Posted by Mitchell Wills, Android Build Software Engineer
AOSP has been around for a while, but flashing builds onto a development device has always required a number of manual steps. A year ago we launched Android's Continuous Integration Dashboard, which gives more visibility into the continuous build status of the AOSP source tree. However, these builds were not available for phones and flashing devices still required a manual command line process.
In order to support developers working in AOSP we are launching Android Flash Tool, which allows developers to flash devices with builds listed on the Continuous Integration Dashboard. This can be used by developers working on the Android OS to test changes or App developers to test compatibility with the latest AOSP build.
A device being flashed.
Android Flash Tool allows anyone to use a browser supporting WebUSB, such as Chrome 79 or Edge 79, to flash an Android device entirely from the browser (Windows requires installing a driver). After connecting a device and authorizing the page to connect to it users will be presented with a list of available builds. After choosing a build click flash and the tool does the rest. You can flash recent Pixel devices and the HiKey reference boards with builds based on aosp-master.
Try Android Flash Tool yourself at https://flash.android.com.
Find out more at https://source.android.com/setup/contribute/flash.
Posted by Kacey Fahey, Games Developer Marketing, Google
Cross-posting from the Google Developers Blog.
Google has lots to share with the game development community at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in March. Check out our plans and sign up to keep up to date with the latest GDC news and announcements from Android, Google Play, Firebase, and more.
For one week, tens of thousands of creators from the gaming community come together at GDC to hear the latest industry innovations and network with peers to enable better gaming experiences for players around the world.
Below is a preview of what to expect from Google, and remember, it’s just the beginning. Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter as we reveal more leading up to the event, or you can check out our website, Google for Games at GDC.
We will start the week with the Google for Games Keynote on Monday, March 16 at 9:30 am PST. Join the livestream and learn about the latest tools and solutions to help game developers create great games, connect with players, and scale their businesses.
Google Developer Keynote photo at GDC 2019
We have two days of in-depth sessions where you can uplevel your skills across Google products and solutions. Topics range from new tools to optimize game development, how to reach more devices and players, using new Firebase features to alleviate infrastructure management challenges, and much more.
Learn more about the Google Developer Summit we’ll be hosting on March 16 -17 and how you can join in person with an official GDC ticket or via livestream.
We’ll be sharing more details about everything we have planned at GDC in the coming weeks so be sure to sign up to be among the first to hear the latest updates, and save the date to watch the keynote and other Developer Summit sessions at g.co/gdc2020.
More to come soon!
The Google for Games team
*On-site events are part of the official Game Developers Conference and require a pass to attend.
Posted by Patricia Correa, Director, Developer Marketing
The indie developer community released several fantastic titles on Google Play during 2019, showing the technical skill and innovative design that makes them an essential part of the gaming landscape.
To continue helping indie developers thrive, today we’re announcing the 2020 edition of our annual Google Play Indie Games Festival. This year we will host three competitions for developers from several European countries*, Japan, and South Korea.
Prizes are designed to help you grow your business, including:
The contests are open to developers from selected countries, with no more than 50 employees. The submitted game must be new, released at least in open beta between May 7, 2019 and March 2, 2020. See other requirements in the terms and conditions for each of the contests.
Simply fill out the relevant form by clicking here. Submissions are open until March 2, 2020, at 3pm CET.
The Top 20 entries in each region will be announced in March and invited to showcase at the Festival events where the field will be narrowed to 10 by the event audience, industry experts and the Google team. The Top 10 will present their games on stage and the 3 winners will be selected.
Even if you’re not submitting a game to the competitions, we’d love to see you at one of the Festival events on the 25th of April 2020.
Learn more and sign up on g.co/play/indiefestival
* The European competition is open to developers from the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland).
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At Google I/O 2019 we announced that Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first. Together with JetBrains, we also launched Kotlin/Everywhere - a global series of community led events focusing on the potential of using Kotlin everywhere; on Android, servers, web front-end and other platforms.
Kotlin/Everywhere events took place from May through December and we want to thank everyone for getting involved
👨💻👩💻30,000+ developers participated in-person at Kotlin/Everywhere events
🎥🍿200,000 views of live-streams and event recordings like Kotlin/Everywhere Bengaluru, Minsk, Chicago, Buenos Aires and more.
📅 500+ events: from short evening meetups, half-day sessions, and full day events, to Kotlin/Everywhere tracks at larger events like DevFests, or even StudyJams that spanned several weeks.
🎤~30 speakers from Google and JetBrains gave ~70 talks at events around the world.
