Posted by Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android
After nearly six months of development, Android Studio 3.4 is ready to download today on the stable release channel. This is a milestone release of the Project Marble effort from the Android Studio team. Project Marble is our focus on making the fundamental features and flows of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) rock-solid. On top of many performance improvements and bug fixes we made in Android Studio 3.4, we are excited to release a small but focused set of new features that address core developer workflows for app building & resource management.
Part of the effort of Project Marble is to address user facing issues in core features in the IDE. At the top of the list of issues for Android Studio 3.4 is an updated Project Structure Dialog (PSD) which is a revamped user interface to manage dependencies in your app project Gradle build files. In another build-related change, R8 replaces Proguard as the default code shrinker and obfuscator. To aid app design, we incorporated your feedback to create a new app resource management tool to bulk import, preview, and manage resources for your project. Lastly, we are shipping an updated Android Emulator that takes less system resources, and also supports the Android Q Beta. Overall, these features are designed to make you more productive in your day-to-day app development workflow.
Alongside the stable release of Android Studio 3.4, we recently published in-depth blogs on how we are investigating & fixing a range of issues under the auspices of Project Marble. You should check them out as you download the latest update to Android Studio:
The development work for Project Marble is still on-going, but Android Studio 3.4 incorporates productivity features and over 300 bug & stability enhancements that you do not want to miss. Watch and read below for some of the notable changes and enhancements that you will find in Android Studio 3.4.
Resource Manager
Jetpack Import Intentions
Layout Editor Properties Panel
Project Structure Dialogue
Android Emulator - Pixel 3 XL Emulator Skin
To recap, Android Studio 3.4 includes these new enhancements & features:
Develop
Build
Test
Check out the Android Studio release notes, Android Gradle plugin release notes, and the Android Emulator release notes for more details.
Download
Download the latest version of Android Studio 3.4 from the download page. If you are using a previous release of Android Studio, you can simply update to the latest version of Android Studio. If you want to maintain a stable version of Android Studio, you can run the stable release version and canary release versions of Android Studio at the same time. Learn more.
To use the mentioned Android Emulator features make sure you are running at least Android Emulator v28.0.22 downloaded via the Android Studio SDK Manager.
We appreciate any feedback on things you like, and issues or features you would like to see. If you find a bug or issue, feel free to file an issue. Follow us -- the Android Studio development team ‐ on Twitter and on Medium.
Posted by Raman Tenneti, AOSP Software Engineer and Ally Sillins, AOSP Program Manager
When we started the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) 10 years ago, we included some basic applications in the AOSP build for three main purposes:
However, as the Android ecosystem has matured over time, we've noticed a healthy growth of alternative applications - both as open source and proprietary implementations - developed by the developer community. These alternative applications are not only capable to serve the first two purposes, but often times showcase richer set of features demonstrating the power of Android. Late last year, we began to clean up these applications in AOSP to focus more effectively on the last purpose — their role to provide functionality to other Android applications as part of the platform.
To date, the following 3 apps have been cleaned up: Music, Calendar, and Calculator. See below for details on these updates. Going forward, you can expect to see similar efforts with the other applications in the AOSP repository.
As always, we're excited to hear your feedback on the developer website or through our AOSP forum.
AOSP's Music app can now playback music, one file at a time, and exposes itself as an intent handler for the android.media.browse.MediaBrowserService. The app has controls to play and pause, and a slider moving forward and backward. Features removed include: Music Icon, Artists, Albums, Songs, Playlists, Search, and Settings.
AOSP's Calendar app now exposes itself as an intent handler for the calendar events. New events cannot be created and existing events cannot be edited or deleted. The following features have been deleted: support for multiple accounts, reminders and settings. In addition, some features remain that are not needed for providing a part of the platform functionality: views for day, week, and month. This app may be further simplified in the future.
The calculator application is a standalone app, and does not function as part of the platform and hence has been removed from the AOSP build. However, the application will continue to exist as an open source project separately.
Posted by Kacey Fahey, Developer Marketing, Google Play & Android
We're excited to host the Google Mobile Developer Day at Game Developers Conference 2019. We are taking this opportunity to share best practices and our plans to help your games businesses, which are fuelling incredible growth in the global mobile games market. According to Newzoo, mobile games revenue is projected to account for nearly 60% of global games revenue by 2021. The drivers of this growth come in many forms, including more developers building great games, new game styles blurring the lines of traditional genres, and the explosion of gaming in emerging markets - most notably in India.
