By Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android
At the Google I/O keynote yesterday we announced the L Developer Preview — a development version of an upcoming Android release. The Developer Preview lets you explore features and capabilities of the L release and get started developing and testing on the new platform. You can take a look at the developer features and APIs in the API Overview page.
Starting today, the L Developer Preview is available for download from the L Developer Preview site. We're also announcing that Android Studio is now in beta, and making great progress toward a full release.
The L Developer Preview includes updated SDK tools, system images for testing on an emulator, and system images for testing on a Nexus 5 or Nexus 7 device.
You can download these components through the Android SDK Manager:
(Note: the full release of Android Wear is a part of Android KitKat, API Level 20. Read more about Android Wear development here.)
Today, we are also providing system image downloads for these Nexus devices to help with your testing as well:
You can download both of these system images from the L Developer Preview site.
With the SDK Tools, and Nexus device images, you can get a head start on testing out your app on the latest Android platform months before the official launch. You can use the extra lead time to take advantage of all the new app features and APIs in your apps. The Nexus device images can help you with testing, but keep in mind that they are meant for development purposes only and should not be used on a production device.
The L Developer Preview is a development release and does not have a standard API level. The APIs are not final, and you can expect minor API changes over time.
To ensure a great user experience and broad compatibility, you can not publish versions of your app to Google Play that are compiled against L Developer Preview. Apps built for L Developer Preview will have to wait until the full official launch to publish on Google Play.
To help you develop your apps for the upcoming Android version and for new Android device types, we’re also happy to announce Android Studio Beta. Android Studio Beta helps you develop apps by enabling you to:
Building on top of the build variants and flavors features we introduced last year, the Android Studio build system now supports creating multiple apks, such as for devices like Android Wear. You can try out all the new features with the L Developer Preview by downloading the Android Studio Beta today.
To get started with the L Developer Preview and prepare your apps for the full release, just follow these steps:
As you use the new developer features and APIs in the L Developer Preview, we encourage you to give us your feedback using the L Developer Preview Issue Tracker. During the developer preview period, we aim to incorporate your feedback into our new APIs and adjust features as best as we can.
You can get all the latest downloads, documentation, and tools information from the L Developer Preview site on developer.android.com. You can also check our Android Developer Preview Google+ page for updates and information.
We hope you try the L Developer Preview as you start building the next generation of amazing Android user experiences.
Google I/O 2014 I/O Livestreams I/O Bytes Videos +Android Developers
L Developer Preview Material Design Android Wear Android TV Android Auto
Explore the conference with the Google I/O 2014 Android app:
By Monica Tran, Head of Developer Marketing
Today at Moscone, we kicked off our 7th annual Google I/O. This year, we’re focusing on three key themes: design, develop, distribute, helping you build your app from start to finish.
It’s been amazing to see how far you’ve come: in fact, since the last Google I/O, we’ve paid developers more than $5 billion, a testament to the experiences you’re creating. In the keynote, we had a number of announcements geared towards meeting the user wherever they go: on the TV, in the car and on your wrist. Below is a taste of some of the goodies we unveiled to help you along the way.
Earlier today, at Google I/O, we showed a number of projects we’ve been working on to the thousands of developers in the audience and the millions more tuning in on the livestream. These projects extend Android to the TV (Android TV), to the car (Android Auto) and to wearables (Android Wear), among others.
At Google, our focus is providing a seamless experience for users across all of the screens in their lives. An important component to that is making sure that you as developers have all of the tools necessary to easily deploy your apps across to those screens. Increasingly, Android is becoming the fabric that weaves these experiences together, which is why you’ll be excited about a number of things we unveiled today.
For the first time since we launched Android, we’re giving you early access to a development version of an upcoming release. The L Developer Preview, available starting tomorrow, lets you explore many of the new features and capabilities of the next version of Android, and offers everything you need to get started developing and testing on the new platform. This is important because the platform is evolving in a significant way — not only for mobile but also moving beyond phones and tablets. Here are a few of the highlights for developers:
Watch for more details coming out tomorrow (26 June) on what’s in the L Developer Preview and how to get it.
Along with the L Developer Preview, we also announced a new version of Google Play services that brings new capabilities and the latest optimizations to devices across the Android ecosystem. Google Play services ensures that you can build on the latest features from Google for your users, with the confidence that those services will work properly everywhere. The latest version has begun rolling out and here are some of the highlights:
We expect the rollout of Google Play services 5.0 to take several days, after which time you’ll be able to get started developing with these new APIs.
If you’d like to learn more, join us for sessions on Android development, material design, game development, and more. You’ll find the full session list on the Google I/O 2014 site, and you can filter the schedule to find livestreamed sessions of interest.
By Greg Hartrell, Product Manager, Google Play games
With Google I/O ‘14 here, we see Android and Google Play as a huge opportunity for game developers: 3 in 4 Android users are playing games, and with over one billion active Android users around the world, games are reaching and delighting almost everyone.
At Google, we see a great future where mobile and cloud services bring games to all the screens in your life and connect you with others. Today we announced a number of games related launches and upcoming technologies across Google Play Games, the Android platform and its new form factors.
