The latest Android and Google Play news for app and game developers.
Posted by Tom Greenaway, Senior Partner Developer Advocate
Last year we announced that starting from August 2018 Google Play will require all new apps and games to target a recent Android API level – set to API level 26 (Android 8.0 Oreo), or higher. Additionally, this requirement will extend to updates for existing apps and games starting from November 2018.
Every new Android version introduces changes that bring significant security and performance improvements – and enhance the user experience of Android overall. Updating your games to target the latest API level ensures that your users can benefit from these improvements, while still allowing your games to run on older Android versions.
Simple next steps:
Significant changes to be aware of:
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE" />
Moving ahead
Remember, updating the target API level is just the first step – make sure your game is compatible with the behavior changes between your current target API level and API level 26. Check out further guidance on the changes in past versions of Android to help in your migration process. These policy changes are important for moving the Android ecosystem forward and keeping it healthy for our users – and yours.
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Posted by Neto Marin - Actions on Google Developer Advocate
There are millions of apps in the Android ecosystem, so helping yours get discovered can require some investment. Your app needs to offer something that differentiates it from other similar apps to stand out to users.
Building a companion Action is a fast and simple way to increase your Android app's potential reach by creating a new entrypoint from devices covered by the Google Assistant. This lets you bring your services to users without needing to install anything through voice, and can bring people into your app when it can provide more value.
Your companion Action complements your Android app's experience by offering some of your services through the Google Assistant, which is available on more than 500 million devices including speakers, phones, cars, headphones, and more. Creating an Action provides a frictionless way for users to start engaging with your services wherever the Google Assistant is available.
Creating an Action for the Assistant will extend your brand presence, bringing your services to new devices and contexts as users interact with the Google Assistant.
It is probably a mistake to try to rewrite all of your Android app as a conversational Action, since voice is a different modality with different constraints and usage patterns. Instead, you should start by selecting the most important or popular features in your app that translate well into a voice context and can be more easily accomplished there. Then, you can create your conversational experience to offer these features on Google Assistant devices. Check out the Conversation design site, which has several articles and guides about how to create a great voice UI.
Let's take a look at a hypothetical example. Imagine you have a mobile commerce app. Some features include searching for products, navigating to different categories, adding payment information, and checking out. You could build an Action for the Assistant with most of the same functionality, but we encourage you to look for what makes the most sense in a conversational experience.
In this case, your Action could focus on everything that a user would want to know after they've purchased a product through your Android app or web page. You could offer a quick way to get updates about a purchase's status (if you provide different states for payment/purchase process) and shipment information, or provide an interface for re-ordering a user's favorite products. Then, your users would be able to ask something like, "Hey Google, ask Voice Store about my last purchase."
Or, to reach users who have never made a purchase before, you could create an Action to offer exciting deals for common products. For example, you could create an Action that is invoked with, "Hey Google, ask Voice Store what are the deals on TVs today".
As you can see, starting with a "hero" use case for your Action is an exciting way to introduce conversational features that complement your Android app, and it will take less time than you think.
At Google I/O 2018, we presented a talk, "Integrating your Android apps with the Google Assistant" which contains more details and examples for developers.
In-app purchases, subscriptions, and one-time products have proven successful for Android developers when it comes to monetization, allowing developers to offer different kinds of digital goods and additional value for paying users. These types of monetization are proven to drive user conversion and make the app more profitable.
Google Play Billing offers a series of tools, APIs, and documentation to help developers manage the subscription life-cycle, build server-side validation, and much more. If you are new to in-app billing, check out the Google Play Billing Overview page.
Now, Android developers can expand where users can access these goods or upgraded experiences by offering them through Actions, as well. This expansion is accomplished by honoring the user's entitlements on Google Play across different surfaces and devices, reaching users when they can't (or don't want to) use an app, like while cooking or driving.
For non-Android platforms, you'll need to ask your users to link their accounts. You can then use your user's account history to identify what purchases they've made on other surfaces.
Check the Accessing Digital Purchases page for a step-by-step guide on how to enable access to the user's purchases and request and parse the purchase data.
If you are not familiar with Actions on Google yet, start by checking out our overview page, which describes the platform in detail and tells you all you need to know to create your Actions for the Google Assistant.
Stay tuned for more posts about how to improve your Android app experience with Actions on Google.
Thanks for reading!
Since the major revamp of the Android Emulator two years ago, we have focused on delivering a fast and feature-rich emulator to help you build great app experiences for users. Today, the Android Emulator is the top device deployed to from Android Studio — more than 2x over physical Android devices. We are humbled to hear from many of you that the Android Emulator has come a long way, but we are not done yet.