Image Source: GamesIndustry.biz
To support your growth, Google is focused on improving the game development experience on Android. We are investing in tools to give you better insights into what is happening on devices, as well as in people and teams to address your feedback about the development process, graphics, multiplayer experiences, and more.
We have some great updates and new tools to improve game discovery and monetization on Google Play, which we also shared today during our Mobile Developer Day:
Pre-registration now in general availability
Starting today, we are launching pre-registration for general availability. Set up a pre-registration campaign in the Google Play Console and start marketing your games to build awareness before launch. Users who pre-register receive a notification at launch, which helps increase day one installs.
Google Play Instant gaining adoption
We have seen strong adoption of Google Play Instant with 3x growth in the number of instant games and 5x growth in the number of instant sessions over the last six months. Instant experiences allow players to tap the 'Try Now' button on your store listing page and go straight to a demo experience in a matter of seconds, without installing. Now, they're even easier to build with Cocos and Unity plug-ins and an expanded implementation partner program. Discover the latest updates on Google Play Instant.
Android App Bundles momentum and new large download size threshold
Over 60K apps and games on Google Play are now using the Android App Bundle publishing format, which is supported in Android Studio, Unity, and Cocos Creator. The app bundle uses Google Play's Dynamic Delivery to deliver a smaller, optimized APK containing only the resources needed for a specific device.
To better support high quality game experiences and reflect improved devices, we've also increased the size limit for APKs generated from app bundles to 150MB and raised the threshold for large download user warnings on the Google Play Store to 150MB, from 100MB.
Store listing experiments let you A/B test changes to your store listing on actual Play Store visitors. We recently rolled out improvements, introducing two new metrics - first time installers and D1 retained users - to more accurately reflect the performance of your store listings. These two new metrics are now reported with hourly intervals and are available via email notifications, letting you see results faster and track performance better.
Country targeted store listings allow you to tailor your app's store listing to appeal to users in different countries. You can customize the app title, icon, descriptions and graphic assets, allowing you to better appeal to users in specific target markets. For example, you can now tailor your store listing with different versions of the English language for users in India versus the United States.
Rewarded ads give players the choice to watch an advertisement in exchange for in-app items. With rewarded ads in Google Play, you can now create and manage rewarded ads through the Google Play Console. No additional SDK integrations are required.
We hope you try some of these new tools and keep sharing ideas so we can make Android and Google Play a better place to grow your business. We are committed to continue improving the platform and building tools that better serve the gaming community.
Get started today by visiting two new resources, a hub for developers interested in creating games on Android and games.withgoogle.com, for developers looking to connect and scale their business across Google. Many of these updates and resources come from community suggestions, so sign up for our monthly newsletter to stay informed.
Watch the session recordings and product updates shared during Google Mobile Developer Day.
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Posted by Ian Lake, Software Engineering Lead & Jisha Abubaker, Product Manager
Today we're happy to announce the stable release of the Android Jetpack Navigation component.
The Jetpack Navigation component's suite of libraries, tooling and guidance provides a robust, complete navigation framework, freeing you from the challenges of implementing navigation yourself and giving you certainty that all edge cases are handled correctly.
With the Jetpack Navigation component you can:
The Jetpack Navigation component adheres to the Principles of Navigation, providing consistent and predictable navigation no matter how simple or complex your app may be.
The Jetpack Navigation component provides a framework for in-app navigation that makes it possible to abstract away the implementation details, keeping your app code free of navigation boilerplate.
To get started with the Jetpack Navigation component in your project, add the Navigation artifacts available on Google's Maven repository in Java or Kotlin to your app's build.gradle file:
build.gradle
dependencies { def nav_version = 2.0.0 // Java implementation "androidx.navigation:navigation-fragment:$nav_version" implementation "androidx.navigation:navigation-ui:$nav_version" // Kotlin KTX implementation "androidx.navigation:navigation-fragment-ktx:$nav_version" implementation "androidx.navigation:navigation-ui-ktx:$nav_version" }
Note: If you have not yet migrated to androidx.*, the Jetpack Navigation stable component libraries are also available as android.arch.* artifacts in version 1.0.0.
navigation-runtime : This core library powers the navigation graph, which provides the structure of your in-app navigation: the screens or destinations that make up your app and the actions that link them. You can control how you navigate to destinations with a simple navigate() call. These destinations may be fragments, activities or custom destinations.
navigate()
navigation-fragment: This library builds upon navigation-runtime and provides out-of-the-box support for fragments as destinations. With this library, fragment transactions are now handled for you automatically.
navigation-ui: This library allows you to easily add navigation drawers, menus and bottom navigation to your app consistent with the Material Design guidelines.
