drivers so that they can be fixed, creating a more robust and reliable experience for both developers and end users. For Vulkan, we’ll not only develop similar tests for use in the Android CTS, but we’ll also contribute them to Khronos for use in Vulkan’s own open source Conformance Test Suite. This will enable Khronos to test Vulkan drivers across platforms and hardware, and improve the 3D graphics ecosystem as a whole.

It’s all about developer choice

We’ll be working hard to help create, test, and ship Vulkan, but at the same time, we’re also going to contribute to and support OpenGL ES. As a developer, you’ll be able to choose which API is right for you: the simplicity of OpenGL ES, or the explicit control of Vulkan. We’re committed to providing an excellent developer experience, no matter which API you choose.

Vulkan is still under development, but you’ll be able to find specifications, tests, and tools once they are released at http://www.khronos.org/vulkan.

Get your hands on Android Studio 1.3

Posted by Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

Previewed earlier this summer at Google I/O, Android Studio 1.3 is now available on the stable release channel. We appreciated the early feedback from those developers on our canary and beta channels to help ship a great product.

Android Studio 1.3 is our biggest feature release for the year so far, which includes a new memory profiler, improved testing support, and full editing and debugging support for C++. Let’s take a closer look.

New Features in Android Studio 1.3

Performance & Testing Tools

• Android Memory (HPROF) Viewer

  Android Studio now allows you to capture and analyze memory snapshots in the native Android HPROF format.

• Allocation Tracker

  In addition to displaying a table of memory allocations that your app uses, the updated allocation tracker now includes a visual way to view the your app allocations.

• APK Tests in Modules

  For more flexibility in app testing, you now have the option to place your code tests in a separate module and use the new test plugin (‘com.android.test’) instead of keeping your tests right next to your app code. This feature does require your app project to use the Gradle Plugin 1.3.

Code and SDK Management

• App permission annotations

  Android Studio now has inline code annotation support to help you manage the new app permissions model in the M release of Android. Learn more about code annotations.

• Data Binding Support

  New data brinding features allow you to create declarative layouts in order to minimize boilerplate code by binding your application logic into your layouts. Learn more about data binding.

• SDK Auto Update & SDK Manager

  Managing Android SDK updates is now a part of the Android Studio. By default, Android Studio will now prompt you about new SDK & Tool updates. You can still adjust your preferences with the new & integrated Android SDK Manager.

• C++ Support

  As a part of the Android 1.3 stable release, we included an Early Access Preview of the C++ editor & debugger support paired with an experimental build plugin. See the Android C++ Preview page for information on how to get started. Support for more complex projects and build configurations is in development, but let us know your feedback.

Time to Update

An important thing to remember is that an update to Android Studio does not require you to change your Android app projects. With updating, you get the latest features but still have control of which build tools and app dependency versions you want to use for your Android app.

For current developers on Android Studio, you can check for updates from the navigation menu. For new users, you can learn more about Android Studio on the product overview page or download the stable version from the Android Studio download site.

We are excited to launch this set of features in Android Studio and we are hard at work developing the next set of tools to make develop Android development easier on Android Studio. As always we welcome feedback on how we can help you. Connect with the Android developer tools team on Google+.

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[New eBook] Download The No-nonsense Guide to App Growth

Originally posted on the AdMob Blog.

What’s the secret to rapid growth for your app?

Play Store or App Store optimization? A sophisticated paid advertising strategy? A viral social media campaign?

While all of these strategies could help you grow your user base, the foundation for rapid growth is much more basic and fundamental—you need an engaging app.

This handbook will walk you through practical ways to increase your app’s user engagement to help you eventually transition to growth. You’ll learn how to:

• Pick the right metric to represent user engagement
• Look at data to audit your app and find areas to fix
• Promote your app after you’ve reached a healthy level of user engagement

Download a free copy here.

For more tips on app monetization, be sure to stay connected on all things AdMob by following our Twitter and Google+ pages.