Making the Android Emulator faster is one of the top priorities for the Android Studio team. Over the last few releases, we have launched quick boot & emulator snapshots for quickly starting and resuming emulator sessions in under 2 seconds. Up until now, our emulator experience has almost universally worked on macOS® and Linux computers. But for users of Microsoft® Windows® or the Microsoft® Hyper-V™ platform, our hardware accelerated speed enhancements for the Android Emulator only worked with computers with Intel® processors. Support for AMD® processors and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor are two long-standing user requests from the Android developer community that we are happy to address with this Android Emulator update.
Today, you can download the latest Android Emulator release, which is enabled to run x86 based Android Virtual Devices (AVD) on computers that use AMD processors. This exciting update makes the Android Emulator more accessible to a new set of Android app developers that were previously limited to software emulation, but can now have hardware accelerated performance. Moreover, for those of you who use Hyper-V to run your local app backend, the Android Emulator can now also coexist with other Hyper-V-backed applications on Windows® 10.
Thanks to a new Microsoft Windows Hypervisor Platform (WHPX) API and recent open-source contributions from Microsoft, even more Android app developers can take advantage of all the speed improvements and features in the Android Emulator.
Android Emulator running on Windows 10 with AMD Processor Screenshot Configuration: Asus ROG Strix GL 702ZC, Processor: AMD® Ryzen™ 7 1700 Processor, Chipset: AMD 5350, Graphics: AMD® Radeon™ RX580
Support for these technologies was initially available in the v27.3.8 Android Emulator canary release and today we are releasing this set of preview features (AMD processor & Hyper-V support) on the stable channel for more feedback. Alongside this update, we have added additional speed improvements in loading emulator snapshots for those developers using the Intel® Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM).
If you use Linux for Android app development, the Android Emulator will continue to use the native Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor for both Intel and AMD based computers for a fast and performant virtualization solution. An update to the v27.3.8 Android Emulator will offer you the new snapshots UI along with improvements to performance, reliability and resource usage.
For OS X v10.10 Yosemite and higher, the Android Emulator uses the built-in Hypervisor.Framework by default, and falls back to using the Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM) if Hypervisor.Framework fails to initialize (such as when running on OS X v10.9 or earlier). Once you update to the latest Android Emulator on macOS, you will also have access to the new snapshots UI along with under the hood performance and reliability improvements.
Android Emulator - Snapshots Extended Controls
On Intel x86-based computers, the Android Emulator will continue to use Intel HAXM by default. Intel HAXM is a mature and open-sourced hypervisor solution developed by Intel. Thanks to on-going development by Intel, the fastest emulator performance on Windows is still with Intel HAXM. To download the latest Intel HAXM v7.2.0, check for updates in the Android SDK Manager.
If you have an AMD processor in your computer you need the following setup requirements to be in place:
Windows Hypervisor Platform setting in Windows 10
If you want to use Hyper-V at the same time as the Android Emulator on your Intel processor-based computer, you will also need the same Android Studio and Android Emulator versions as listed above, but with the additional requirements:
For more setup tips and troubleshooting details, check out the documentation page.
Again, for existing Windows users who have an Intel-based processor, the Android Emulator will continue to use the faster and recommended Intel HAXM configuration. For those using AMD processors, and those who use Hyper-V hypervisors, this should be an exciting step forward to start using the Android Emulator.
Download the latest Android Emulator from the Android Studio 3.2 Beta SDK Manager for the latest performance updates across all supported platforms that you are using. We are going to continue to invest in performance improvements for each of the platforms and we look forward to your feedback and feature requests.
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 Florina Muntenescu, Developer Advocate & Siyamed Sinir Android Text Technical Lead
In "What's new in Android P Beta" we mentioned two of the new text features in Android.. Now that Android P Beta 2 and the final APIs are here, it's time to dive deeper into what's new for text. We know that TextView is one of the most critical components of the Android view system. This is why we continue to invest in both developer- and user-facing features and API improvements.
Displaying text can be complex, encompassing features like multiple fonts, line spacing, letter spacing, text direction, line breaking, hyphenation and more. TextView has to do a lot of work to measure and lay out the given text: reading the font file, finding a glyph, decide the shape, measure the bounding box, and caching the word in an internal word cache. What's more, all of this work takes place on the UI thread, where it could potentially cause your app to drop frames.
We found that measuring text can take up to 90% of the time required to set the text. To solve this problem, in Android P and as part of Jetpack, we introduced a new API: PrecomputedText. This API is available as far back as API 14 via PrecomputedTextCompat.
PrecomputedText enables an app to perform the most time-consuming parts of text layout beforehand, even on a background thread, caching the layout result and returning valuable measurement data. The result of PrecomputedText.create(CharSequence, params) can then be set on a TextView. With this, only about 10% of the work remains to be done by the TextView.