Each of these libraries provide an Android KTX artifact with the -ktx suffix that builds upon the Java API, taking advantage of Kotlin-specific language features.
Available in Android Studio 3.3 and above, the Navigation Editor lets you visually create your navigation graph , allowing you to manage user journeys within your app.
With integration into the manifest merger tool, Android Studio can automatically generate the intent filters necessary to enable deep linking to a specific screen in your app. With this feature, you can associate URLs with any screen of your app by simply setting an attribute on the navigation destination.
Navigation often requires passing data from one screen to another. For example, your list screen may pass an item ID to a details screen. Many of the runtime exceptions during navigation have been attributed to a lack of type safety guarantees as you pass arguments. These exceptions are hard to replicate and debug. Learn how you can provide compile time type safety with the Safe Args Gradle Plugin.
Check out our brand new set of developer guides that encompass best practices to help you implement navigation correctly:
Here's what Emery Coxe, Android Lead @ HomeAway, has to say about the Jetpack Navigation component :
"The Navigation library is well-designed and fully configurable, allowing us to integrate the library according to our specific needs.
With the Navigation Library, we refactored our legacy navigation drawer to support a dynamic, runtime-based configuration using custom views. It allowed us to add / remove new screens to the top-level experience of our app without creating any interdependencies between discreetly packaged modules.
We were also able to get rid of all anti-patterns in our app around top-level navigation, removing explicit casts and hardcoded assumptions to instead rely directly on Navigation. This library is a fundamental component of modern Android development, and we intend to adopt it more broadly across our app moving forward.
Check out the migration guide and the developer guide to learn how you can get started using the Jetpack Navigation component in your app. We also offer a hands-on codelab and a sample app.
Also check out Google's Digital Wellbeing to see another real-world example of in-app navigation using the Android Jetpack Navigation component.
Please continue to tell us about your experience with the Navigation component. If you have specific feedback on features or if you run into any issues, please file a bug via one of the following links:
Posted by Patricia Correa, Director, Platforms & Ecosystems Developer Marketing
Google Play empowers game developers of all sizes to engage and delight people everywhere, and build successful businesses too. We are inspired by the passion and creativity we see from the indie games community, and, over the past few years, we've invested in and nurtured indie games developers around the world, helping them express their unique voice and bring ideas to life.
This year, we've put together several initiatives to help the indie community.
For indie developers who are constantly pushing the boundaries of storytelling, visual excellence, and creativity in mobile we are announcing today the Indie Games Showcase, an international competition for games studios from Europe*, South Korea and Japan. Those of you who meet the eligibility criteria (as outlined below) can enter your game for a chance to win several prizes, including:
How to enter the competition
If you're over 18 years old, based in one of the eligible countries, have 30 or less full time employees, and have published a new game on Google Play after 1 January 2018, you can enter your game. If you're planning on publishing a new game soon, you can also enter by submitting a private beta. Submissions close on May 6 2019. Check out all the details in the terms and conditions for each region. Enter now!
Last year we launched our first games accelerator for developers in Southeast Asia, India and Pakistan and saw great results. We are happy to announce that we are expanding the format to accept developers from select countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, with applications for the 2019 cohort opening soon. The Indie Games Accelerator is a 6 month intensive program for top games startups, powered by mentors from the gaming industry as well as Google experts, offering a comprehensive curriculum that covers all aspects of building a great game and company.
We will be hosting our annual Developer Day at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday, March 18th. Join us for a full day of sessions covering tools and best practices to help build a successful mobile games business. We'll focus on game quality, effective monetization and growth strategies, and how to create, connect, and scale with Google. Sign up to stay up to date or join us via livestream.
We also want to engage with you in person with a series of events. We will be announcing them shortly, so please make sure to sign up to our newsletter to get notified about events and programs for indie developers.