Posted by Raj Ajrawat, Product Specialist, AdMob

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Introducing new Android training programs with Udacity

Posted by Peter Lubbers, Senior Program Manager, Google Developer Training

We know how important it is for you to efficiently develop the skills to build better Android apps and be successful in your jobs. To meet your training needs, we’ve partnered with Udacity to create Android training courses, ranging from beginner to more advanced content.

Last week at Google I/O we announced the Android Nanodegree, an education credential that is designed for busy people to learn new skills and advance their careers in a short amount of time from anywhere at any time. The nanodegree ties together our Android courses, and provides you with a certificate that may help you be a more marketable Android developer.

Training courses

All training courses are developed and taught by expert Google instructors from the Developer Platform team. In addition to updating our popular Developing Android Apps course and releasing Advanced Android App Development, we now have courses for everyone from beginning programmers to advanced developers who want to configure their Gradle build settings. And then there's all the fun stuff in between—designing great-looking, high performance apps, making your apps run on watches, TVs, and in cars, and using Google services like Maps, Ads, Analytics, and Fit.

Each course is available individually, without charge, at udacity.com/google. Our instructors are waiting for you:

Android Nanodegree

You can also enroll in the new Android Nanodegree for a monthly subscription fee, which gives you access to coaches who will review your code, provide guidance on your project, answer questions about the class, and help keep you on track when you need it.

More importantly, you will learn by doing, focusing only on where you need to grow. Since the Nanodegree is based on your skills and the projects in your portfolio, you do not need to complete the courses that address the skills you already have. You can focus on writing the code and building the projects that meet the requirements for the Nanodegree credential. We’ll also be inviting 50 Android Nanodegree graduates to Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, for a three day intensive Android Career Summit in November. Participants will have the opportunity to experience Google’s company culture and attend workshops focused on developing their personal career paths. Participants will then leverage the skills learned from Udacity’s Android Nanodegree during a two-day hackathon.

To help you learn more about this program and and courses within it, Google and Udacity are partnering up for an "Ask the Experts" live streamed series. In the first episode on Wednesday, June 3rd at 2pm PDT, Join Sebastian Thrun, Peter Lubbers and Jocelyn Becker who will be answering your questions on the Nanodegree. RSVP here and ask and vote for questions here.

Android training in Arabic

We also believe that everyone has the right to learn how to develop Android apps. Today, there is a great need for developers in countries outside of the United States as software powers every industry from food and transportation to healthcare and retail. As a first step in getting the Android Nanodegree localized and targeted for individual countries, we have worked with the Government of Egypt and Udacity to create end-to-end translations of our top Android courses into Arabic (including fully dubbed video). Google will offer 2,000 scholarships to students to get a certificate for completing the Arabic version of the Android Fundamentals course. Google will also host job fairs and sessions for students with local employers and the Egyptian Government. For more information, see www.udacity.com/egypt.

Complete Android course catalog

Here are the currently-planned courses in the Android Nanodegree:

• Android App Development for Beginners: How to Make an Android App, with Katherine Kuan
• Developing Android Apps: Android Fundamentals, with Reto Meier, Katherine Kuan, Dan Galpin and Alex Lucas
• Advanced Android app development: Productionize and Publish Your Apps, with Dan Galpin, Ian Lake and Joanna Smith
• Google Play services: Use Google APIs to Improve Your Apps (Maps, Location, and more!), with Jocelyn Becker, Magnus Hyttsten and Laurence Moroney
• Android Ubiquitous Computing: Extend Apps to Wearables, TV and Auto, with Timothy Jordan, Wayne Piekarski and Joshua Gordon
• Android Performance: Optimizing Apps for Speed and Usability, with Colt McAnlis
• Android Design for Developers: Make Your Apps Material, with Nick Butcher and Roman Nurik
• Gradle for Android and Java: Build Better Apps Though Automation with Gradle

So get learning now at udacity.com/android

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Android Developer Story: Wooga’s fast iterations on Android and Google Play

Posted by Leticia Lago, Google Play team

In order to make the best possible games, Wooga works on roughly 40 concepts and prototypes per year, out of which 10 go into production, around seven soft launch, and only two make it to global launch. It’s what they call “the hit filter." For their latest title, Agent Alice, they follow up with new episodes every week to maintain player interest and engagement over time.

