Posted by Purnima Kochikar, VP Play Partnerships
Every day we work with developers to help make Google Play a safe, secure and seamless experience for everyone, and to ensure that developers can build sustainable businesses. Last September, we clarified our Payments Policy to be more explicit about when developers should use Google Play’s billing system. While most developers already complied with this policy, we understood that some existing apps currently using an alternative billing system may need to make changes to their apps, and we gave one year for them to make these updates.
Many of our partners have been making steady progress toward the September 30 deadline. However, we continue to hear from developers all over the world that the past year has been particularly difficult, especially for those with engineering teams in regions that continue to be hard hit by the effects of the global pandemic, making it tougher than usual for them to make the technical updates related to this policy.
After carefully considering feedback from both large and small developers, we are giving developers an option to request a 6-month extension, which will give them until March 31, 2022 to comply with our Payments policy. Starting on July 22nd, developers can appeal for an extension through the Help Center and we will review each request and get back to requests as soon as possible.
Check out the Help Center and the Policy Center for details, timelines, and frequently asked questions. You can also check out Play Academy or watch the PolicyBytes video for additional information.
Alongside today’s Android 12 Beta 3 release for mobile, we’re also bringing the third Beta of Android 12 to Android TVs. We’re excited to bring new media features, UI improvements, and privacy controls to the experience with Beta 3 while we continue our work of preparing the full release.
At the heart of the TV experience is beautiful and seamless media playback. In the US, users are spending well over 4 hours a day watching media on TV, and are always asking for the highest resolution playback possible. With Android 12, we are releasing three new features to better support ever-improving picture quality.
A beautiful media experience needs an equally stunning user interface to match. Android TV brings two new additions to the UI that help developers provide users with a richer visual experience on high performance devices.
Example background blur used to separate UI layers.
With Android 12, we’re continuing to focus on giving users more transparency and control while keeping their devices and data secure. Beta 3 for TV includes many of the new privacy features from the Android framework.
Microphone and camera indicators showing during a video call. Video credit: Ekaterina Bolovtsova.
Microphone access toggle in a user’s global privacy settings.
The Android 12 Beta 3 release for TV is available as a system update to ADT-3 devices today. Also available in the coming weeks, you can use the preview version of the Android 12 emulator to test and build your apps for TV. We hope this helps you test your Android TV app implementations for the next generation of devices. To learn more about getting your Android TV app ready, visit our Android TV OS developers page.
We can’t wait to see what you will build with Android 12 on TV!
Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering
Each month we’re bringing Android 12 closer to its final form, with innovative features, a new UI that adapts to you, performance improvements, privacy enhancements, security benefits, and much more. Many of you are already developing and testing on Android 12 through our Beta program - thank you for all of the feedback you’ve shared so far!
There’s still a lot to do to land this release, though, and today we’re pushing out the third Beta of Android 12 for you to try. Along with updates like scrolling screenshots, privacy indicator APIs, and enhanced auto-rotate, Beta 3 also includes the final Android 12 APIs and the official SDK. WIth these, you can start testing and updating your app ahead of Platform Stability, coming up next at Beta 4. Now is the time to make sure your apps are ready!
You can get Beta 3 today on your Pixel device by enrolling here for over-the-air updates, and if you previously enrolled, you’ll automatically get today’s update. You can also get Android 12 Beta 3 on select devices from several of our device-maker partners like Sharp and TCL - learn more at android.com/beta. Visit the Android 12 developer site for details on how to get started.
Beta 3 includes a number of updates to improve functionality, user experience, and performance. Here are a few highlights.
Scrolling screenshots - To make it easier to capture and share scrolling content, we’re adding scrolling screenshots. Starting in Beta 3, when users capture a screenshot of content that’s scrollable, they’ll now see a “Capture more” button to extend the screenshot to the full content and they can then adjust the crop.
Capturing a scrolling screenshot in the Settings app
Scrolling screenshots work out-of-the-box for most apps -- if your app uses a standard View-based UI, no changes should be needed. For apps and UI toolkits that are not using View-based UI or that use highly customized UI, we’re introducing a new ScrollCapture API to support scrolling screenshots. With this API, the system notifies your app of scroll capture requests and provides a Surface for you to draw your UI into. We’re continuing to iterate on scrolling screenshots and in Beta 4 you’ll see improvements to the default support, such as for scrolling ListViews. We're also working to provide support for a wider variety of content (such as web content). Let us know what you think!