Looking for tips on how to use various developer tools in the Play Console? Get free training through our e-learning program, the Academy for App Success. We even have a custom Play Console for game developers course to get a jump start on Google Play.
We look forward to seeing your amazing work and sharing your creativity with other developers, gamers and industry experts around the world. And don't forget to submit your game for a chance to get featured on Indie Corner on Google Play.
* The competition is open to developers from the following European countries: Austria, Belgium, Belarus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland).
Posted by Sumir Kataria, Software Engineering Lead & Jisha Abubaker, Product Manager
When we looked at the top problems faced by developers, we saw that doing background processing reliably and in a battery-friendly manner was a huge challenge. This meant that periodically fetching fresh content or uploading your logs was complex. Different versions of Android provided different tools for the job, each with their own API quirks. For example, listening for network or storage availability and automatically retrying your tasks involved a lot of work.
Our answer to these challenges was WorkManager. We introduced a preview of the Android Jetpack WorkManager library at Google I/O 2018 and have since iterated on it with additional features and bug fixes thanks to your valuable input. The goal of WorkManager is to make background operations easy for you. WorkManager takes into account constraints like battery-optimization, storage, or network availability, and it only runs its tasks when the appropriate conditions are met. It also knows when to retry or reschedule your work--even if your device or app restarts.
We believe WorkManager is a friendly, approachable API that can take care of one of the most complex parts of Android for you so you can focus on the code that makes your app unique.
Here are some key features of WorkManager:
Watch and read below to learn when and how to use WorkManager to simplify managing background work in your apps:
WorkManager is best suited for tasks that can be deferred, but are still expected to run even if the application or device restarts (for example, syncing data periodically with a backend service and uploading logs or analytics data).
For tasks like sending an instant message that are required to run immediately or for tasks that are not required to run after the app exits, take a look at our background processing guide to learn which solution meets your needs.
To get started with the WorkManager API, add the WorkManager dependency available on Google's Maven repository in Java or Kotlin to your application's build.gradle file:
dependencies { def work_version = 1.0.0 // Java implementation "android.arch.work:work-runtime:$work_version" // Kotlin KTX + coroutines implementation "android.arch.work:work-runtime-ktx:$work_version" }
Now, simply subclass a Worker and implement your background work with doWork() and enqueue it with WorkManager.
class MyWorker(ctx: Context, params: WorkerParameters) : Worker(ctx, params) { override fun doWork(): Result { //do the work you want done in the background here return Result.success() } } // optionally, add constraints like power, network availability val constraints: Constraints = Constraints.Builder() .setRequiresCharging(true) .setRequiredNetworkType(NetworkType.CONNECTED) .build() val myWork = OneTimeWorkRequestBuilder() .setConstraints(constraints).build()
WorkManager will now take care of running your task when it detects that your device is charging and the network is available.
WorkManager will leverage the right scheduling API under the hood: it uses JobScheduler API on Android 6.0+ (API 23+) and a combination of AlarmManager and BroadcastReceiver on previous versions.
It also seeks to ensure the best possible behavior so that it complies with system optimizations introduced in newer Android API versions to maximize battery and enforce good app behavior.
For example, WorkManager will schedule background work during the maintenance window for Android 6.0+ (API 23+) devices when the system is in Doze mode.
With WorkManager, you can easily add constraints like network availability or charging status. Your work will run when the constraints are met and automatically retried if they fail while running. For example, if your task requires network to be available, the task will be stopped when network is no longer available and retried later.
You can also monitor work status and retrieve work result using LiveData. This allows your UI to be notified when your task is completed.
In the event that your work fails, you can control how your work is retried by configuring how backoff is handled.
WorkManager is also able to reschedule your work, using a record of your work in its local database, if an application or device restart occurs.
We understand that each app has unique needs, and so do your tasks--even within the same app. WorkManager provides a simple yet highly flexible API surface to help configure your work and how it is run.
Take advantage of one-off scheduling with OneTimeWorkRequest or recurrent scheduling with PeriodicWorkRequest.
You can also chain your one time work requests to run in order or in parallel. If any work in the chain fails, WorkManager seeks to ensure that the remaining chain of work will not run. Read more about chaining work requests here.
If you require more flexibility over how WorkManager parallelizes and manages work, check out our advanced threading guide.
redBus, the largest online bus ticketing platform, shares their experience using WorkManager to simplify how they collect user feedback in their Android app:
"Feedback is critical to redBus as we expand into other countries. It often happens that a user gives critical feedback about a functionality within the redBus app but when the app tries to upload the feedback to backend servers, there might not be enough network coverage or battery.
