The latest Android and Google Play news for app and game developers.
As we put the finishing touches on the Android O platform, today we're rolling out Developer Preview 4 to help you make sure your apps are ready.
This is the final preview before we launch the official Android O platform to consumers later this summer. Take this opportunity to wrap up your testing and publish your updates soon, to give users a smooth transition to Android O.
If you have a device that's enrolled in the Android Beta Program, you'll receive an update to Developer Preview 4 in the next few days. If you haven't enrolled your device yet, just visit the Android Beta site to enroll and get the update.
Watch for more information on the official Android O release soon!
Developer Preview 4 is a release candidate build of Android O that you can use to complete your development and testing in time for the upcoming official release. It includes the final system behaviors, the latest bug fixes and optimizations, and the final APIs (API level 26) already available since Developer Preview 3.
We're releasing the Developer Preview 4 device system images today, together with the stable version of the Android 26.0.0 Support Library. Incremental updates to the SDK, tools, and Android Emulator system images are on the way over the next few days.
We're also introducing a new version of Android Testing Support Library that includes new features like Android Test Orchestrator, Multiprocess Espresso, and more. Watch for details coming soon.
Today's Developer Preview 4 system images give you an excellent way to test your current apps on the near-final version of Android O. By testing now, you can make sure your app offers the experience you want as users start to upgrade to the official Android O platform.
Just enroll a supported device in the Android Beta Program to get today's update over-the-air, install your current app from Google Play, and test the user flows. The app should run and look great, and should handle the Android O behavior changes properly -- in particular, pay attention to background location limits, notification channels, and changes in networking, security, and identifiers.
Once you've resolved any issues, publish your app updates with the current targeting level, so that they're available as users start to receive Android O.
Users running the latest versions of Android are typically among the most active in terms of downloading apps, consuming content, and making purchases. They're also more vocal about support for the latest Android features in their favorite apps. With Android O, users are anticipating features like notification channels and dots, shortcut pinning, picture-in-picture, autofill, and others. These features could also help increase engagement with your app as more users upgrade to Android O over time.
Enhancing your apps with Android O features can help you drive engagement with users, offer new interactions, give them more control and security, and improve performance. Features like adaptive icons, downloadable fonts, and autosizing TextView can simplify your development and minimize your APK size. Battery is also a top concern for users, so they'll appreciate your app being optimized for background execution limits and other important changes in vital system behavior for O apps.
Visit the O Developer Preview site to learn about all of the new features and APIs and how to build them into your apps.
When you're ready to build for Android O, we recommend updating to the latest version of Android Studio 3.0, available for download from the canary channel. Aside from improved app performance profiling tools, support for the Kotlin programming language, and Gradle build optimizations, Android Studio 3.0 makes it easier to develop with Instant Apps, XML Fonts, Downloadable Fonts, and Adaptive Icons.
We also recommend updating to the stable version of the Android Support Library 26.0.0, available now from Google's Maven repository, and to the latest SDK, tools, and emulator system images, available over the next few days.
You can update your project's compileSdkVersion to API 26 to compile against the official Android O APIs. We also recommend updating your app's targetSdkVersion to API 26 to opt-in and test your app with Android O specific behavior changes. See the migration guide for details on how to setup your environment to build with Android O.
Google Play is open for apps compiled against or targeting API 26. When you're ready, you can publish your APK updates in your alpha, beta, or production channels.
Make sure that your updated app runs well on Android O as well as older versions. We recommend using Google Play's beta testing feature to get early feedback from a small group of users. Then do a staged rollout. We're looking forward to seeing your app updates!
It's simple to get Developer Preview 4 if you haven't already! Just visit android.com/beta and opt-in your eligible phone or tablet. As always, you can also download and flash this update manually. The O Developer Preview is available for Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel C, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus Player, and the Android Emulator. Enrolled devices will automatically update when we release the official version of Android O.
Thanks for all of your input throughout the preview. Continue to share your feedback and requests, we love it!