The ability to quickly iterate both live and under development games is therefore key to Wooga’s business model — Android and Google Play provide them the tools they need and mean that new features and updates are made on Android first, before they get to other platforms.

Find out more from Sebastian Kriese, Head of Partnerships, and Pal Tamas Feher, Head of Engineering, and learn how the iteration features of Android and Google Play have contributed to successes such as Diamond Dash, Jelly Splash, and Agent Alice.

You can find out more about building successful games businesses on Android and Google Play at Google I/O 2015: in person, on the live stream, or session recordings after the event. Check out the following:

• Developers connecting the world through Google Play - Hear how the new mobile ecosystem including Google Play and Android are empowering developers to make good on the dream of connecting the world through technology to improve people's lives. This session will be live streamed.
• Growing games with Google — In addition to consoles, PC, and browser gaming, as well as phone and tablet games, there are emerging fields including virtual reality and mobile games in the living room. This talk covers how Google is helping developers across this broad range of platforms. This session will be live streamed.
• What’s new in the Google Play Developer Console - Google Play’s new launches will help you acquire more users and improve the quality of your app. Hear an overview of the latest features and how you can start taking advantage of them in the Developer Console.
• Smarter approaches to app testing — Hear about the new ways Google can help maximize the success of your next app launch with cheaper and easier testing strategies.

A New Reference App for Multi-device Applications

It is now possible to bring the benefits of your app to your users wherever they happen to be, no matter what device they have near them. Today we’re releasing a reference sample that shows how to implement such a service with an app that works across multiple Android form-factors. This sample, the Universal Music Player, is a bare-bones but functional reference app that supports multiple devices and form factors in a single codebase. It is compatible with Android Auto, Android Wear, and Google Cast devices. Give it a try and easily adapt your own app for wherever your users are, be that a phone, watch, TV, car, or more!

Playback controls and album art in the lock screen.
On the application toolbar, the Google Cast icon.

Controlling playback through Android Auto

Controlling playback on an Android Wear watch

This sample uses a number of new features in Android 5.0 Lollipop, like MediaStyle notifications, MediaSession and MediaBrowserService. They make it easy to implement media browsing and playback on multiple devices with a single version of your app.

Check out the source code and let your users enjoy your app from wherever they like.

Posted by Renato Mangini, Senior Developer Platform Engineer, Google Developer Platform Team

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Your Chance to be on TV!

By Tarjei Vassbotn and Dan Galpin, Developer Advocates, Android TV

We’re excited to see the launch of Nexus Player, the first consumer streaming media player running Android TV. Android TV delivers an entertainment experience tailored for users, including movies, shows, games and more.
Now is a great time to develop apps for Android TV that reach a whole new audience.

Starting today, you can publish your apps for Android TV on Google Play, the largest digital store for apps and games. We’ve provided guidance on how to get started building great apps for Android TV in this post.

"Google has done an insanely good job to ease the developer’s task of creating a TV application, mainly thanks to the Leanback support library. It literally takes 2 hours to create a fully working and possibly fancy app, which is awesome."

- Sebastiano Gottardo

A high bar for quality experiences

We want to offer the best possible experience for users to enjoy your apps and games. To make this possible, your Android TV app must meet the basic requirements for usability. When your app meets these requirements, users will be able to discover and download it directly on their Android TV devices.

