The latest Android and Google Play news for app and game developers.
Posted by Gerardo Capiel and Varouj Chitilian, Google Pay
Today's customers want to get things done faster than ever, whether they're ordering groceries or shopping for a new pair of shoes. With Google Pay, we want to ensure checkout doesn't slow them (or your conversions) down, while enhancing the customer experience at every step of the way.
Last week at Google I/O, we announced some exciting new features that do just that. We also shared the latest ways developers can use Google Pay to offer the best experiences at checkout and beyond—all available for free with our APIs. Here are some of the highlights and how you can make the most of them.
We've started rolling out support for checking out with Google Pay regardless of your browser or device. This means customers can pay with Google Pay on most major browsers from any device.
Enabling this functionality within your apps and sites is simple. Watch Google Pay software engineer Tony Chen do a website integration live on stage, then try it yourself using our developer docs.
But making checkout easier for your customers doesn't just apply to how they pay. Chrome Autofill helps customers fill in forms automatically, so they can speed through the entire checkout process without getting bogged down by typing. To ensure your shoppers are getting the fastest checkout experience with Chrome Autofill, we recommend you check out our new best practices guide.
We'll also be making it easier for customers to manage their payment methods in Google Pay by adding this functionality to our iOS and desktop experiences as well. The new functionality will allow people to add cards and see transactions whenever and wherever it's most convenient for them, giving you access to a new group of customers who will be able to use Google Pay within your apps and sites. It also means that customers who add cards from a laptop can use those cards with Google Pay on an iOS device. (Try it for yourself at g.co/pay/demo.)
This new functionality will be launching soon, and you can learn more about it in our Build with Google Pay session.
Building off our newly-launched support for prepaid transit passes, we're now also supporting a new way for you to save and manage passes through our Google Pay API for Passes. This lets you create mobile event tickets and boarding passes that your customers can save to the Google Pay Android app. We've piloted this feature with Southwest, Fortress GB, and Ticketmaster, with more partners coming soon. Want to get on board? Sign up for more information.
Actions on Google lets developers engage billions of users across the Google Assistant and soon Google Search, Android, and other surfaces by developing Actions and linking them with our ever-growing intents catalog. One of our sessions shows you how you can enable Google Pay in your Actions so your customers can make purchases with their Assistant across multiple surfaces, including mobile devices, Google Home, and soon, Smart Displays. Transactions are now available in Australia, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom. (We'll be bringing them to Brazil, India, Italy, and Spain soon.)
Plus, we're starting a developer preview where you can now enable transactions to sell digital content on the Google Assistant. That includes in-app purchases, subscriptions, games, experiences, and premium content.
We can't wait to see all of the creative ways you use Google Pay to amplify your business and build better checkout experiences for your customers. Be sure to check out all of our I/O sessions for more ideas, tools, and tips. In the meantime, we'll be hard at work on new features to keep making Google Pay the best experience possible—for you and your customers.
Posted by Iliyan Malchev, Project Treble Architect
Android P Beta available at android.com/beta
As Android continues to evolve, each new release of the OS brings new features, new user experiences, and better security. It is important that these new releases find their way to mobile devices as fast as possible.
Yesterday, we announced that the following devices, in addition to Pixel and Pixel 2, now support Android P Beta: Sony Xperia XZ2, Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, Nokia 7 Plus, Oppo R15 Pro, Vivo X21, OnePlus 6 and Essential PH‑1. Android P Beta provides an opportunity for developers and early adopters around the world to try the latest Android release, test their apps, and provide feedback.
In this post, we provide an update to Project Treble and the technology that allowed us to bring Android Beta to more phones this year.
Bringing the new Android release quickly to the hands of users takes a combined effort between Google, silicon manufacturers (SM), device manufacturers (OEMs), and carriers. This process is technically challenging and requires aligning the schedules between our industry partners.
To reduce the technical difficulties, we launched Project Treble as part of Android Oreo.
Next, to capitalize on the foundation we built, we collaborated closely with the silicon manufacturers, where the journey of making an Android device always begins.
Any device with the latest version of Android must be based on an SoC with the proper software support for it. This software, commonly referred to as the Board Support Package (BSP), contains not only the chip-specific vendor implementation, but also all of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and pieces of the framework that are missing from AOSP itself (e.g., carrier-specific telephony functionality).
These BSPs are the starting point for all device launches. OEMs adapt the vendor implementation to their hardware and add their own custom framework components.