03-09 16:39:32.122 15107 15107 I crash_dump32: performing dump of process 14942 (target tid = 14971) 03-09 16:39:32.127 15107 15107 F DEBUG : *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** 03-09 16:39:32.127 15107 15107 F DEBUG : Build fingerprint: 'google/sailfish/sailfish:O/OPP1.170223.013/3795621:userdebug/dev-keys' 03-09 16:39:32.127 15107 15107 F DEBUG : Revision: '0' 03-09 16:39:32.127 15107 15107 F DEBUG : ABI: 'arm' 03-09 16:39:32.127 15107 15107 F DEBUG : pid: 14942, tid: 14971, name: WorkHandler >>> com.redacted <<< 03-09 16:39:32.127 15107 15107 F DEBUG : signal 31 (SIGSYS), code 1 (SYS_SECCOMP), fault addr -------- 03-09 16:39:32.127 15107 15107 F DEBUG : Cause: seccomp prevented call to disallowed system call 55 03-09 16:39:32.127 15107 15107 F DEBUG : r0 00000091 r1 00000007 r2 ccd8c008 r3 00000001 03-09 16:39:32.127 15107 15107 F DEBUG : r4 00000000 r5 00000000 r6 00000000 r7 00000037
adb shell setenforce 0 && adb stop && adb start
//bionic/libc/seccomp
//cts/tests/tests/security/jni/android_security_cts_SeccompTest.cpp
add_key
keyctl
openat
Updates are essential for security, but they can be difficult and expensive for device manufacturers. Project Treble is making updates easier by separating the underlying vendor implementation from the core Android framework. This modularization allows platform and vendor-provided components to be updated independently of each other. While easier and faster updates are awesome, Treble's increased modularity is also designed to improve security.
The traditional method of running HALs in-process means that the process needs all the permissions required by each in-process HAL, including direct access to kernel drivers. Likewise, all HALs in a process have access to the same set of permissions as the rest of the process, including permissions required by other in-process HALs. This results in over-privileged processes and HALs that have access to permissions and hardware that they shouldn't.
Moving HALs into their own processes better adheres to the principle of least privilege. This provides two distinct advantages:
Moving HALs into their own processes is great for security, but it comes at the cost of increased IPC overhead between the client process and the HAL. Improvements to the binder driver made IPC between HALs and clients practical. Introducing scatter-gather into binder improves the performance of each transaction by removing the need for the serialization/deserialization steps and reducing the number of copy operations performed on data from three down to one. Android O also introduces binder domains to provide separate communication streams for vendor and platform components. Apps and the Android frameworks continue to use /dev/binder, but vendor-provided components now use /dev/vndbinder. Communication between the platform and vendor components must use /dev/hwbinder. Other means of IPC between platform and vendor are disallowed.
Many of the services offered to apps by the core Android OS are provided by the system server. As Android has grown, so has system server's responsibilities and permissions, making it an attractive target for an attacker. As part of project Treble, approximately 20 HALs were moved out of system server, including the HALs for sensors, GPS, fingerprint, Wi-Fi, and more. Previously, a compromise in any of those HALs would gain privileged system permissions, but in Android O, permissions are restricted to the subset needed by the specific HAL.
Efforts to harden the media stack in Android Nougat continued in Android O. In Nougat, mediaserver was split into multiple components to better adhere to the principle of least privilege, with audio hardware access restricted to audioserver, camera hardware access restricted to cameraserver, and so on. In Android O, most direct hardware access has been entirely removed from the media frameworks. For example HALs for audio, camera, and DRM have been moved out of audioserver, cameraserver, and drmserver respectively.
De-privileging system server and the media frameworks is important because they interact directly with installed apps. Removing direct access to hardware drivers makes bugs difficult to reach and adds another layer of defense to Android's security model.
Mobile apps entertain and assist us, make it easy to communicate with friends and family, and provide tools ranging from maps to electronic wallets. But these apps could also seek more device information than they need to do their job, such as personal data and sensor data from components, like cameras and GPS trackers.
To protect our users and help developers navigate this complex environment, Google analyzes privacy and security signals for each app in Google Play. We then compare that app to other apps with similar features, known as functional peers. Creating peer groups allows us to calibrate our estimates of users' expectations and set adequate boundaries of behaviors that may be considered unsafe or intrusive. This process helps detect apps that collect or send sensitive data without a clear need, and makes it easier for users to find apps that provide the right functionality and respect their privacy. For example, most coloring book apps don't need to know a user's precise location to function and this can be established by analyzing other coloring book apps. By contrast, mapping and navigation apps need to know a user's location, and often require GPS sensor access.
One way to create app peer groups is to create a fixed set of categories and then assign each app into one or more categories, such as tools, productivity, and games. However, fixed categories are too coarse and inflexible to capture and track the many distinctions in the rapidly changing set of mobile apps. Manual curation and maintenance of such categories is also a tedious and error-prone task.
