Android Developers Blog

Developer-Powered CTS (CTS-D)

23 June 2022

Posted by Sachiyo Sugimoto, Android Partner Engineering

Notes from Google Play: making Play work for everyone

22 June 2022

I will kick us off by sharing the story of OLIO, one of the many apps that has inspired me this year. OLIO is a community-driven app that is fighting to reduce food waste. The app provides a way for people to easily give away food to neighbors. Founders, Tessa Clarke and Saasha Celestial-One, had a goal to create local food sharing networks across the world and ensure nothing of value goes to waste. Having first launched the app in the UK, Tessa and Saasha’s belief in their core mission helped them expand the app to 62 countries and counting, partnering with global stores to help them reach zero waste along the way.

The success of the OLIO app is a tale of two women from different backgrounds, with the same dream, made for the benefit of everyone and our planet. For me, this is what it’s all about: ensuring that everyone is empowered to build a successful business that can benefit people around the globe.

So let me share more about some of my favorite tools and programs that we recently launched with this goal in mind.

Apps and games by everyone

Regardless of the size of your company, we want to make sure you have the insights and tools that enable you to make more informed decisions, and ultimately make it easy for you to build and improve your app or game business. Let’s take a look at privacy and security as an example, as this is a critical topic.

We have various tools and programs to help you build safe and secure experiences for everyone and protect your business, including the Play Integrity API, Data Safety section, Privacy Sandbox on Android, and also the newly launched Google Play SDK Index.The index provides data and insights about more than 100 of the most widely used commercial SDKs. This can help you navigate third-party SDKs and align with Google Play policies, so that you make more informed decisions for your business and your users.

We also have programs designed for companies with various needs, from media companies building experiences across devices, to startups solving local problems in the first cohort of Appscale Academy in India. These 100 promising app innovators have already inspired us with their drive and creativity to build high-quality apps that serve and help people across India, and the world.

We’re also excited to continue investing in programs designed to help grow businesses both big and small. These include the Google Play Partner Program which launched in March and is designed to help larger games businesses reach their growth and performance goals. We also just opened submissions for the Indie Games Accelerator and Indie Games Festival programs. We were particularly inspired by the alumni of the 2021 edition, and you can hear directly from Jimjum Studios in Israel, who create games that encourage kindness, community building, and generosity, in the first episode of Google Play Coffee breaks:

Beyond the size of the company, apps and games are built and run by people. So we are continuously investing in programs to drive diversity in the ecosystem and empower the next generations of app and game makers. Programs like Change the Game and our investment in organizations driving positive change in the games industry are just a couple of the programs I’m particularly proud of.

Apps and games for everyone

We believe everyone should have easy access to great app and game experiences. This enables people to lead better lives, and it helps you grow your businesses.

In order to help with this, we’ve made some updates that make it easier for everyone to access apps and games at a price that is right for them, which in turn helps you better monetise your apps or games. For example, you asked for more flexibility and less complexity in how you sell your subscriptions, so we launched new subscription capabilities. You can now create multiple base plans and offers for each subscription, all while significantly reducing the cost and complexity of managing an ever-increasing number of SKUs. Whether your aim is to better connect with people that are new to your business, or to retain your loyal users, you have the ability to create offers for everyone.

We’ve also invested in new tools that help people pay for your apps and games using the methods that suit them best, helping to improve your monetisation. Google Play Commerce provides buyer support in over 170 countries, and we’ve further increased access by adding to our payment method library, which now includes over 300 local payment methods in 70 countries. We also made changes to help you better adapt to local purchasing power by adding the option to lower prices, starting at the equivalent of 5 US cents in any market.

Serving people better doesn’t only mean adapting pricing, but also optimizing your apps and games for the devices they are using, so they can get the best experience. Whether it’s phones, wearables, tablets or TVs. We introduced new tools and resources to help you create better experiences on large screens and launched Google Play Games beta, to help you expand your game’s reach to PCs.

Celebrating you

I started by highlighting OLIO as a business that was brought into existence by newcomers to the apps space, and yet managed to have a positive impact across the world. This is only one of so many inspiring examples out there. We’ve just launched #WeArePlay, a new campaign that celebrates you, the global community of people behind apps and games, and your unique stories. It represents teams of all sizes — some founded by longtime coders and others by tech newcomers, some based in big cities and others in smaller towns. These are short stories that tell personal journeys of making apps or games that are solving a problem or bringing joy to people everywhere.

I look forward to watching you all continue to build amazing app and game experiences, grow your businesses, and enthrall your users. Here’s to you and your achievements - let’s continue to celebrate every step forward and each small win. That’s what makes us all grow.