Percentage of time taken to measure and layout text
// UI thread val params: PrecomputedText.Params = textView.getTextMetricsParams() val ref = WeakReference(textView) executor.execute { // background thread val text = PrecomputedText.create("Hello", params) val textView = ref.get() textView?.post { // UI thread val textViewRef = ref.get() textViewRef?.text = text } }
Even with features like Smart Text Selection, precisely selecting text can be challenging. Android P introduces the text Magnifier to improve the user experience of selecting text. The magnifier helps users precisely position the cursor or the text selection handles by viewing magnified text through a pane that can be dragged over the text.
Magnifying text in Android P
We wanted users to have the same experience across all apps, whether in custom widgets or during custom text-rendering, so we provided a Magnifier widget that can be applied to any view that is attached to a window. The Magnifier widget can provide a zoomed-in version of any view or surface, not just text.
Magnifier
The Magnifier has 3 main methods: show, update and dismiss. For example, you could call these methods when implementing onTouchEvent-handling for your custom view. This would cause the Magnifier to follow the user's finger along the screen.
fun onTouchEvent(event: MotionEvent): Boolean { when (event.actionMasked) { MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN -> magnifier.show(event.x, event.y) MotionEvent.ACTION_MOVE -> magnifier.show(event.x, event.y) MotionEvent.ACTION_UP -> magnifier.dismiss() } }
The Linkify class, which has existed since API 1, allows adding links to text using regexes. On top of that, finding physical addresses spins up a WebView instance to produce the results, which can degrade the performance of the app requesting links. To make link resolution more accurate, especially for internationalized text, and to mitigate the performance degradation caused by the WebView, we created Smart Linkify. Smart Linkify can be accessed using TextClassifier API.
Smart Linkify uses machine-learning algorithms and models to recognize entities in text. This improves the reliability of the entities recognized. Smart Linkify can, based on entity type,suggest actions that the user can perform. For example, if Smart Linkify recognizes a phone number, the API suggests actions such as sending a text message, making a call, or adding to contacts.
Smart Linkify in Android P
To improve the performance of your app, move the work of generating and applying links to a background thread.
// UI thread val text: Spannable = ... val request = TextLinks.Request.Builder(text) val ref = WeakReference(textView) executor.execute { // background thread TextClassifier.generateLinks(request).apply(text) val textView = ref.get() textView?.post { // UI thread val textViewRef = ref.get() textViewRef?.text = text } }
Designers sometimes provide layout specifications to developers that do not match existing TextView attributes perfectly. On Android P and in Jetpack we added three attributes, together with their corresponding functions, to help bridge this gap between how designers and developers work.
Before Android P, the spacing between lines could be controlled using the lineSpacingExtra and lineSpacingMultiplier attributes. However, designers will commonly provide these values as a simple line height, instead. For this reason, on Android P, we added the lineHeight attribute to set the line height of the text: that is, the distance between the top and bottom of a line (or distance between subsequent baselines). Under the hood, this attribute actually uses and modifies the existing lineSpacingExtra and lineSpacingMultiplier attributes.
lineSpacingExtra
lineSpacingMultiplier
lineHeight
Size of line height and font size
<TextView android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_width="match_parent" android:text="Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" app:lineHeight="50sp"/> // or in code TextView.setLineHeight(@Px int)
To control the distances of the first and last baselines from the view boundaries, we added two new attributes: firstBaselineToTopHeight and lastBaselineToBottomHeight.
firstBaselineToTopHeight
lastBaselineToBottomHeight
firstBaselineToTopHeight: Sets the distance between the TextView's top boundary and the baseline of the first line of the TextView. Under the hood this attribute updates the top padding.
lastBaselineToBottomHeight: Sets the distance between the TextView's bottom boundary and the baseline of the last line of the TextView. Under the hood, this attribute actually updates the bottom padding.
Distances between first base line to top and last baseline to bottom
<TextView android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_width="match_parent" android:text="Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" app:firstBaselineToTopHeight="28sp" app:lastBaselineToBottomHeight="20sp"/> // or in code TextView.setFirstBaselineToTopHeight(@Px int) TextView.setLastBaselineToBottomHeight(@Px int)
Text plays an important role in a vast majority of apps - it's a crucial part of an app's design language. Text is consumed by users, and it even renders emoji 😎. We're continuing to invest in text, improving the experience of both app users and developers.
To learn more about working with text APIs and what's new in Android P for text, check out the Google I/O 2018 talk on "Best practices with text":
Join us in congratulating the latest apps and games entering the Android Excellence program on Google Play. This diverse group of apps and games is recognized for their high quality, great user experience, and strong technical performance. Whether you're interested in learning meditation or a new language, or are looking for a game about butterflies or warships, we're excited to dive in to these new collections.
Check out a few of our highlighted apps.
Test your skills with these highlighted games.
See the full list of Android Excellence apps and games.