To address this, Google developed a machine-learning algorithm for clustering mobile apps with similar capabilities. Our approach uses deep learning of vector embeddings to identify peer groups of apps with similar functionality, using app metadata, such as text descriptions, and user metrics, such as installs. Then peer groups are used to identify anomalous, potentially harmful signals related to privacy and security, from each app's requested permissions and its observed behaviors. The correlation between different peer groups and their security signals helps different teams at Google decide which apps to promote and determine which apps deserve a more careful look by our security and privacy experts. We also use the result to help app developers improve the privacy and security of their apps.
These techniques build upon earlier ideas, such as using peer groups to analyze privacy-related signals, deep learning for language models to make those peer groups better, and automated data analysis to draw conclusions.
Many teams across Google collaborated to create this algorithm and the surrounding process. Thanks to several, essential team members including Andrew Ahn, Vikas Arora, Hongji Bao, Jun Hong, Nwokedi Idika, Iulia Ion, Suman Jana, Daehwan Kim, Kenny Lim, Jiahui Liu, Sai Teja Peddinti, Sebastian Porst, Gowdy Rajappan, Aaron Rothman, Monir Sharif, Sooel Son, Michael Vrable, and Qiang Yan.
For more information on Google's efforts to detect and fight potentially harmful apps (PHAs) on Android, see Google Android Security Team's Classifications for Potentially Harmful Applications.
S. Jana, Ú. Erlingsson, I. Ion (2015). Apples and Oranges: Detecting Least-Privilege Violators with Peer Group Analysis. arXiv:1510.07308 [cs.CR].
T. Mikolov, I. Sutskever, K. Chen, G. S. Corrado, J. Dean (2013). Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26 (NIPS 2013).
Ú. Erlingsson (2016). Data-driven software security: Models and methods. Proceedings of the 29th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF'16), Lisboa, Portugal.
Calling all indie developers with fun and creative mobile games: we want to see your latest work! We'll be back with the second Google Play Indie Games Festival taking place in San Francisco on September 23rd.
If you're an indie developer based in the US or Canada and want to submit your game, visit the submission form and enter now through August 6th at 11:59PM PST.
If chosen as one of the 20 Finalists, you could have a chance to demo your game at the event and compete for prizes and bragging rights, to go home as one of the three festival winners!
Poor app performance is something that many users have experienced. Think about that last time you experienced an app crashing, failing to respond, or rendering slowly. Consider your reaction when checking the battery usage on your own device, and seeing an app using excessive battery. When an app performs badly, users notice. In fact, in an internal analysis of app reviews on Google Play, we noticed that half of the 1-star reviews mentioned app stability.
Conversely, people consistently reward the best performing apps with better ratings and reviews. This leads to better rankings on Google Play, which helps increase installs. Not only that, but users stay more engaged, and are willing to spend more time and money.
At Google I/O 2017, we announced the new Android vitals dashboard in the Google Play Console. Android vitals is designed to help you understand and analyze bad app behaviors, so you can improve your app's performance and reap the benefits of better performance.
Android vitals helps identify opportunities to improve your app's performance. The dashboards are useful for engineers and business owners alike, offering quick reference performance metrics to monitor your app so you can analyze the data and dedicate the right resources to make improvements.
You'll see the following data collected from Android devices whose users have opted in to automatically share usage and diagnostics data:
Read our best practice article on Android vitals to understand the data shown in the dashboards, and how you can improve your app's performance and stability. Watch the I/O session to learn about more tools from Android and Google Play that you can use to identify and fix bad behaviors:
Learn more about other Play Console features, and stay up to date with news and tips to succeed on Google Play, with the Playbook app. Join the beta and install it today.
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Android Things makes building connected embedded devices easy by providing the same Android development tools, best-in-class Android framework, and Google APIs that make developers successful on mobile. Since the initial preview launch back in December, the community has turned some amazing ideas into exciting prototypes using the platform.
To empower these makers and developers using Android Things to share and learn from each other, we have partnered with Hackster.io to create a community where aspiring IoT developers can go to showcase their projects and get inspired by the work of others. Hackster.io is a community of 200,000 engineers and developers dedicated to building internet-connected hardware projects. They also seek to educate and challenge members through live workshops and design contests.
We are eager to see the projects that you come up with. More importantly, we're excited to see how your work can inspire other developers to create something great with Android Things. Visit our Hackster.io community to see the amazing projects others have already built and join the community today!
We will be hosting a webinar in cooperation with Hackster.io on July 7th, 2017 at 10AM PST titled Bootstrapping IoT Products with Android Things. During this time, you will learn how we have designed Android Things to address many of the pain points experienced by developers attempting to build IoT products. You will also have the opportunity to send in questions you have regarding the platform and ecosystem. Register today to join us for this exciting event!
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