Even if you have already uploaded your app to the Google Play Developer Console, you will need to add TV graphics and screenshots, and opt-in to distribution on TV on the Pricing & Distribution page. For complete information about the requirements and process of publishing your Android TV app for Google Play, make sure to check out the publishing documentation.

Get started!

With our Leanback Library we’ve made it easy for you to extend your existing app to the TV screen or even build a completely new app for Android TV. For a quick look at the Leanback Library, check out this DevBytes video.

We’ve only begun scratching the surface of what’s possible with this new form factor, and we are very excited to see what you will build, start developing today!

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Messaging on Android Wear

By Timothy Jordan, Developer Advocate

Sending messages on Android Wear feels as easy as it was to pass notes back in school. Remember when your friends always felt nearby? That feeling is why I love staying in touch with friends and family using my wearable.

Your messaging app likely already works on Android Wear. With just a few more lines of code you can unlock simple but powerful features that let your users communicate even more effortlessly.

Message notifications for free

If your Android app uses notifications to let the user know about new messages, these will work automatically on their wearable. That is, when you build notifications with the NotificationCompat.Builder class, the system takes care of displaying them properly, whether they appear on a handheld or wearable. Also, an "Open on phone" action will be added so it's easy for the user to reply via the app on their handheld.

Google+ Hangouts message.

Reply like a champ

Messages on Wear get really exciting when you can reply directly from the watch with your voice. In addition to being super convenient, this always gives me a Dick Tracy thrill… but maybe that's just me. =]

To add this functionality, it's as simple as adding an action to the notification via WearableExtender that includes a RemoteInput to your notification. After the user replies, you'll just grab their voice input as a string from the RemoteInput included in the Intent. You can even include text responses the user can easily select from a list by passing an array of them to the setChoices method of the RemoteInput. More details and code can be found here.

WhatsApp message with the reply by voice action.

See who is texting

Messages are more meaningful when you are connected to the sender. That's why we recommend you include the photo of the sender as the background of the notification. As soon as the user taps into the message, they also see who it's from, which will make it matter more (or maybe that other thing, depending on who it is).

You should add a photo with a resolution of at least 400x400, but we recommend 640x400. With the larger size, the background will be given parallax scrolling. If the background is to be included in the apk, place it in the res/drawable-nodpi directory. Then call setBackground() on your WearableExtender and add it to your notification. More details and code can be found here.

Path Talk message with a clear picture of the sender.

Custom actions

Basic notifications with reply by voice and a good background image are the most important parts to get done right away. But why stop there? It's easy to extend the unique parts of your service to the wearable. A simple first step is adding in a custom action the way Omlet does. These are just actions defined with the WearableExtender that raise an intent on the handheld.

Omlet includes two extra actions with every message: Like and Check-In. Check-In sends along the user's current location.

Custom Layouts

Custom interaction on the wearable, like the following example from TextMe, is straightforward to implement. They have what appears to be a simple notification with an action that allows the user to select an emoticon. However, to show this emoticon picker, they are actually issuing a notification from the wearable. The round trip looks something like this:

1. The handheld gets a new message, issues a notification setLocalOnly(True), and sends a message to the wearable using the Data Layer API
2. The wearable receives that message using the WearableListenerService and issues a custom notification with a PendingIntent to launch an activity when the user views the notification
3. That activity has a custom layout defined with the Wearable UI Library
4. Once the user selects an emoticon, the wearable sends a message back to the handheld
5. The handheld receives that message and sends it along to the server

Custom layouts are documented in more depth here.

TextMe allows users to reply with a quick emoticon.

Next steps

Make your messaging service awesome by providing rich functionality on the user's wearable. It's easy to get started and easy to go further. It all starts at developer.android.com/wear.

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Google Play Services 6.1

Google Play services 6.1 is now rolled out to devices worldwide, bringing you the newest features from Google to help you optimize your apps. You can get started developing today by downloading the Google Play services SDK from the Android SDK Manager.