Take care of yourselves and each other,

Sarah Karam

Director, Global Apps Partnerships, Google Play

#WeArePlay | Discover the people building apps & games businesses

22 June 2022

Posted by Patricia Correa, Director, Global Developer Marketing

Privacy Sandbox Developer Preview 3: Support for conversion measurement, custom audiences, and ad selection

16 June 2022

Posted by Fred Chung, Android Developer Relations

The Privacy Sandbox on Android aims to develop new solutions that preserve user privacy and enable effective, personalized advertising experiences for apps. Since our first developer preview, we've shared progress updates and continue to engage the industry on everything from the Developer Preview timeline, to Topics taxonomy, to SDK version management. We appreciate your feedback! Today, we’re releasing Developer Preview 3, which includes APIs and developer resources for conversion measurement and remarketing use cases. In addition to the preview of SDK Runtime and Topics APIs released earlier, you can for the first time begin testing and evaluating impact on all key APIs for Privacy Sandbox on Android. Event-Level and Aggregate Attribution Reporting APIs These APIs allow developers to measure when an ad click or view event leads to a conversion, such as the download of a new game. They support key use cases for attribution across apps and the web, and improve user privacy by removing reliance on cross-party user identifiers. This release includes a developer guide and sample apps to help you understand client- and server-side set up and interactions for key parts of the attribution reporting workflow, including:

Registering attribution source and trigger events.

Receiving event reports and unencrypted aggregatable reports.

(Note that aggregatable report encryption is not yet implemented. See the release notes for details.) To help facilitate testing, the release also supports ADB commands to override reporting time windows. Refer to the API reference to learn more about the Android client APIs. Custom Audience and Ad Selection APIs Part of FLEDGE for Android, these APIs provide the building blocks to serve customized ads to users based on previous app engagement, without third-party data sharing. You’ll be able to:

Manage Custom Audience membership and observe how its parameter values may affect auction outcomes

Fetch JavaScript auction code from remote endpoints

Configure and initiate on-device ad auctions

Handle impression reporting

To learn more, refer to the Custom Audience and Ad Selection API reference pages, as well as the release notes. Other key features If you’re just starting to explore the Developer Preview, please also review the supported features described in the SDK Runtime and Topics API developer guides. If you need a refresher on key technologies for the Privacy Sandbox on Android, we recommend watching this overview video and reviewing the design proposals. Get started with the Developer Preview Today’s Developer Preview release provides the resources you need to begin early testing of features and share feedback. To get started developing, see instructions to set up the SDK and system images on the emulator or supported Pixel devices. For more information on the Privacy Sandbox on Android Developer Preview, visit the developer site and sign up for our newsletter to receive regular updates.

Google Play @ Google I/O - 3 updates you need to know

13 June 2022

Posted by Tom Grinsted - Group Product Manager, Google Play

Here at Google Play, we’re always working on new ways to help developers grow their businesses, whether that’s by increasing installs, improving engagement, or boosting monetization. So in case you missed it, here are the top 3 new ways to grow your business that we announced at this year’s Google I/O: #1: Improved custom store listings Custom store listings have gotten a major update, giving you new ways to make a great first impression by showing the right message to each person. You can now generate unique deep links to your custom listings, so you can show different listings to users depending on which channel or site they come from. And because Play Console provides analytics for each of your custom listings, you can see how effective each variation is and optimize them over time. All developers can create up to 50 custom store listings, so you can create more tailored narratives for your users than ever before. With up to 5 experiments per listing, the opportunities for optimization are huge!

Custom store listings have gotten a major update, giving you new ways to improve your conversion rate.

#2: LiveOps open beta LiveOps are self-service merchandising units in the Play Store that promote limited-time events, offers, and major updates for your game or app. Developers in our beta can submit content to help inspire installs, increase engagement, and drive sales. Plus, they can now use deep links to drop users directly into the most relevant part of their app or game, then measure success with the new LiveOps reporting dashboard in Play Console. These reports give a granular view of the performance metrics of each event, displaying the results over time and by outcome – whether that’s acquisitions, opens, or updates. Learn more about LiveOps and express interest in our beta program here.

Developers in our LiveOps beta can submit content to be featured on the Google Play Store. #3: New flexible tools to grow your subscriptions As subscription business models evolve, many developers have asked us for more flexibility and less complexity in how they sell subscriptions. In a major update, we launched new subscription capabilities, allowing you to configure multiple base plans and offers for each subscription. Acquire new subscribers, incentivize upgrades, and retain existing subscribers, by creating multiple offers supporting different stages of the subscription lifecycle, all while significantly reducing the cost and complexity of managing an ever-increasing number of SKUs.