While silicon manufacturers always want the latest version of Android in their BSPs, the costs have been prohibitive. By making it possible for newer AOSP frameworks to run on older, already-released vendor implementations, Project Treble dramatically reduces the need for continuous investment in older silicon to support each Android release. Silicon manufacturers have to do all this work just once, rather than every time there is a new release of Android.
However, that first time still has to happen. Below is a chart, which illustrates the effort the various actors expend over time as they go through each release. You can think of it as code churn or bug count over time.
The chart shows how there is very little time in the year for Google, silicon manufacturers, and the OEMs to all this work. Any overlap between phases causes code churn and introduces significant schedule risk. For OEMs who target the holiday season, it is often safer to launch on an older BSP with a year-old or even older Android version. This dynamic has been at the heart of the slow uptake of the latest Android release, even on flagship devices.
To solve this, we've worked closely with Qualcomm, MediaTek and Samsung Electronics’ System LSI Business to co-develop their BSPs, starting with Android P. Their BSPs are now ready for Android P on a much-accelerated schedule, reducing the overall effort significantly. These silicon manufacturers are now able to provide a stable and high-quality release much earlier than before, allowing OEMs to bring the latest innovations of Android to their customers across the globe.
This is an important step in accelerating the adoption of Android releases that bring numerous benefits to our partners, users, and Android developers. We look forward to seeing many more partners launch or upgrade devices to Android P.
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Google Play connects a thriving ecosystem of developers to people using more than 2 billion active Android devices around the world. In fact, more than 94 billion apps were installed from Google Play in the last year alone. We’re continuing to empower Android developers with new features in the Play Console to help you improve your app’s performance and grow your business. And, at Google I/O 2018, we’re introducing our vision for a new Android app model that is modular and dynamic.
The Android App Bundle is Android's new publishing format, with which you can more easily deliver a great experience in a smaller app size, and optimize for the wide variety of Android devices and form factors available. The app bundle includes all your app's compiled code and resources, but defers APK generation and signing to Google Play. You no longer have to build, sign, and manage multiple APKs.
Google Play's new app serving model, called Dynamic Delivery, uses your app bundle to generate and serve optimized APKs for each user's device configuration. This means people download only the code and resources they need to run your app. People see a smaller install size on the Play Store, can install your app more quickly, and save space on their devices.
(Left) An example of all resources being delivered to a device via a legacy APK. (Right) An example of Dynamic Delivery serving just what’s needed to a device.
With the Android App Bundle, you're also able to add dynamic feature modules to your app. Through Dynamic Delivery, your users can download your app's dynamic features on-demand, instead of during the initial install, further reducing your app's download size. To publish apps with dynamic feature modules, apply to join the beta.
Start using the Android App Bundle in the latest Android Studio canary release. Test your release using the testing tracks in the Play Console before pushing to production. Watch these I/O sessions to hear from the team as they introduce the new app model:
An internal study Google ran last year found that over 40% of one-star reviews on the Play Store mentioned app stability as an issue. Conversely, people consistently reward the best performing apps with better ratings and reviews, leading to better rankings on Google Play and more installs. Not only that, but people tend to be more engaged and willing to spend more time and money in those apps. To help you understand and fix quality issues we're improving a number of features in the Google Play Console.
Watch these I/O sessions where we introduce the new features and share examples of how developers are using them successfully:
The Play Console has tools and reports to help your whole team understand and improve your app's store performance and business metrics. The Play Console's access management controls were recently improved so you can more easily grant access to your whole team while having granular control over which data and tools they can see and use.
Subscriptions continue to see huge growth, with subscribers on Google Play growing over 80% year over year. Google Play Billing offers developers useful features to acquire, engage, and retain subscribers, and gives users a consistent and familiar purchase flow. We're making improvements to help you prepare your subscriptions business for the future and to give users more information on their subscriptions.
Watch our I/O session where we explain the new features:
As we have announced, Google Play will require new apps (from August 2018) and app updates (from November 2018) to target API level 26 or higher. For more information and practical guidance on preparing for the new requirement, watch the I/O session, Migrating your existing app to target Android Oreo and above, and review our migration guide. If you develop an SDK or library that's used by developers, make sure it's ready to target Oreo too and sign up to receive news and updates for SDK providers.
To find out more about all these new features, learn best practices, understand how other developers are finding success, and hear from the teams building these features, watch the Android & Play sessions at I/O 2018. For more developer resources about how to improve your app's performance on Google Play, read this guide to the Google Play Console and visit the Android developers website. Finally, to stay up to date, sign up to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Medium where we post regularly.