On-device search - With Beta 3 we’re highlighting platform support for AppSearch, a new high-performance on-device search engine. With AppSearch, apps can index structured data and search over it with built-in full-text search capabilities, and they can use native features like highly-efficient indexing and retrieval, multi-language support, and relevancy ranking.
AppSearch comes in two flavors: a local index for your app to use that’s backward-compatible through a new AppSearch Jetpack library, and a central index that’s maintained for the entire system in Android 12 (and later releases). When you participate in the central index, the system will be able to display your app’s data on System UI surfaces unless you choose to opt out. Additionally, you can securely share data with other apps, allowing them to search your app’s data as well as their own. More here.
Privacy indicator APIs in WindowInsets - In Beta 2 we added support for privacy indicators in the status bar that show when an app is using the device camera or microphone. Since the indicators can be displayed when an app is in immersive mode and could potentially cover controls or content, apps need to know where the indicators can be drawn and make any adjustments needed to prevent useful content from being covered. In Beta 3 we’ve added new privacy indicator APIs to WindowInsets that let you get the maximum bounds of the indicators and their relative placement on the screen, taking into account the current orientation and language settings. More here.
WindowInsets
Camera and microphone toggles configurable for enterprises - In Beta 2 we also introduced new toggles that let users instantly turn off access to the device microphone and camera for all apps. We’ve now made these accessible to enterprise administrators who can set any restrictions needed on fully managed devices. More here.
New permission for CDM-paired apps starting foreground services - To better support companion apps carrying out core functionality while providing transparency to the system, apps paired with Companion Device Manager (CDM) can launch foreground services from the background by declaring a new normal permission. More here.
Better, faster auto-rotate - We’ve enhanced Android’s auto-rotate feature with face detection, using the front-facing camera to more accurately recognize when to rotate the screen. This is especially helpful for people who are using their devices while lying down on a couch or in bed, for example. For developers, this means that the auto-rotation behavior will provide a better user experience for users who have opted in through Settings. The enhanced auto-rotate feature lives within our recently announced Private Compute Core, so images are never stored or sent off the device. In Beta 3 this feature is available on Pixel 4 and later Pixel devices.
To make screen rotation as speedy as possible on all devices, we’ve also optimized the animation and redrawing and added an ML-driven gesture-detection algorithm. As a result, the latency for the base auto-rotate feature has been reduced by 25%, and the benefits of the face detection enhancement build on top of those improvements. Give the auto-rotate improvements a try and let us know what you think.
Android 12 for Games - With Game Mode APIs, you can react to the players' performance profile selection for your game - like better battery life for a long commute, or performance mode to get peak frame rates. These APIs will be tied to the upcoming game dashboard which provides an overlay experience with quick access to key utilities during gameplay. The game dashboard will be available on select devices later this year.
Play as you download on Android 12 with Touchgrind BMX
Meanwhile, play as you download will allow game assets to be fetched in the background during install, getting your players into gameplay faster.
Visit the Android 12 developer site to learn more about all of the new features in Android 12.
Over the past several weeks we've been working to finalize the Android 12 APIs and today we're releasing them with Beta 3, along with the official API Level 31 SDK. We plan to reach full Platform Stability at Beta 4, when all app-facing system behaviors and non-SDK interface restrictions will also be final, in addition to the API surfaces.
If you’re compiling your app against the Android 12 APIs, we recommend using today’s release to update your environment and recompile your apps with the final SDK and latest tools.
With many early-adopter users and developers getting Android 12 Beta on Pixel and other devices, now is the time to make sure your apps are compatible and ready for them to use!
To test your app for compatibility with Beta 3, just install the published version from Google Play or other source onto a device or emulator running Android 12 Beta. Work through all of the app’s flows and watch for functional or UI issues. Review the behavior changes to focus your testing on areas where underlying changes may affect your app. There’s no need to change your app’s targetSdkVersion at this time, so once you’ve resolved any issues, we recommend publishing an update as soon as possible for your Android 12 Beta users.
targetSdkVersion
As mentioned earlier, Android 12 will reach Platform Stability in the next release, Beta 4. With Platform Stability, all app-facing system behaviors, SDK/NDK APIs, and non-SDK restrictions will be finalized. At that time, you can begin your final compatibility testing and release a fully compatible version of your app, SDK, or library. More on the Android 12 timeline for developers is here.