For each subscription, you can now configure multiple base plans and offers, without needing to manage an ever-increasing number of SKUs. Plus, you can now offer prepaid plans that give users access for a fixed amount of time, and make a great option for regions where pay-as-you-go is standard or for users not ready to commit to an auto-renewing plan. Users can easily extend their access period at any time before plan expiration, with a top-up in your app, or right on the Play Store subscription screen. That was just three launches from a whole bunch of great updates to help you grow and thrive with Play. Want to see more? Be sure to catch the full playlist on Google Play from Google I/O.

Android 13 Beta 3 and Platform Stability

08 June 2022

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering Android13 Logo

Today we’re releasing the third Beta of Android 13, taking us into the final phase of our cycle where we’re focusing on polish and performance. With Android 13, we’ve built on our core themes of privacy and security, developer productivity, and tablet and large screen support. There’s a lot to explore in Android 13, from privacy features like the new notification permission and photo picker, to productivity features like themed app icons and per-app language support, as well as modern standards like HDR video, Bluetooth LE Audio, and MIDI 2.0 over USB. We’ve also extended the newer updates we made in 12L, giving you better tools to take advantage of the 270+ million tablet and large screen devices in active use. Beta 3 takes Android 13 to Platform Stability, which means that the developer APIs and all app-facing behaviors are now final. We’re thankful for all the feedback you’ve shared to help us get to this point! For developers, the focus is now on compatibility testing and quality as you prepare your apps for the official release later in the year! You can get Beta 3 on your Pixel device by enrolling here for over-the-air updates. If you previously enrolled, you’ll automatically get today’s update. You can also try Android 13 Beta on select devices from several of our partners - learn more at android.com/beta. Read on for a quick look at how to get your app ready, and visit the Android 13 developer site for details. Platform Stability With Beta 3, Android 13 reaches Platform Stability, a milestone that means all app-facing behaviors and APIs, including the official API Level 33 SDK and NDK APIs, are now final. So from Beta 3, you can confidently develop and release your compatibility updates knowing that the platform won’t change.

Platform stability timeline with stable at the June mark

We’re asking all app and game developers to start your final compatibility testing now and prepare to publish your compatibility updates as soon as possible ahead of the final release. For all SDK, library, tools, and game engine developers, it’s even more important to start testing now and release your compatible updates as soon as possible -- your downstream app and game developers may be blocked until they receive your updates. So when you’ve released a compatible update, be vocal and let your developers know! App compatibility App compatibility means that your app runs as intended on a new version of the platform. With each release, we make integral changes to the platform that improve privacy and security and the overall user experience across the OS. These can affect your apps, so it’s important to test your app now, make any updates needed, and publish a compatible update to your users ahead of the final release. It’s a basic but critical level of quality that your users will appreciate as they explore what’s new in Android 13. To test your app for compatibility, just install your production app from Google Play or other source onto a device running Android 13 Beta 3. Work through all of the app’s flows and watch for functional or UI issues. Review the behavior changes to focus your testing. Here are some changes to watch for:

Runtime permission for notifications - Android 13 introduces a new runtime permission for sending notifications from an app. Make sure you understand how the new permission works, and plan on targeting Android 13 (API 33) as soon as possible. More here.

Clipboard preview - Make sure your app hides sensitive data in Android 13’s new clipboard preview, such as passwords or credit card information. More here.

JobScheduler prefetch - JobScheduler now tries to anticipate the next time your app will be launched and will run any associated prefetch jobs ahead of that time. If you use prefetch jobs, test that they are working as expected. More here.

Also remember to test the libraries and SDKs in your app for compatibility. If you find any issues, try updating to the latest version of the library or SDK or reaching out to the developer for help. Once you’ve published the compatible version of your current app, you can start the process to update your app's targetSdkVersion. Review the behavior changes for apps targeting Android 13 and use the compatibility framework to help you detect issues quickly. Here are some of the changes to test for (these apply only to apps with targetSdkVersion set to API 33 or higher):

Nearby device permission for Wi-Fi - Apps that manage a device's connections to nearby access points should use a new NEARBY_WIFI_DEVICES runtime permission for Wi-Fi operations like scanning, without needing access to device location. Some Wi-Fi APIs require your app to have this new permission. More here.

Granular media permissions - If your app targets Android 13 and reads media files from common data storage, you must request one or more of the new granular permissions instead of the READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission. More here.