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Today at Google I/O 2018 we announced the latest preview of Android Studio 3.2 which includes an exciting set of features that support the Android P Developer Preview, the new Android App Bundle, and Android Jetpack. Download Android Studio 3.2 from our canary release channel today to explore one of the most feature rich releases of the year.
Android Jetpack is a set of libraries, developer tools and architectural guidance to help make it quick and easy to build great Android apps. It provides common infrastructure code so you can focus on what makes your app unique. Android Studio 3.2 includes a wide set of tools that support Jetpack from a visual Navigation Editor that uses the Navigation API, templates for Android Slices APIs, to refactoring tools to migrate to the new Android support libraries in Jetpack — AndroidX.
The canary 14 release of Android Studio 3.2 also supports the new Android app model that is the evolution of the APK format, the Android App Bundle. With no code changes, Android Studio 3.2 will help you create a new Android App Bundle and have it ready for publishing on Google Play.
There are 20 major features in this release of Android Studio spanning from ultra fast Android Emulator Snapshots, Sample Data in the Layout Editor, to a brand new Energy Profiler to measure battery impact of your app. If any of these features sound interesting, download the preview of Android Studio 3.2 today.
To see these features demoed in action and to get a sneak peak at other features we are working on, check out the Google I/O 2018 session - What's new in Android Development Tools.
What’s new in Android Development Tools - Google I/O 2018
Below is a full list of new features in Android Studio 3.2, organized by key developer flows.
Navigation Editor
android.enableJetifier = true
gradle.properties
AndroidX Refactoring Support
Design Time Sample Data
New Material Design Components
Slices Provider Template
CMakeList Code Completion
What's New Assistant
com.android.tools.build:gradle:3.2.0-alpha14
Build Android App Bundle
android.enableR8=true
Enable R8 in Android Studio
./adb emu avd snapshot load snap_2018-04-29_00-01-12
Android Emulator Snapshots
./adb emu screenrecord start --time-limit 10 /sample_video.webm
Screen record in Android Emulator
Virtual Scene Camera in Android Emulator
ADB Connection Assistant
Energy Profiler
System Trace
Profiler Sessions
startMethodTracing(String tracePath)
stopMethodTracing()
JNI Reference Tracking
To recap, the latest canary of Android Studio 3.2 includes these new major features:
Build
Optimize
Check out the preview release notes for more details.
Download the latest version of Android Studio 3.2 from the canary channel download page. If you are using a previous canary release of Android Studio, make sure you update to Android Studio Canary 14 or higher. 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 v27.3+ downloaded via the Android Studio SDK Manager.
We appreciate any early feedback on things you like, and issues or features you would like to see. Please note, to ensure we maintain product quality, the features you see in the canary channel may not be available in the next stable release channel until they are ready for stable usage. If you find a bug or issue, feel free to file an issue. Connect with us -- the Android Studio development team ‐ on our Google+ page or on Twitter.
Posted by Chris Sells, Benjamin Poiesz, Karen Ng, Product Management, Android Developer Tools
Today we're excited to introduce Android Jetpack, the next generation of components, tools and architectural guidance to accelerate your Android app development.
Android Jetpack was inspired by the Support Library, a set of components to make it easy to take advantage of new Android features while maintaining backwards compatibility; it's currently used by 99% of every app in the Play Store. Following on that success, we introduced the Architecture Components, designed to make it easier to deal with data in the face of changes and the complications of the app lifecycle. Since we introduced those components at I/O just one year ago, an overwhelming number of you have adopted them. Companies such as LinkedIn, Zillow and iHeartRadio are seeing fewer bugs, higher testability and more time to focus on what makes their app unique.
The Android developer community has been clear -- not only do you like what we've done with these existing components, but we know that you want more! And so more is what you get.
Android Jetpack is a set of components, tools and guidance to make great Android apps. The Android Jetpack components bring together the existing Support Library and Architecture Components and arranges them into four categories:
Android Jetpack components are provided as "unbundled" libraries that are not part of the underlying Android platform. This means that you can adopt each component at your own speed, at your own time. When new Android Jetpack functionality is available, you can add it to your app, deploy your app to the Play Store and give users the new features all in a single day (if you're quick)! The unbundled Android Jetpack libraries have all been moved into the new androidx.* namespace (as described in detail in this post).
androidx.*
In addition, your app can run on various versions of the platform because Android Jetpack components are built to provide their functionality independent of any specific version, providing backwards compatibility.