🌎 85+ countries/regions: from United States to Chile, Kenya, Greece, Taiwan, New Zealand
💻 Many of the resources used or created for Kotlin/Everywhere by Google and JetBrains are available online:
General Kotlin:
Kotlin in Android:
Kotlin in Google Cloud Platform:
Multi-platform Kotlin:
We’re grateful for this engagement with Kotlin from communities around the world, as well as for all the organisers, speakers and attendees who made these events possible! To participate in more Kotlin events, check out JetBrains’ KotlinConf’19 Global initiative, happening through March 2020.
With all of the resources available, there’s never been a better time to adopt Kotlin… Everywhere!
The last 12 months have seen Google Play continue to grow, with over 116 billion downloads of the apps and games that you created.
We’ve been working hard to build the latest technology and tools for modern Android development and distribution, improving Google Play and the Play Console to offer you new and better ways for your app to be discovered, promoted, and monetized.
A key focus has been addressing the challenge of keeping users safe and maintaining trust in Google Play.
We are focused on building great tools and services and your feedback is crucial in helping us do so. You have told us that you love Android’s openness, but we have also heard that you would like us to marry it with an opinion about the right way to do things. We call this approach modern Android development: opinionated and powerful, for fast, easy development, taking away everything that slows you down so you can focus on building incredible experiences. You can see modern Android development come to life in a number of investments we made this year:
Android 10, released earlier this year, is built around three important themes. First, Android 10 is shaping the leading edge of mobile innovation with advanced machine-learning and support for emerging devices like foldables and 5G enabled phones. Next, Android 10 has a central focus on privacy and security, with almost 50 features that give users greater protection, transparency, and control. Finally, Android 10 expands users' digital wellbeing controls so individuals and families can find a better balance with technology.
We introduced Android App Bundles last year as a mechanism to simplify and streamline app distribution, overcome the constraints of APK publishing, and introduce advanced distribution features such as dynamic delivery. There are now over 300K app bundle apps and games in production, covering nearly 30% of all active installs. If this doesn’t include your app or game, check out 16 reasons to publish your apps and games with the Android App Bundle.
This year we’ve made it much easier to test and implement app bundles and dynamic delivery. Internal app sharing makes it easy to share test builds with others. You can easily grant anyone on your team the ability to upload a test build to Play and get a download link to share with your testers. With internal app sharing, you can be sure that each device is receiving exactly what Play would deliver in the wild. You don’t need to use version codes or the prod signing key, and can even upload debuggable artifacts.You can also get download links for old versions of your app from the Play Console, whether they’re app bundles or APKs.
In 2019, you helped us make Google Play even safer, building user trust in your apps and Google Play as a whole. Thanks to your hard work, we have:
To help you protect your apps, we’ve improved our ability to detect impersonators, repackaging, bad content, and other forms of abuse. Additionally, we’re investing in resources like policy-focused Play Academy courses to help you better understand and navigate our policy changes.
Because the threats are always changing, it’ll take all of us working together to keep users safe and our platform secure. Thank you for continuing to work with us on this.
During 2019 we continued to look for new ways to help you market and monetize your apps and games:
With such scale comes responsibility. We’re committed to ensuring our users’ safety for the future, to making development easier and distribution faster, and to offering you more effective ways for your app to be discovered and monetized.
On this note, we hope we can all continue working together to make Android and Google Play better for billions of people around the world, in 2020, and the years to come. From everyone on our team, we wish you all a happy holiday season and a prosperous new year.
Posted by Paul Lammertsma, Developer Advocate
Technology has changed the way media and entertainment is accessed and consumed in the home. While the living room experience is evolving with the addition of smart devices, TVs still remain the largest and most frequently used screen for watching content.
When Android TV was first introduced in 2014, we set out to bring the best of Android into the connected home on the TV. We worked closely with the developer community to grow our content and app ecosystem and bring users the content they want. Since then, we’ve seen tremendous momentum with OEM and operator partners as well as consumer adoption worldwide.
Today, we are bringing Android API level 29 with the recent performance and security updates made with Android 10 to Android TV. We’re excited to provide faster updates through Project Treble and more secure storage with encrypted user data. TLS 1.3 by default also brings better performance benefits and is up to date with the TLS standard. In addition, Android 10 includes hardening for several security-critical areas of the platform.
To make sure developers have the ability to build and test Android TV app implementations on Android 10 prior to rollout, we’re introducing a new, developer-focused streaming media device called ADT-3.
With a quad-core A53, 2GB of DDR3 memory and 4Kp60 HDR HDMI 2.1 output, we’ve designed this pre-certified TV dongle with updates and security patches to help developers design for the next generation of Android TV devices. By providing a way to test on physical and up to date hardware, developers can better validate their Android TV app’s compatibility.
ADT-3 will be made available to developers in the coming months for purchase online through an OEM partner.
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