Google Play services 6.1 adds Enhanced Ecommerce analytics support from Google Tag Manager and offers new improvements to the Google Drive Android API. With the latest release, we’re also including a refresh of the Google Fit developer preview, so that you can test your fitness apps on any Android device.

Analytics

Launched in Google Play services 5.0, Enhanced Ecommerce is an analytics extension designed to provide richer insights into pre-purchase shopping behavior and into product performance. It’s a great way to gain visibility into the full customer journey, helping you understand how different user acquisition campaigns are performing at a granular level. By including support for Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Tag Manager with the latest release of Google Play services, we are supercharging your ability to regularly update and manage tags on mobile apps more easily, so that you can consistently measure product impressions, shopping funnel events, and more.

Drive

To make it easier to use Drive, we added enhancements to the Google Drive Android API. With the new Completion Events feature, you can see when actions are committed to the server and improve the response time to conflicts. Material design elements have been incorporated into the File Picker UI, along with the addition of Recent and Starred views. A new setParents() method enables you to organize files and folders, while the previous Contents class has been replaced with a simpler DriveContents class.

Learn more about how to use these new features in this DevBytes video.

Google Fit

Initially introduced in August, the Google Fit Developer Preview has been refreshed to enable you to test your new fitness apps on any Android device. We expect to make additional changes to the APIs, so please check back with us on new developments.

Get Started

To get started developing, download the latest Google Play services SDK from the Android SDK Manager. For details on the new APIs, take a look at the New Features documentation. For setup information, see Set Up Google Play Services SDK.

To learn more about Google Play services and the APIs available to you through it, visit the Google Services section on the Android Developers site.

We hope you enjoy this release of Google Play services!

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Android One: Bringing Your Apps to the Next Five Billion

Posted by Rich Hyndman, Developer Advocate

With the launch of Android One, more people across the world will have access to high-quality and affordable smartphones, packed with plenty of processing power and running the latest version of Android. These devices are available now in India and soon in Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Asia, so now is a good time to make sure your apps are ready for these new markets. This post highlights a few areas to consider.

These days, we often talk about smooth, 60fps transitions and keeping apps jank-free, and rightly so — performance is a critical metric for app quality. But in the user experience hierarchy of needs, an app should first and foremost do its job reliably and consistently.

If your app has search functionality, will user requests time out entirely? Do you think it is more important that a result is returned in a timely manner, or that the result is returned at all? If you're trying to build a robust app to reach the next five billion, it might be less about returning a result immediately, and more about returning a result at all. To address this challenge, why not include an option to users to “notify me with the results” when a search query is running on a slow network? Your app can then take as long as it needs to successfully retrieve the data in the background and show a notification when complete. The difference in user experience between an app that times out on a slower network and one that caters to user-specific needs will be very impactful for driving mobile app adoption.

There are also ways to test app performance without flying around the globe. The Android Emulator has network speed and network delay emulation settings, which can become an integral part of your testing strategy. If you’re testing on physical hardware, try turning off WiFi and switching the network to 2G only; how well does your app perform? Do search pages load? Does data refresh? These issues can often be fixed with relatively minor changes to your app logic or by leveraging a SyncAdapter. Check out our blog post on sync in the Google I/O app for more ideas.

Another key area for you to be aware of is app memory utilization. As part of the KitKat launch, we added new tools to the SDK for analyzing memory use and new APIs like isLowRamDevice(). We also just added a Memory Monitor to Android Studio 0.8.10 (currently in Canary). Much of this is documented in our Best Practices for Performance guide.

Moving forward, the Android L release has a strong focus on battery usage and analysis. Project Volta introduces new tools, such as Battery Historian and new APIs like JobScheduler, that can really help optimize battery use of your app.

By ensuring your app works well on slower networks, uses minimal memory, minimizes battery usage and doesn’t have a larger-than-necessary APK, you will help the next five billion discover, use and love your app.