Further, Android Jetpack is built around modern design practices like separation of concerns and testability as well as productivity features like Kotlin integration. This makes it far easier for you to build robust, high quality apps with less code. While the components of Android Jetpack are built to work together, e.g. lifecycle awareness and live data, you don't have to use all of them -- you can integrate the parts of Android Jetpack that solve your problems while keeping the parts of your app that are already working great.
We know that these benefits are important to you because of feedback like this:
"We had been thinking of trying out MVVM in our code base. Android Architecture Components gave us an easy template to implement it. And it's helped make our code more testable as well; the ability to unit test ViewModels has definitely increased code robustness."
-- Sumiran Pradhan, Sr. Engineer, Zillow
If you want to learn more about how companies are using Android Jetpack components, you can read the developer stories on the Android Developer site.
And finally, as you can see from the Android Jetpack diagram above, today we're announcing new components as well.
Android Jetpack comes with five new components:
The WorkMananager component is a powerful new library that provides a one-stop solution for constraint-based background jobs that need guaranteed execution, replacing the need to use things like jobs or SyncAdapters. WorkManager provides a simplified, modern API, the ability to work on devices with or without Google Play Services, the ability to create graphs of work, and the ability to query the state of your work. Early feedback is very encouraging but we love to make sure that your use cases are covered, too. You can see what we have so far and provide feedback on our alpha on the WorkManager component.
While activities are the system provided entry points into your app's UI, their inflexibility when it comes to sharing data between each other and transitions has made them a less than ideal architecture for constructing your in-app navigation. Today we are introducing the Navigation component as a framework for structuring your in-app UI, with a focus on making a single-Activity app the preferred architecture. With out of the box support for Fragments, you get all of the Architecture Components benefits such as Lifecycle and ViewModel while allowing Navigation to handle the complexity of FragmentTransactions for you. Further, the Navigation component allows you to declare transitions that we handle for you, automatically builds the correct Up and Back behavior, includes full support for deep links, and provides helpers for connecting Navigation into the appropriate UI widgets, like the navigation drawer and bottom navigation. But that's not all! The Navigation Editor in Android Studio 3.2 allows you to see and manage your navigation properties visually:
The Navigation component is also in alpha and we'd love your feedback.
Data presented in an app can be large and costly to load, so it's important to avoid downloading, creating, or presenting too much at once. The Paging component version 1.0.0 makes it easy to load and present large data sets with fast, infinite scrolling in your RecyclerView. It can load paged data from local storage, the network, or both, and lets you define how your content gets loaded. It works out of the box with Room, LiveData, and RxJava.
And finally, to round out the set of new features making their debut in Android Jetpack is the Slices component. A "slice" is a way to surface your app's UI inside of the Google Assistant as a result of a search:
You can learn all about the Slices component and how to integrate it into your app on the Android Developer website.
And last but not least, one goal of Android Jetpack takes advantage of Kotlin language features that make you more productive. Android KTX lets you transform Kotlin code like this:
view.viewTreeObserver.addOnPreDrawListener( object : ViewTreeObserver.OnPreDrawListener { override fun onPreDraw(): Boolean { viewTreeObserver.removeOnPreDrawListener(this) actionToBeTriggered() return true } });
into more concise Kotlin code like the following:
view.doOnPreDraw { actionToBeTriggered() }
This is just the first step in bringing Kotlin support to Android Jetpack components; our goal is to make Android Jetpack great for Kotlin developers (and of course Java developers!).You can read more about Android KTX on the Android Developer web site.
You can get started with Android Jetpack at developer.android.com/jetpack. You'll find docs and videos for Android Jetpack, see what's new in Android Jetpack components, participate in the community and give us feedback. We've also created a YouTube playlist devoted to Android Jetpack, so you can tune in for information about Android Jetpack, components, tools and best practices.
Getting Started with Android Jetpack will tell you how to bring the Android Jetpack components into your existing apps and help you get started with new Android Jetpack apps. Android Studio 3.2 has great tooling support for Android Jetpack. For building new apps, use the Activity & Fragment+ViewData activity, which you can get to from File | New | New Project in Android Studio:
With Android Jetpack, we're taking the benefits of the Support Library and the Architecture Components and turning it up a notch with new components, Android Studio integration and Kotlin support. And while Android Jetpack provides the next generation components, tools and guidance to accelerate your Android development, we've got a lot more that we want to do and we want your help. Please go to developer.android.com/jetpack and let us know what we can do to make your experience building Android apps even better.
Play Console