Today’s Beta release has everything you need to try the latest Android 12 features, test your apps, and give us feedback. Just enroll any supported Pixel device to get the update over-the-air. To get started developing, set up the Android 12 SDK.
You can also get Android 12 Beta 3 on devices from some of our top device-maker partners like Sharp and TCL. Visit android.com/beta to see the full list of partners participating in Android 12 Beta. For even broader testing, you can try Android 12 Beta on Android GSI images, and if you don’t have a device you can test on the Android Emulator.
Beta 3 is also available for Android TV, so you can check out the latest TV features and test your apps on the all-new Google TV experience. Try it out with the ADT-3 developer kit. More here.
For complete details on Android 12 Beta, visit the Android 12 developer site.
After more than a year in closed beta, we are happy to announce that Android Game Development Extension (AGDE) is now available for all game developers to download. This milestone release of Game Tools from the Android Studio team meets game developers where they are; AGDE adds Android as a platform target to Microsoft Visual Studio, making it easier to target Android with existing multi-platform Visual Studio game projects.
AGDE is part of the Android Game Development Kit, which includes both libraries and tools that support making great games on Android. AGDE is best suited for game developers that develop primarily on Microsoft Windows using Visual Studio to write C/C++ code. Game developers that do not fall under these criteria, but are using C/C++, should use Android Studio to develop for Android.
Alongside the release of AGDE 2021.1, we recently published case studies on how our partners, Epic Games and Electronic Arts found success using AGDE.
We built AGDE as part of our effort to address game developers facing issues in targeting Android with their cross-platform workflows. At the top of the list of issues was developers’ preference to remain in a single IDE instead of maintaining multiple projects for different platforms. AGDE enables this for game developers using Visual Studio by removing the need to switch between IDEs when switching between platforms. In addition, we wanted to solve pain points around existing Visual Studio tools for Android that are often dated or suffer from integration issues. Our team is committed to having AGDE support the latest versions of the Android SDK, and NDK as well as providing updated tools easily accessible from Visual Studio. Finally, we wanted to bring you quick access to some of the most useful Android Studio capabilities, built into AGDE. Therefore, we invested in creating seamless integrations to our most popular tools, such as Studio profilers, logcat, and the Android SDK and device manager. Overall, these features are designed to make you more productive in your day-to-day game development workflow.
After downloading and installing AGDE in a Visual Studio project, you can treat Android development as you would any other platform.
AGDE supports deploying to, running on, and debugging with both an Android emulator and a physical device. Debug sessions run inside Visual Studio, using its standard interface for breakpoints, tracing and variable inspection.
AGDE integrates with a standalone version of Android Studio Profilers. This profiler can be launched from Visual Studio and attached to a running game session.
We know everyone has a unique build setup and there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution. That is why we are investing in making AGDE compatible with various tools commonly used by game developers.
Download AGDE 2021.1 and see our documentation for additional details. To help you get to know AGDE quickly, we put together a few samples that demonstrate different ways you can use AGDE to configure your project.
Visual Studio IntelliSense features are compatible with AGDE. All current Android CPU architectures are supported: both ARM and Intel in 32-bit and 64-bit.
We appreciate any feedback on things you like, and issues or features you would like to see. If you find a bug or issue, feel free to file an issue. Learn more about Android game development, and follow us -- the Android Studio development team ‐ on Twitter and on Medium.
Microsoft and Visual Studio are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.
Posted by Lauren Mytton, Product Manager, Google Play
Google Play has over 2.5B monthly active users, distributed across the world, using many different devices. How do you make the most of this opportunity?
The foundations for your game’s (or app’s) success on Google Play are its reach and its quality:
To unlock the opportunity for any single user on Google Play, you need both: every user must be able to access your game, AND have a good technical experience when playing it.
This is the ideal state of quality reach.
When you have quality reach, your game development, marketing budgets, and growth strategy can be lined up to reinforce each other, because you acquire users for whom your game performs well, and your engagement and retention strategies have higher ROI for users with good experiences.
If you have poor quality reach, you can inadvertently acquire users whom you will not be able to engage and retain. Any spend to acquire these users is likely to be wasted. But the bigger problem is that poor quality reach makes it harder for you to acquire users for whom your game does perform well, since Android vitals and user ratings may affect your game’s discoverability and conversion in the Play store.
