Last month, we kicked off the next Android Developer Challenge, and asked you to submit your ideas focused on helpful innovation, powered by on-device machine learning. But what exactly do we mean when we say helpful innovation? We’re glad you asked! We rounded up a few of Google’s on-device machine learning offerings, together with some great recent examples of this technology in action, to help inspire your submission. Don’t forget, submit your idea by December 2!
Using machine learning to tackle Fall Armyworm
Take Nazirini Siraji. When she and a team of developers noticed a crop-pest threatening the livelihood of Ugandan farmers, they taught themselves TensorFlow to combat this pest. They collected training data from nearby fields in the form of images. With TensorFlow, they re-trained a MobileNet, a technique known as transfer learning and then used the TensorFlow Converter to generate a TensorFlow Lite FlatBuffer file which they deployed in an Android app. With the app, a farmer can snap a picture of their crop and the image frame is analysed to look for Fall armyworm damage. Depending on the results from this phase, a suggestion of a possible solution is given. It’s pretty cool!
Helping doctors detect respiratory diseases using machine learning
Tambua Health is helping doctors determine the likelihood of respiratory diseases by turning any smartphone into a powerful non-invasive screening tool. They developed an app using TensorFlow Lite that can help doctors analyze lung sounds for the presence of abnormal sounds like wheezes, crackles, stridor, and other adventitious sounds.
adidas uses machine learning to make the shopping experience easier
Even brands are tapping the power of machine learning. Take adidas, who recently launched a new “Bring It to Me” experience for their London store. Shoppers can use Visual Lookup to scan products on their phones while they are in the store, and the app lets them check stock and request their size without the need for queues. Under the hood, ML Kit is helping power the experience. It’s another way machine learning is helping users get things done more quickly.
The benefits of on-device machine learning
Running machine learning on a user’s device comes with a number of benefits. First, you reduce the amount of data you send to your server, enhancing user privacy. And because it runs on device, it can also work offline - perfect for inaccessible areas such as the middle of a rainforest, a desert or the London Underground. Last but not least, the most exciting aspect of running your model on device is low latency and this can enable all kinds of new user experiences. Machine learning is not just for automating tasks, it can work alongside your users and give them super powers too!
At Google, we offer a number of different technologies to help you take advantage of this:
If you’ve got a great idea that can help users get things done, we want to hear from you! We’ll pick 10 concepts and provide expertise and guidance to those developers to help in their plans to bring their ideas to fruition. And once the app is ready, we’ll help showcase it in front of the billions of users on Google Play, through a collection and more. You can read more about all of the prizes here.
There’s still time to submit your idea before the December 2 deadline. We can’t wait to hear what you come up with, and to work with you on bringing helpful innovation powered by on-device machine learning to more and more users!
Android users care a lot about the battery life on their phones. In particular, how your app schedules deferrable background tasks play an important role in battery life. To help you build more battery-friendly apps, we introduced WorkManager as the unified solution for all deferrable background processing needs.
Starting November 1, 2020, we are unifying deferrable background tasks on Android around WorkManager, and GCMNetworkManager will be deprecated and no longer supported.
The WorkManager API incorporates the features of Firebase Job Dispatcher (FJD) and GcmNetworkManager solutions, providing a consistent job scheduling service back to API level 14 while being conscious of battery life. For example, if your app needs to send log files up to the server, it would be more efficient to wait until the device is both charging and connected to WiFi. In this case, WorkManager will ensure that the sync will execute when the given constraints (charging and connected to WiFi) are met. Additionally, it does not require Google Play Services, unlike FJD and GcmNetworkManager.
Some of the other key features of WorkManager include:
Now that the WorkManager library has reached maturity, we have decided to deprecate alternative solutions to simplify the developer story and focus on WorkManager stability and features.
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Now is the time to migrate your apps to WorkManager if you haven't already done so! You can start by reading the official documentation for WorkManager.
If your app is still using FirebaseJobDispatcher, you can migrate your app to WorkManager by following the migration guide. A similar migration guide from GCMNetworkManager to WorkManager is also available.
YouTube recently moved over to WorkManager for their background scheduling needs and has reported improvements in app startup time as well as an 8% drop in crash rates.
The team is dedicated to improving and continuing feature development on WorkManager. If you encounter issues using the library, have proposals for features you would like to see, or have any feedback about the library, please file an issue.