WorkManager has simplified the way redBus app delivers information to it's backend servers. WorkManager library's capability to handle parameters like network connectivity, battery and use appropriate handlers like AlarmManager or JobScheduler has enabled us to concentrate on building business logics and offloading execution complexity to WorkManager."
- Dinesh Shanmugam
Android Lead, redBus.in
Check out our getting started guide and hands-on codelab to start using the WorkManager library for your background task needs.
We appreciate your feedback, including features you like and features you would like to see.
If you find a bug or issue, feel free to file an issue.
Posted by Patrick Mutchler and Meghan Kelly, Android Security & Privacy Team
Helping Android app developers build secure apps, free of known vulnerabilities, means helping the overall ecosystem thrive. This is why we launched the Application Security Improvement Program five years ago, and why we're still so invested in its success today.
When an app is submitted to the Google Play store, we scan it to determine if a variety of vulnerabilities are present. If we find something concerning, we flag it to the developer and then help them to remedy the situation.
Think of it like a routine physical. If there are no problems, the app runs through our normal tests and continues on the process to being published in the Play Store. If there is a problem, however, we provide a diagnosis and next steps to get back to healthy form.
Over its lifetime, the program has helped more than 300,000 developers to fix more than 1,000,000 apps on Google Play. In 2018 alone, the program helped over 30,000 developers fix over 75,000 apps. The downstream effect means that those 75,000 vulnerable apps are not distributed to users with the same security issues present, which we consider a win.
The App Security Improvement program covers a broad range of security issues in Android apps. These can be as specific as security issues in certain versions of popular libraries (ex: CVE-2015-5256) and as broad as unsafe TLS/SSL certificate validation.
We are continuously improving this program's capabilities by improving the existing checks and launching checks for more classes of security vulnerability. In 2018, we deployed warnings for six additional security vulnerability classes including:
Ensuring that we're continuing to evolve the program as new exploits emerge is a top priority for us. We are continuing to work on this throughout 2019.
Keeping Android users safe is important to Google. We know that app security is often tricky and that developers can make mistakes. We hope to see this program grow in the years to come, helping developers worldwide build apps users can truly trust.
Posted by Rahul Mishra and Tom Watkins, Android Security & Privacy Team
In 2018, Google Play Protect made Android devices running Google Play some of the most secure smartphones available, scanning over 50 billion apps everyday for harmful behaviour.
Android devices can genuinely improve people's lives through our accessibility features, Google Assistant, digital wellbeing, Family Link, and more — but we can only do this if they are safe and secure enough to earn users' long term trust. This is Google Play Protect's charter and we're encouraged by this past year's advancements.
Google Play Protect is the technology we use to ensure that any device shipping with the Google Play Store is secured against potentially harmful applications (PHA). It is made up of a giant backend scanning engine to aid our analysts in sourcing and vetting applications made available on the Play Store, and built-in protection that scans apps on users' devices, immobilizing PHA and warning users.
This technology protects over 2 billion devices in the Android ecosystem every day.
On by default
We strongly believe that security should be a built-in feature of every device, not something a user needs to find and enable. When security features function at their best, most users do not need to be aware of them. To this end, we are pleased to announce that Google Play Protect is now enabled by default to secure all new devices, right out of the box. The user is notified that Google Play Protect is running, and has the option to turn it off whenever desired.
New and rare apps
Android is deployed in many diverse ways across many different users. We know that the ecosystem would not be as powerful and vibrant as it is today without an equally diverse array of apps to choose from. But installing new apps, especially from unknown sources, can carry risk.
Last year we launched a new feature that notifies users when they are installing new or rare apps that are rarely installed in the ecosystem. In these scenarios, the feature shows a warning, giving users pause to consider whether they want to trust this app, and advising them to take additional care and check the source of installation. Once Google has fully analyzed the app and determined that it is not harmful, the notification will no longer display. In 2018, this warning showed around 100,000 times per day
Context is everything: warning users on launch
It's easy to misunderstand alerts when presented out of context. We're trained to click through notifications without reading them and get back to what we were doing as quickly as possible. We know that providing timely and context-sensitive alerts to users is critical for them to be of value. We recently enabled a security feature first introduced in Android Oreo which warns users when they are about to launch a potentially harmful app on their device.