Explore other great apps and games in the Editors' Choice section on Google Play and discover best practices to help you build quality apps and games.
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Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering
Today we're rolling out Beta 3 of Android P, our next milestone in this year's Android P developer preview. With the developer APIs already finalized in the previous update, Beta 3 now takes us very close to what you'll see in the final version of Android P, due later this summer.
Android P Beta 3 includes the latest bug fixes and optimizations for stability and polish, together with the July 2018 security updates. It's a great way to test your apps now to make sure they are ready before the final release. Give Beta 3 a try and let us know what you think!
You can get Android P Beta 3 on Pixel devices by enrolling here. If you're already enrolled and received the Android P Beta 2 on your Pixel device, you'll automatically get the update to Beta 3. Partners who are participating in the Android P Beta program will also be updating their devices to Beta 3 over the coming weeks.
Today's preview update includes the Beta 3 system images for Pixel devices and the Android Emulator, as well as an update to the Android Studio build tools to include D8 as an independent tool. Beta 3 is an early release candidate build of Android with near-final system behaviors and the official Android P APIs (API level 28).
With the Beta 3 system images and updated build tools, you've got everything you need to test your apps or extend them with Android P features like multi-camera support, display cutout, enhanced notifications, ImageDecoder, TextClassifier, and many others. In your testing, make sure to account for App standby buckets, privacy restrictions, and restrictions on non-SDK interfaces.
First, make your app compatible and give your users a seamless transition to Android P. Just install your current app from Google Play on an Android P Beta device or emulator and test -- the app should run and look great, and handle the Android P behavior changes properly. After you've made any necessary updates, we recommend publishing to Google Play right away without changing the app's platform targeting.
If you don't have a supported device, remember that you can instead set up an Android Virtual Device on the Android Emulator for your test environment. If you haven't tried the emulator recently, you'll find that it's incredibly fast, boots in under 6 seconds, and even lets you model next-gen screens -- such as long screens and screens with a display cutout.
Next, update your app's targetSdkVersion to 28 as soon as possible, so Android P users of your app can benefit from the platform's latest security, performance, and stability features. If your app is already targeting API 26+ in line with Google Play's upcoming policies, then changing to target API 28 should be a small jump. When you change your targeting, make sure your app supports all of the applicable behavior changes.
It's also important to test your apps for uses of non-SDK interfaces and reduce your reliance on them. As noted recently, Android P restricts access to selected non-SDK interfaces. Watch for logcat warnings that highlight direct uses of restricted non-SDK interfaces and try the new StrictMode method detectNonSdkApiUsage() to catch accesses programmatically. Where possible, you should move to using public equivalents from the Android SDK or NDK. If there's no public API that meets your use-case, please let us know.
When you're ready, dive into Android P and learn about the new features and APIs that you can use in your apps. To build with the new APIs, just download the official API 28 SDK and tools into Android Studio 3.1, or use the latest version of Android Studio 3.2. Then update your project's compileSdkVersion and targetSdkVersion to API 28.
Visit the Developer Preview site for details and documentation. Also check out this video and the Google I/O Android playlist for more on what's new in Android P for developers.
As soon as you're ready, publish your APK updates that are compiled against, or optionally targeting, API 28. Publishing an update to Google Play during the preview lets you push updates to existing users to test compatibility on their devices.
To make sure that your updated app runs well on Android P as well as older versions, a common strategy is to use Google Play's beta testing feature. With beta testing you can get early feedback from a small group of users -- including Beta 3 users — and then do a staged rollout to production.
Thanks for all of your feedback so far. Please continue to share feedback or requests as we work towards the consumer release later this summer. Feel free to use our hotlists for platform issues, app compatibility issues, and third-party SDK issues.
Also, the Android engineering team will host a Reddit AMA on r/androiddev to answer your technical questions about Android P on July 19 from 11:30-1 PM (Pacific Time). Look out for an announcement on r/androiddev in the coming weeks. We look forward to addressing your questions!
Posted by Paul Bankhead, Director, Product Management, Google Play
Every day, millions of people come to the Play Store to discover the best apps and games. As part of our continued effort to deliver great experiences to our users, we regularly update the Play Store to help people find and discover safe, high quality, and relevant apps and games.
Over the last year, we've been enhancing our search and discovery algorithms' consideration of app quality and user engagement. This means that apps and games that have high retention rates, low crash rates, low uninstalls, and many other factors, are recommended more often.
Recently, we increased the importance of engagement and app quality in our recommendation systems and users reacted favorably to the changes. With more high quality titles being surfaced in the Play Store's recommendations, people are playing the games they download more often.
We believe that providing great experiences for our users on Google Play will encourage a healthier, growing Android ecosystem. We encourage all developers to review some of the suggestions in this post and on developers.android.com for guidance and best practices.
Play Console