Advanced Android in Kotlin, developed by Google together with Udacity, is our newly-released, free, self-paced online course. In this course expert instructors from the Android team at Google will introduce you to some of the advanced features you can build into your Android apps.
This course is intended for developers who have mastered the basics of building an Android app in Kotlin, and want to dive deeper into advanced functionality. To benefit most from this course, you need skills equivalent to what's taught in our Android Fundamentals Udacity or codelab courses.
Advanced Android in Kotlin teaches you about notifications, graphics and animations on Android, using third-party authentication for login, and how to add maps to your apps. Learn how to create custom views that can look like anything you want, draw to a canvas, and have eye-catching animations. And, most importantly, you will learn how to properly test your apps!
Here is a sample of apps you will build:
Check out the YouTube course trailer below for additional information about the course and apps:
Different people like to learn in different ways, so we are offering this course as both a Udacity video-based course and as a series of codelabs with topics that you can explore in any order. Whether you prefer to work on your own with just the text and code, or to have an instructor help walk through the code with you on video, we’ve got you covered; just choose your path and get learning!
Last month’s #AndroidDevSummit was jam-packed with announcements and technical news...so much that we wouldn’t be surprised if you missed something. So all this month, we’ll be diving into key areas from throughout the summit so you don’t miss anything. Earlier this week, we spotlighted Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, and today, we’re highlighting Android Studio, with the top three things you should know:
#1: Support for Jetpack Compose
For the best experience developing with Jetpack Compose, you can now use the latest version of Android Studio 4.0 in the canary channel, and benefit from smart editor features, such as New Project templates, code completion and the ability to immediately preview your Jetpack Compose UI.
#2: What’s new in Android Studio session
We covered both new features and successes of our quality initiative called Project Marble. On the quality aspect, we discuss improvements around hangs and latency, memory leak detection, automatic IDE heap sizing and build speed. Also during the session you will find demos on new developments & features in Android Studio such as Build Attribution tool which helps you understand and diagnose problems with your build system, Java 8 library desugaring, View binding, Kotlin Android live templates, an updated live Layout inspector which allows you to drill into resources right from the view to find where a property value originates in the source code with a 3D visualization of your view hierarchy.
#3: Android Studio Design tools
We introduced new features of Layout & Navigation editor including a new split view, new tools such as Multi-preview which allows you to visualize your layout in different configurations and MotionEditor, visual design editor for the MotionLayout layout type, making it easier to create and preview animations. The Motion Editor provides a simple interface for manipulating elements from the MotionLayout library that serves as the foundation for animation in Android apps. In previous releases, creating and altering these elements required manually editing constraints in XML resource files. Now, the Motion Editor can generate this XML for you, with support for start and end states, keyframes, transitions, and timelines.
You can find the entire playlist of Android Dev Summit sessions and videos here. We’ll continue to spotlight other areas later this month, so keep an eye out and follow AndroidDevelopers on Twitter. Thanks so much for letting us be a part of this experience with you!
Posted by Marcus Leal, Product Manager, Google Play Ads
How do people find your app? It’s the million-dollar question for any developer, and the answer can help you make the right choices about your marketing strategy and budget. Accurate install referral data is crucial for understanding which traffic sources send users to download your app from the Google Play Store, as well as identifying fraudulent attempts to claim install attributions.
That’s why in 2017, we launched the Play Install Referrer API, which provides a reliable and robust mechanism for apps to retrieve referral information directly from the Play Store. It was a big step forward from the old install_referrer intent broadcast, so many developers made the switch right away, including App Attribution Program partners like Adjust, AppsFlyer, and Kochava. Now, because it’s been replaced by the new API, we’ve decided to deprecate the install_referrer intent broadcast mechanism on March 1, 2020. After this date, new versions of the Play Store app will no longer broadcast the install_referrer intent after app installs.
We are asking developers who still rely on the install_referrer to use the Play Install Referrer API instead. Among other advantages, the Install Referrer API offers better performance, uses a secure communication channel between your app and the Play Store, and offers a more robust solution against spoof and attribution fraud.
If you still use the Broadcast API and the install_referrer intent to track your referrals, be sure to make the switch by March 1, 2020. Migration is easy, and the cost of adoption is low. Learn how to use the Play Install Referrer API to track your app installs today.