Learn How UX Design can Make Your App More Successful

By Nazmul Idris, a Developer Advocate at Google who's passionate about Android and UX design

As a mobile developer, how do you create 5-star apps that your users will not just download, but love to use every single day? How do you get your app noticed, and how do you drive engagement? One way is to focus on excellence in design — from visual and interaction design to user research, in other words: UX design.

If you’re new to the world of UX design but want to embrace it to improve your apps, we've created a new online course just for you. The UX Design for Mobile Developers course teaches you how to put your designer hat on, in addition to your developer hat, as you think about your apps' ideal user and how to meet their needs.

The course is divided into a series of lessons, each of which gives you practical takeaways that you can apply immediately to start seeing the benefits of good UX design.

Without jargon or buzzwords, the course teaches you where you should focus your attention, to bring in new users, keep existing users engaged, and increase your app's ratings. You'll learn how to optimize your app, rather than optimizing login/signup forms, and how to use low-resolution wireframing.

After you take the course, you'll "level up" from being an excellent developer to becoming an excellent design-minded developer.

Check out the video below to get a taste of what the course is like, and click through this short deck for an overview of the learning plan.

The full course materials — all the videos, quizzes, and forums — are available for free for all students by selecting “View Courseware”. Personalized ongoing feedback and guidance from Coaches is also available to anyone who chooses to enroll in Udacity’s guided program.

If that’s not enough, for even more about UX design from a developer's perspective, check out our YouTube UXD series, on the AndroidDevelopers channel: http://bit.ly/uxdplaylist.

Android Developers
at Udacity

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KNOX Contribution to Android: Accelerating Android in the Workplace

Srikanth Rajagopalan, PM Director and Workplace aficionado

Recently at Google I/O, we announced a comprehensive set of new features that will allow IT organizations to easily deploy and manage Android devices in enterprise environments. These features will be built into the upcoming Android L release.

Samsung, with its KNOX technology, has been a thought leader in the enterprise mobility space. In order to accelerate Android adoption in the enterprise, we have partnered with Samsung to bring key KNOX functionality into Android, for the benefit of the entire Android ecosystem. We thank Samsung for their contributions. These new capabilities will make it easy for IT organizations to allow employees to bring their own Android devices to work (BYOD) and use them on the corporate network or to simply issue new Android devices to their employees. IT administrators will be able to manage a wide range of Android devices from many manufacturers, using third-party Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solutions that are built on top of the new enterprise APIs launching with Android L release.

Google and Samsung together designed the new enterprise APIs around three major concepts:

• Device and data security
• Support for IT policies and restrictions
• Mobile application management

Device and data security

At the core of the expanded enterprise capabilities being introduced in Android ‘L’ lies a set of technologies that are designed to keep personal and corporate data both separate and safe. We achieve the data separation by building on the existing multi-user support in Android: personal and corporate applications will run as two separate Android users. Data is kept safe by using block-level disk encryption as well as verified boot technology. For those of you familiar with KNOX, this is analogous to KNOX Workspace. EMMs will be able to take advantage of new Android SDK APIs to enable the creation of a managed profile, which is where all corporate applications and data will reside.

Support for IT restrictions and policies

EMMs can use new Android SDK APIs , which have evolved from KNOX APIs, to allow IT admins to enforce a wide set of policies, ranging from system settings and certificate provisioning to application-specific (e.g. Chrome) configurations and restrictions.

Mobile application management

EMMs will be able to use new backend APIs, adapted from KNOX APIs and built around strong security principles for on-device app deployment, to allow IT admins to curate the corporate application catalog and to remotely deploy applications to the managed profile on the employees’ devices.

We encourage developers interested in the new Enterprise APIs to download and test the Android L Developer Preview. For developers who have already built applications using Samsung KNOX APIs, Samsung will be providing a KNOX Compatibility Library that will let such applications run on all Android L devices.

You can read more about this collaboration on the Samsung KNOX blog. Stay tuned for additional details.