This new warning dialog provides in-context information about which app the user is about to launch, why we think it may be harmful and what might happen if they open the app. We also provide clear guidance on what to do next. These in-context dialogs ensure users are protected even if they accidentally missed an alert.
Auto-disabling apps
Google Play Protect has long been able to disable the most harmful categories of apps on users devices automatically, providing robust protection where we believe harm will be done.
In 2018, we extended this coverage to apps installed from Play that were later found to have violated Google Play's policies, e.g. on privacy, deceptive behavior or content. These apps have been suspended and removed from the Google Play Store.
This does not remove the app from user device, but it does notify the user and prevents them from opening the app accidentally. The notification gives the option to remove the app entirely.
Keeping the Android ecosystem secure is no easy task, but we firmly believe that Google Play Protect is an important security layer that's used to protect users devices and their data while maintaining the freedom, diversity and openness that makes Android, well, Android.
Acknowledgements: This post leveraged contributions from Meghan Kelly and William Luh.
Posted by Edward Cunningham, Android Security & Privacy Team
In a previous blog we described how API behavior changes advance the security and privacy protections of Android, and include user experience improvements that prevent apps from accidentally overusing resources like battery and memory.
Since November 2018, all app updates on Google Play have been required to target API level 26 (Android 8.0) or higher. Thanks to the efforts of thousands of app developers, Android users now enjoy more apps using modern APIs than ever before, bringing significant security and privacy benefits. For example, during 2018 over 150,000 apps added support for runtime permissions, giving users granular control over the data they share.
Today we're providing more information about the Google Play requirements for 2019, and announcing some changes that affect apps distributed via other stores.
Google Play requirements for 2019
In order to provide users with the best Android experience possible, the Google Play Console will continue to require that apps target a recent API level:
Existing apps that are not receiving updates are unaffected and can continue to be downloaded from the Play Store. Apps can still use any minSdkVersion, so there is no change to your ability to build apps for older Android versions.
minSdkVersion
For a list of changes introduced in Android 9 Pie, check out our page on behavior changes for apps targeting API level 28+.
Apps distributed via other stores
Targeting a recent API level is valuable regardless of how an app is distributed. In China, major app stores from Huawei, OPPO, Vivo, Xiaomi, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent will be requiring that apps target API level 26 (Android 8.0) or higher in 2019. We expect many others to introduce similar requirements – an important step to improve the security of the app ecosystem.
Over 95% of spyware we detect outside of the Play Store intentionally targets API level 22 or lower, avoiding runtime permissions even when installed on recent Android versions. To protect users from malware, and support this ecosystem initiative, Google Play Protect will warn users when they attempt to install APKs from any source that do not target a recent API level:
These Play Protect warnings will show only if the app's targetSdkVersion is lower than the device API level. For example, a user with a device running Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) will be warned when installing any new APK that targets API level 22 or lower. Users with devices running Android 8.0 (Oreo) or higher will be warned when installing any new APK that targets API level 25 or lower.
targetSdkVersion
Prior to August, Play Protect will start showing these warnings on devices with Developer options enabled to give advance notice to developers of apps outside of the Play Store. To ensure compatibility across all Android versions, developers should make sure that new versions of any apps target API level 26+.
Existing apps that have been released (via any distribution channel) and are not receiving updates will be unaffected – users will not be warned when installing them.
Getting started
For advice on how to change your app’s target API level, take a look at the migration guide and this talk from I/O 2018: Migrate your existing app to target Android Oreo and above.
We're extremely grateful to the Android developers worldwide who have already updated their apps to deliver security improvements for their users. We look forward to making great progress together in 2019.
Posted by Dave Smith, Developer Advocate for IoT
Over the past year, Google has worked closely with partners to create consumer products powered by Android Things with the Google Assistant built-in. Given the successes we have seen with our partners in smart speakers and smart displays, we are refocusing Android Things as a platform for OEM partners to build devices in those categories moving forward. Therefore, support for production System on Modules (SoMs) based on NXP, Qualcomm, and MediaTek hardware will not be made available through the public developer platform at this time.
Android Things continues to be a platform for experimenting with and building smart, connected devices using the Android Things SDK on top of popular hardware like the NXP i.MX7D and Raspberry Pi 3B. System images for these boards will remain available through the Android Things console where developers can create new builds and push app updates for up to 100 devices for non-commercial use.