Last month’s #AndroidDevSummit was jam-packed with announcements and technical news...so much that we wouldn’t be surprised if you missed something. So all this month, we’ll be diving into key areas from throughout the summit so you don’t miss anything. First up, we’re spotlighting Kotlin, with the top things you should know:
#1: Kotlin momentum on Android
Kotlin is at the heart of modern Android development — and we’ve been excited to see how quickly it has won over developers around the world. At Android Dev Summit we announced that nearly 60% of the top 1000 Android apps on the Play Store now use Kotlin, and we’re seeing more developers adopt it every day. Kotlin has helpful features like null safety, data classes, coroutines, and complete interoperability with the Java programming language. We’re doubling down on Kotlin with more Kotlin-first APIs even beyond AndroidX — we just released KTX extensions, including coroutines support, for Play Core. There’s never been a better time to give Kotlin a try.
#2: Learn more: Getting started with Kotlin & diving into advanced Kotlin with coroutines
If you’re introducing Kotlin into an existing codebase, chances are that you’ll be calling the Java programming language from Kotlin and vice versa. At Android Dev Summit, developer advocates Murat Yener, Nicole Borrelli, and Wenbo Zhu took a look at how nullability, getters, setters, default parameters, exceptions, and more work across the two languages.
For those looking into more advanced Kotlin topics, we recommend watching Jose Alcérreca's and Yigit Boyar's talk that explains how coroutines and Flow can fit together with LiveData in your app's architecture and one on testing coroutines by Sean McQuillan and Manuel Vivo.
#3: Get certified in Kotlin
We announced the launch of our Associate Android Developer certification in Kotlin. Now you can prove your proficiency with modern Kotlin development on Android to your coworkers, your professional network, or even your future employer. As part of this launch, you can take this exam at a discount when using the code ADSCERT99 through January 25.
It’s especially great to hear from you, the Android community, at events like Android Dev Summit: what do you want to hear more about, and how can we help with something you’re working on. We asked you to submit your burning questions on Twitter and the livestream, and developer advocates Florina Muntenescu and Sean McQuillan answered your Kotlin and coroutines questions live during our #AskAndroid segment:
You can find the entire playlist of Android Dev Summit sessions and videos here. We’ll continue to spotlight other areas later this month, so keep an eye out and follow Android Developers on Twitter. Thanks so much for letting us be a part of this experience with you!
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Last month’s #AndroidDevSummit was jam-packed with announcements and technical news...so much that we wouldn’t be surprised if you missed something. So all this month, we’ll be diving into key areas from throughout the summit so you don’t miss anything. Earlier today, we spotlighted Kotlin and now we’re diving into Jetpack Compose, with the top three things you should know:
#1: Jetpack Compose is available in Developer Preview!
Jetpack Compose is Android’s modern toolkit for building native UI. It allows developers to write beautiful Android apps in an intuitive way, writing less code and accelerating development. It's powerful, because when writing code is a pleasure, you can focus on making your apps look beautiful and giving your users the best experience. At #AndroidDevSummit, we released the Developer Preview, to enable more feedback as we work towards bringing Jetpack Compose to beta next year. All you need to do is download the Android Studio 4.0 Canary build to try it out. To give feedback, feel free to reach out through the Kotlinlang Slack channel or our Bug Tracker to let us know what you think. It's your chance to help us build the right thing!
#2: See what's new in Jetpack Compose
At Android Dev Summit we showed how we've designed Compose to simplify development of Android apps, details on the new Material UI components we are building, and insights on some of the learnings that are informing the way we think about Compose. We also showcased how to write a small app, including layout and state management for a list of elements, in just a few lines of code.
Watch the Android Dev Summit session video to learn more:
If you want to take a look behind the scenes, we also had a tech deep dive into the inner workings of Compose:
#3: Try it out, with our tutorial, sample app, and codelab!
Jetpack Compose is still in Developer Preview, which means it's a great time to try it out and let us know what you think about it. To help you with that, you can follow our tutorial, which will take you through the first steps of building a Compose app, and also take a look at our sample app, Jetnews, that shows what is currently possible with Jetpack Compose. We also have a popular codelab available to take you through how to build UIs with Compose, how to manage state in composable functions, and data flow principles in Compose.
...and we also heard from you!
But Android Dev Summit isn’t just about what we’ve got to say; it’s also about you telling us what you’d like to see worked on to make your life easier. And this year, one thing we heard strongly from our community was how important it is to have the right tools to manage your layouts on so many different form factors and devices. Jetpack Compose has full Android Studio support and you can iterate fast with live Previews.
Android Dev Summit is over for this year, but you can keep giving us your feedback through the Kotlinlang Slack channel and Bug Tracker.
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