Another scenario to keep an eye on is missed reach. Unlike poor quality reach, it may not hurt your ability to acquire users who can access and enjoy your game. However it still limits your game’s scale and possibly also its ROI.
There are three types of decisions that determine your quality reach:
You make these decisions when you develop and publish a game for the first time, and you continue to make them with every new release over the lifecycle of your game. You also need to think about these decisions outside your release cycle, since the Play ecosystem is constantly changing, which means your quality reach will also change over time, even if you do nothing.
However these decisions can be very hard. They require you to answer, or predict the answers to, two questions:
These questions are challenging because of the scale and diversity of users on Google Play, both technically and geographically. Not only that, but these decisions may be made at different points in time, across both business and technical teams. How do you get them to line up?
We’re launching a new tool in Play Console called Reach and devices to help with these challenges. Reach and devices is a data and insights tool that helps you to plan for quality reach, by helping you understand or predict the distribution of your users and your issues across the Google Play ecosystem.
Reach and devices takes data about your app and its peers and presents it in new ways, to help you answer these questions. It also makes it easier to get all the relevant teams in your organisation on the same page.
Key features:
We’ve received great feedback during closed beta from developers who have found it useful in a variety of ways:
Visit g.co/play/reachanddevices for more information or go straight to Play Console to check it out.
Posted by Scott Carbon-Ogden, Product Manager Android Games
Today we’re launching the Android Game Development Kit (AGDK), a full range of tools and libraries to help you develop, optimize, and deliver high quality Android games.
AGDK features follow three key tenets:
In this initial launch, we’re focusing on covering three major areas where we heard a lot of feedback from our developer community: Integrated workflows, C/C++ game libraries, and performance optimization.
Generally, the less you need to switch tools, the more efficient you can be, so with AGDK, we’re providing new tools to facilitate Android game development in your primary IDE. We will focus on the bits of workflow where Google can add unique value and solve Android specific problems, while being compatible with whichever parts of your existing workflow you are comfortable with.
Start your C development with less Java Native Interface (JNI) by using our game libraries for C/C++ development. Most games and game engines are written in C++, whereas Android development often requires using the Java programming language. Bridging these two languages using a Java Native Interface requires effort and can introduce bugs or performance regressions. AGDK will help you build and customize game engines by providing C game libraries that minimize the use of the Java Programming language and JNI. This makes your games easier to build, debug, and maintain.
We’re focusing on what you’ve told us are your top frustrations. Initially, this will involve building foundational classes for activity and input. Longer term, we plan to make more C libraries to provide functionality that is commonly used across game engines. We're incorporating our existing frame pacing and high-performance audio libraries into this effort, and adding three new ones:
Learn more about these libraries in our C/C++ libraries session.
To make integration as easy as possible, you can get all our libraries as a Maven dependency, as a pre-compiled Zip file, or as source code.
Our goal is to help you find any stability or performance issues before launch and monitor your game post-launch to catch any issues. We’re starting with the most important metrics like frame rate, loading time, and memory, and will be including new metrics over time.
Visit g.co/android/AGDK for our latest resources for Android game development and to download the AGDK. Check out the mobile session track for the full lineup of sessions from the Google for Games Developer Summit.
Posted by Posted by Greg Hartrell, Product Management Director, Google Play & Android
Last year we saw Android and Play reach new heights with people playing more games safely at home. By continually making Google Play a better place for consumers, we've made it a richer place for game developers to connect with a diverse global audience. So much in fact, that Android has reached 3B monthly active devices, and Play grew to reach 2.5B monthly active users driving 140B installations worldwide.
At Google we build for everyone, and that means we’re here to help all developers reach gamers in the right moments: from the largest game studios, to the indie shops conjuring up fun and innovative games across the world.
During our Game Developer Summit, we shared updates on a breadth of tools and solutions to help you across the lifecycle of your gaming business. We announced new tools to make game development easier, updates on a growing ecosystem to help get your games running on more screens, and new opportunities to drive your go-to-market success on Google Play.
Here’s more about everything we shared and how you can get started today.
1. Integrated workflows (e.g. a new Visual Studio extension)
2. Essential C/C++ game libraries (e.g. the new Game Text Input library)
3. Performance optimization (e.g. frame profiler support in our GPU profiler and new loading time support in Android Performance Tuner)
Check out the mobile session track for the full lineup of sessions from the Google for Games Developer Summit and bookmark g.co/android/games for our latest resources for Android game development.
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