We remain dedicated to providing a managed platform for IoT devices, including turnkey hardware solutions. For developers looking to commercialize IoT products in 2019, check out Cloud IoT Core for secure device connectivity at scale and the upcoming Cloud IoT Edge runtime for a suite of managed edge computing services. For on-device machine learning applications, stay tuned for more details about our Edge TPU development boards.
Posted by Chris Banes, Chief Elf of Android Engineering
Today, we pushed the source code for Google's Santa Tracker 2018 Android app at google/santa-tracker-android, including its 17 mini-games, Santa tracking feature, Wear app and more!
Visually the app looks much the same this year, but underneath the hood the app has gone on a massive size reduction exercise to make the download from Google Play as small as possible. When a user downloads the app the initial download is now just 9.2MB, compared to last year's app which was 60MB. That's a 85% reduction! 🗜️
We achieved that reduction by migrating the app over to using an Android App Bundle. The main benefit is that Google Play can now serve dynamically optimized APKs to users' devices. Moreover, we were also able to separate out all of the games into their own dynamic feature modules, downloaded on demand. This is why you might have seen a progress bar when you first opened a game, we are actually downloading the game from Google Play before starting the game:
The progress bar shown while a game is fetched from Google Play
You can read more about our journey migrating over to App Bundle in a small blog series, starting with our 'Moving to Android App Bundle' post.
One of the new features we added this year was a Gboard sticker pack, allowing users to share stickers to their friends. You might even notice some of the characters from the games in the stickers!
'Santa Dunk' is one of the 20 available stickers
We use Firebase App Indexing to publish our stickers to the local index on the device, where the Gboard keyboard app picks them up, allowing the user to share them in apps. You can see the source code here.
The sticker pack being used in a very important conversation
Aside from the things mentioned above, we've also completed a number of code health improvements. We have increased the minimum SDK version to Lollipop (21), migrated from the Support Library to AndroidX, reduced the file size of our game assets by switching to modern formats, and lots of other small improvements! Phew 😅.
If you're interested go checkout the code and let us know what you think. If you have any questions or issues, please let us know via the issue tracker.
Posted by Jamal Eason, Product Manager
We are excited to kick off the new year with a stable release of Android Studio 3.3 focused on refinement and quality. You can download it today from developer.android.com/studio. Based on the feedback from many of you, we have taken a step back from large features to focus on our quality fundamentals. The goal is to ensure Android Studio continues to help you stay productive in making great apps for Android. Since the last stable release, Android Studio 3.3 addresses over 200 user- reported bugs. This release also includes official support for Navigation Editor, improved incremental Java compilation when using annotation processors, C++ code lint inspections, an updated new project wizard, and usability fixes for each of the performance profilers. In addition, saving snapshots on exit for the Android emulator is 8x faster.
Android Studio 3.3 kicks off the broader quality focus area for the year, which we call Project Marble. Announced at the Android Developer Summit in November 2018, Project Marble is the Android Studio team's focus on making the fundamental features and flows of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) rock-solid, along with refining and polishing the user-facing features that matter to you in your day-to-day app development workflows. In Project Marble, we are specifically looking at reducing the number of crashes, hangs, memory leaks, and user-impacting bugs. We are also investing in our measurement infrastructure to prevent these issues from occurring. Stay tuned for more updates and details as we progress on this initiative.
This release of Android Studio is a solid milestone for the product. If you want the latest in feature refinement and quality, then download Android Studio 3.3 today on the stable release channel. Watch and read below for some of the notable changes and enhancements that you will find in Android Studio 3.3.
Navigation Editor
Clang-Tidy Code Inspection Settings
New Project Wizard
Delete Unused Directories Dialogue
IDE User Feedback
Single-Variant Project Sync
$./emulator -avd <avdname> -read-only & $./emulator -avd <avdname> -read-only &
Android Emulator: Multiple AVD Launch
$./emulator @<server-avd-name> -wifi-server-port 9999 $./emulator @<client-avd-name> -wifi-client-port 9999
Android Emulator: Wi-Fi P2P Setup
Memory Profiler: Allocation Tracking Options
Network Profiler: Formatted Text
CPU Profiler: Frame Rendering Data
To recap, Android Studio 3.3 includes these new enhancements & features:
Optimize
Download the latest version of Android Studio 3.3 from the download page. If you are using a previous release of Android Studio, you can simply update to the latest version of Android Studio as well. If you want to maintain a stable version of Android Studio, you can run the stable release version and canary release versions of Android Studio at the same time. Learn more.