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Learn to Think Like an Android Developer

By Reto Meier, Head of Scalable Developer Advocacy

Today I’m proud to announce the latest resource for learning to develop Android apps: Developing Android Apps: Android Fundamentals.

Android Fundamentals is an online training course featuring Google Developer Advocates Reto Meier, Dan Galpin, and Katherine Kuan, working with the team at Udacity that’s advanced and technical enough for experienced developers who are new to Android — maybe even new to mobile — but not new to programming.

The course offers step-by-step training in which you’ll build an Android app, and learn best practices of mobile development in general and Android development in particular.

The full course materials — all the videos, quizzes, and forums — are available for free for all students by selecting “View Courseware”. Personalized ongoing feedback and guidance from Coaches is also available to anyone who chooses to enroll in Udacity’s guided program.

This guided course, along with UX Design for Mobile Developers and Mobile Web Development, complement our existing material—including documentation, samples, and videos — to offer a solid grounding in developing great experiences for people using mobile devices. Check out the trailer below for an overview of what's in the course.

Mobile devices are the platform that will bring the next five billion people online. With Android expanding rapidly into emerging markets, and growing beyond phones and tablets into wearables, auto, and TV, learning the fundamentals behind Android development represents an opportunity to affect and improve the lives of billions of people.

We look forward to seeing what the next wave of Android developers build, and we’ll keep exploring new ways to help you become better developers.

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Google Play Services 5.0

Google Play services 5.0 is now rolled out to devices worldwide, and it includes a number of features you can use to improve your apps. This release introduces Android wearable services APIs, Dynamic Security Provider and App Indexing, whilst also including updates to the Google Play game services, Cast, Drive, Wallet, Analytics, and Mobile Ads.

Android wearable services

Google Play services 5.0 introduces a set of APIs that make it easier to communicate with your apps running on Android wearables. The APIs provide an automatically synchronized, persistent data store and a low-latency messaging interface that let you sync data, exchange control messages, and transfer assets.

Dynamic security provider

Provides an API that apps can use to easily install a dynamic security provider. The dynamic security provider includes a replacement for the platform's secure networking APIs, which can be updated frequently for rapid delivery of security patches. The current version includes fixes for recent issues identified in OpenSSL.

Google Play game services

Quests are a new set of APIs to run time-based goals for players, and reward them without needing to update the game. To do this, you can send game activity data to the Quests service whenever a player successfully wins a level, kills an alien, or saves a rare black sheep, for example. This tells Quests what’s going on in the game, and you can use that game activity to create new Quests. By running Quests on a regular basis, you can create an unlimited number of new player experiences to drive re-engagement and retention.

Saved games lets you store a player's game progress to the cloud for use across many screen, using a new saved game snapshot API. Along with game progress, you can store a cover image, description and time-played. Players never play level 1 again when they have their progress stored with Google, and they can see where they left off when you attach a cover image and description. Adding cover images and descriptions provides additional context on the player’s progress and helps drive re-engagement through the Play Games app.

App Indexing API

The App Indexing API provides a way for you to notify Google about deep links in your native mobile applications and drive additional user engagement. Integrating with the App Indexing API allows the Google Search app to serve up your app’s history to users as instant Search suggestions, providing fast and easy access to inner pages in your app. The deep links reported using the App Indexing API are also used by Google to index your app’s content and surface them as deep links to Google search result.

Google Cast

The Google Cast SDK now includes media tracks that introduce closed caption support for Chromecast.

Drive

The Google Drive API adds the ability to sort query results, create folders offline, and select any mime type in the file picker by default.

Wallet

Wallet objects from Google take physical objects (like loyalty cards, offers) from your wallet and store them in the cloud. In this release, Wallet adds "Save to Wallet" button support for offers. When a user clicks "Save to Wallet" the offer gets saved and shows up in the user's Google Wallet app. Geo-fenced in-store notifications prompt the user to show and scan digital cards at point-of-sale, driving higher redemption. This also frees the user from having to carry around offers and loyalty cards.