Permission changes for body sensors - Android 13 introduces "while in use" access for body sensors. If your app needs to access body sensor information from the background, it must declare a new BODY_SENSORS_BACKGROUND permission. More here.

Intent filters block non-matching intents - If your app sends an intent to an exported component of another app targeting Android 13 (API 33) or higher, it now needs to match an intent filter in the receiving app. More here.

Media controls derived from PlaybackState - Android 13 derives more media controls from PlaybackState actions, to show a richer set of controls that are consistent across device types. Make sure your app handles these changes. More here

Tablets and large-screens support Android 13 builds on the tablet optimizations introduced in 12L, so as part of your testing, make sure your apps look their best on tablets and other large-screen devices. You can test with the large screens features by setting up an Android emulator in Android Studio, or you can use a large screen device from our Android 13 Beta partners. Here are some areas to watch for:

Taskbar interaction - Check how your app responds when viewed with the new taskbar on large screens. Make sure your app's UI isn't cut off or blocked by the taskbar. More here.

Multi-window mode - Multi-window mode is now enabled by default for all apps, regardless of app configuration, so make sure the app handles split-screen appropriately. You can test by dragging and dropping your app into split-screen mode and adjusting the window size. More here.

Improved compatibility experience - if your app isn’t optimized for tablets yet, such as using a fixed orientation or not being resizable, check how your app responds to compatibility mode adjustments such as letterboxing. More here.

Media projection - If your app uses media projection, check how your app responds while playing back, streaming, or casting media on large screens. Be sure to account for device posture changes on foldable devices as well. More here.

Camera preview - For camera apps, check how your camera preview UI responds on large screens when your app is constrained to a portion of the screen in multi-window or split-screen mode. Also check how your app responds when a foldable device's posture changes. More here.

You can read more about the tablet features in Android 13 and what to test here. Get started with Android 13! Today’s Beta release has everything you need to test your app and try the Android 13 features. Just enroll your Pixel device to get the update over-the-air. To get started, set up the Android 13 SDK. You can also test your app with Android 13 Beta on devices from several of our partners. Visit android.com/beta to see the full list of partners, with links to their sites for details on their supported devices and Beta builds, starting with Beta 1. Each partner will handle their own enrollments and support, and provide the Beta updates to you directly. For even broader testing, you can try Android 13 Beta 3 on Android GSI images, and if you don’t have a device, you can test on the Android Emulator. For complete details on Android 13, visit the Android 13 developer site.

Progress on initiatives to keeping Google Play safe

07 June 2022

Posted by Krish Vitaldevara Director, Product Management, Play and Android Trust & Safety

We want to keep you updated on the privacy and security initiatives we shared earlier this year, so you can plan ahead and use new tools to safely build your business. In the past few months, we launched:

Google Play SDK Index to help you evaluate an SDK’s reliability and safety and make informed decisions about whether an SDK is right for your business and your users. See insights and usage data on over 100 of the most widely used commercial SDKs on Google Play.

The Data safety section on Google Play, helping users better understand your apps’ data safety practices. Developers have told us that this new feature helps them explain privacy practices with their users and build trust. If you haven't yet, complete your Data safety form by July 20th.

Enhancements to app integrity tools like Play App Signing to securely sign millions of apps on Google Play and help ensure that app updates can be trusted. Use Play App Signing to help protect your app signing key from loss or compromise with Google's secure key management service.

Play Integrity API to help protect your app, your IP, and your users from piracy and malicious activity. Use this API to help detect fraudulent and risky interactions, such as traffic from modified or pirated app versions and rooted or compromised devices.

And a new Target API Level policy to strengthen user security by protecting users from installing apps that may not have the expected privacy and security features.

What’s coming up

As part of our work with the industry to build more private advertising solutions, we’ve launched initial developer previews for Privacy Sandbox on Android. We have more developer previews coming soon and a beta later this year.

We continue to help developers update their apps before policy enforcement actions are taken. We’ve extended time to make changes, improved clarity of responses, and added new training materials. Recent tests of advanced Play Console warnings have also shown solid results. As we refine these features, we’ll expand them to more developers this year.

Thank you for your partnership in making Google Play a safe and trustworthy platform for everyone.

Developer-Powered CTS (CTS-D)

Notes from Google Play: making Play work for everyone

#WeArePlay | Discover the people building apps & games businesses

Privacy Sandbox Developer Preview 3: Support for conversion measurement, custom audiences, and ad selection

Google Play @ Google I/O - 3 updates you need to know

Android 13 Beta 3 and Platform Stability

Progress on initiatives to keeping Google Play safe

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