Posted by Patricia Correa, Platforms & Ecosystems
Earlier this year we highlighted some of Google Play's milestones and commitments in supporting the 1M+ developers on the Play Store, as well as those of you working on Android apps and games and looking to launch and grow your business on our platforms. We have been inspired and humbled by the achievements of app and game developers, building experiences that delight and help people everywhere, as some stories highlighted in #IMakeApps.
We continue to focus on helping you grow thriving businesses and building tools and resources to help you reach and engage more users in more places, whilst ensuring a safe and secure ecosystem. Looking to 2019, we are excited about all the things to come and seeing more developers adopt new features and update to Android P.
In the meantime let's share some of the 2018 highlights on Google Play and Android:
Building for the future
Along with Android P we have continued to help the Android developer ecosystem, launching Android Jetpack, the latest Android Studio, and Kotlin support. Developers are also now able to add rich and dynamic UI templates with Slices in places such as Google Search and Assistant, APIs for new screens support, and much more. Discover the latest from Android 9, API Level 28.
Smaller apps have higher conversion rates and our research shows that a large app size is a key driver of uninstalls. At I/O we launched a new publishing format, the Android App Bundle, helping developers to deliver smaller and more efficient apps with a simplified release process, and with features on demand - saving on average 35% in download size! On devices using Android M and above, app bundles can reduce app size even further, by automatically supporting uncompressed native libraries, thereby eliminating duplication on devices.
You can build app bundles in the Android Studio 3.2 stable release and in Unity 2018.3 beta, and upload larger bundles with installed APK sizes of up to 500MB without using expansion files, through an early access feature soon to be available to all developers.
Richer experiences and discovery
Discovery of your apps and games is important, so we launched Google Play Instant and increased the size limit to 10MB to enable TRY NOW on the Play Store, and removed the URL requirement for Instant apps. Android Studio 3.3 beta release, lets you publish a single app bundle and classify it or a particular module to be instant enabled (without maintaining separate code).
For game developers, Unity introduced the Google Play Instant plug-in and instant app support is built into the new Cocos Creator. Our app pre-registration program, has seen nearly 250 million app pre-registrations, helping drive app downloads through richer discovery.
Optimizing for quality and performance
Android vitals are now more actionable, with a dashboard highlighting core vitals, peer benchmarks, start-up time and permission denials vitals, anomaly detection and alerts, and linking pre-launch reports - all so that you can better optimize and prioritize issues for improved quality and performance.
There are more opportunities to get feedback and fix issues before launch. The Google Play Console expanded the functionality of automated device testing with a pre-launch report for games, and the launch of the internal and closed test tracks lets you push your app to up to 100 internal testers, before releasing them to production.
Insights for your business, now and in the long term
Metrics are critical to optimize your business and we've added new customizable tools in the Play Console, with downloadable reports to help you evaluate core metrics. Including cumulative data, 30-day rolling averages, and roll-ups for different time periods to better match the cadence of your business.
You can now configure the statistics report to show how your instant apps are performing, analyze different dimensions and identify how many install the final app on their device. The acquisition report shows users discovery journey through to conversion - with average revenue per user and retention benchmarks against similar apps. You can also find the best performing search terms for your store listing with organic breakdown - helping to optimize efforts to grow and retain a valuable audience.
Increasingly developers are adopting subscriptions as their core monetization model. The dedicated new subscriptions center means you can easily change subscription prices, offer partial refunds for in-app products and subscriptions, and also make plan changes in Play Billing Library version 1.2. Learn how to keep subscribers engaged; users can pause plans, giving you more control with order management and the cancellation survey.
Discover how to use all the new features and best practices on the Academy for App Success, our interactive free e-learning platform, offering bite-sized courses that help you make the most of Play Console and improve your app quality.
Make sure you follow @googleplaydev and sign up to our newsletter to stay ahead of all our updates in 2019! We hope these features and tools will enable us to continue a successful partnership with you in the New Year - follow our countdown for a daily highlight. From all of us at Google Play - happy holidays.
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