Users can also now use their Google Wallet Balance to pay for Instant Buy transactions by providing split tender support. With split tender, if your Wallet Balance is not sufficient, the payment is split between your Wallet Balance and a credit/debit card in your Google Wallet.

Analytics

Enhanced Ecommerce provides visibility into the full customer journey, adding the ability to measure product impressions, product clicks, viewing product details, adding a product to a shopping cart, initiating the checkout process, internal promotions, transactions, and refunds. Together they help users gain deeper insights into the performance of their business, including how far users progress through the shopping funnel and where they are abandoning in the purchase process. Enhanced Ecommerce also allows users to analyze the effectiveness of their marketing and merchandising efforts, including the impact of internal promotions, coupons, and affiliate marketing programs.

Mobile Ads

Google Mobile Ads are a great way to monetise your apps and you now have access to better in-app purchase ads. We've now added a default implementation for consumable purchases using the Google Play In-app Billing service.

And that’s another release of Google Play services. The updated Google Play services SDK is now available through the Android SDK manager. For details on the APIs, please see New Features in Google Play services 5.0.

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Google Play services 4.4

A new release of Google Play services has now been rolled out to the world, and as usual we have a number of features that can make your apps better than before. This release includes a major enhancement to Maps with the introduction of Street View, as well as new features in Location, Games Services, Mobile Ads, and Wallet API.

Here are the highlights of Google Play services release 4.4:

Google Maps Android API

Starting with a much anticipated announcement for the Google Maps Android API: Introducing Street View. You can now embed Street View imagery into an activity enabling your users to explore the world through panoramic 360-degree views. Programmatically control the zoom and orientation (tilt and bearing) of the Street View camera, and animate the camera movements over a given duration. Here is an example of what you can do with the API, where the user navigates forward one step:

We've also added more features to the Indoor Maps feature of the API. You can turn the default floor picker off - useful if you want to build your own. You can also detect when a new building comes into focus, and find the currently-active building and floor. Great if you want to show custom markup for the active level, for example.

Activity Recognition

And while we are on the topic of maps, let’s turn to some news in the Location API. For those of you that have used this API, you may have seen the ability already there to detect if the device is in a vehicle, on a bicycle, on foot, still, or tilting.

In this release, two new activity detectors have been added: Running, and Walking. So a great opportunity to expand your app to be even more responsive to your users. And for you that have not worked with this capability earlier, we hardly need to tell the cool things you can do with it. Just imagine combining this capability with features in Maps, Games Services, and other parts of Location...

Games Services Update

In the 4.3 release we introduced Game Gifts, which allows you to request gifts or wishes. And although there are no external API changes this time, the default requests sending UI has been extended to now allow the user to select multiple Game Gifts recipients. For your games this means more collaboration and social engagement between your players.

Mobile Ads

For Mobile Ads, we’ve added new APIs for publishers to display in-app promo ads, which enables users to purchase advertised items directly. We’re offering app developers control of targeting specific user segments with ads, for example offering high-value users an ad for product A, or new users with an ad for product B, etc.

With these extensions, users can conveniently purchase in-app items that interest them, advertisers can reach consumers, and your app connects the dots; a win-win-win in other words.

Wallet Fragments

For the Instant Buy API, we’ve now reduced the work involved to place a Buy With Google button in an app. The WalletFragment API introduced in this release makes it extremely easy to integrate Google Wallet Instant Buy with an existing app. Just configure these fragments and add them to your app.

And that’s another release of Google Play services. The updated Google Play services SDK is now available through the Android SDK manager. Coming up in June is Google I/O, no need to say more…

For the release video, please see:
DevBytes: Google Play services 4.4

For details on the APIs, please see:
New Features in Google Play services 4.4

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