At last year’s Google I/O, we announced Google Play Games -- Google’s online game platform, with services and user experiences designed to bring players together and take Android and mobile games to the next level.
Google Play Games has grown at tremendous speed, activating 100 million users in the past 6 months. It’s the fastest growing mobile game network, and with such an incredible response, we announced more awesome enhancements to Google Play Games today.
The Play Games app now gives players a Game Profile, where they earn points and vanity titles from unlocking achievements. Players can also compare their profile with friends. Developers can benefit from this meta-game by continuing to design great achievements that reward players for exploring all the content and depth of their game.
Two new game services will launch with the next update for Google Play Services on Android, and through the Play Games iOS SDK:
We have many great partners who have started integrating Quests and Saved Games, here are just a few current or upcoming games.
Other developer tools are now available for Play Games, including:
With the announcement of the developer preview of the Android L-release, there are some new platform capabilities that will make Android an even more compelling platform for game development.
We're pleased to be working with different GPU vendors to adopt AEP including Nvidia, ARM, Qualcomm, and Imagination Technologies.
And Google's game network is a part of the Android TV announcement — so think of Android on a TV, with a rich interface on a large screen, and fun games in your living room! Players will be able to earn achievements, climb leaderboards and play online with friends from an Android TV. This is only available through the developer preview, so game developers seeking a hardware development kit (the ADT-1) can make a request at http://developer.android.com/tv.
That’s a lot of games announcements! Our Play Games changes will roll out over the next few weeks with the update of Google Play Services and the Play Games App, and Android L-release changes are part of the announced developer preview. This gets us a big step closer to a world where Android and our cloud services enable games to reach all the screens in your life and connect you with others.
Greg Hartrell is the lead product manager for Google Play Games: Google's game platform that helps developers reach and unite millions of players. Before joining Google, he was VP of Product Development at Capcom/Beeline, and prior to that, led product development for 8 years at Microsoft for Xbox Live/360 and other consumer and enterprise product lines. In his spare time, he enjoys flying birds through plumbing structures, boss battles and pulling rare objects out of mystery boxes.
By: Purnima Kochikar, Director, Google Play Apps & Games
With over 1 billion active Android users, an increasing number of developers like you are building successful global businesses on Google Play. Since the last Google I/O, we’ve also paid out more than $5 billion to developers.
This week at Google I/O, we announced new ways to help you build a successful business. These solutions work together at scale to help you find more users, understand and engage them, and effectively convert your active users into buyers.
Last year, Google Play became an even better place to try new ideas. Since May 2013, Google Play offers Alpha and Beta Testing so that you can engage users early to get feedback on your new app. Feedback provided by users is private, allowing you to fix issues before publicly launching the app, and without impacting your public ratings and reviews. Over 80,000 apps on Google Play are actively using beta testing. You can also ensure new versions get a positive response by updating through staged rollouts.
As your app business grows, you dedicate more time to release management. Today we announced the Google Play Developer Publishing API to help you scale your release operations. The new API will let you upload APKs, manage your in-app products and localized store listings. You will be able to integrate publishing operations with your release processes and toolchain through a RESTful API. With the Google Play Developer Publishing API you’ll spend less time managing your releases and more time managing your business. This API is currently in closed beta and we look forward to making it available to all developers.
The Google Play Developer Console now offers more actionable insights into your app’s performance by sending you email notifications for Alerts and providing Optimization Tips. We’re also offering new revenue metrics including number of buyers and average revenue per paying user. You’ll also be able to export user reviews for further analysis. Click on Announcements in the Developer Console for a list of new features.
For game developers, we recently launched enhanced Play Games statistics on the Google Play Developer Console. You get a daily dashboard that visualizes player and engagement statistics for signed in users, including daily active users, retention analysis, and achievement and leaderboard performance.
With AdWords, we're building a robust platform to help you promote your app and drive re-engagement. This week we are launching Installed App Category Targeting, a new way to promote your app to new users. It helps you reach potential customers across the AdMob network who have already installed apps from related categories on Google Play and other app stores. For example, an action-oriented game developer may wish to reach users who have previously installed apps from the category Action & Adventure Games.
Ads can also remind users about the apps they already have. Through Google mobile display and search ads deep linking, you can re-engage users who have already installed your Android app by taking them directly to specific pages in the app. Let’s say someone has the Hotel Tonight app installed on their phone. If they search Google for “hotels in San Francisco," they'll see an ad that will open Hotel Tonight app and take them directly to a list of San Francisco hotels.
This deep-linking is also available through search for all apps that implement app indexing. If a user with the Walmart Android app searches for “Chromecast where to buy”, they’ll go directly to the Chromecast page in the Walmart app. The new App Indexing API is now open to all Android developers, globally. Get started now.
For game developers using Play Games, we announced a new Game Profile that is automatically customized based on the gameplay and achievements earned in those games. Since its launch last year, users have loved saving their game progress in the cloud. We’re now evolving this feature to Saved Games, where users can save up to 3 “bookmarks” of their progress in the Play Games app, complete with images and descriptions. Finally, we announced a new service called Quests — it you run online, time-based goals in your game; for example, players can collect bunch of in-game items on a specific day, and the quests services coordinates with your game to know who completed the goal. These APIs run events for your players, and reward them, without the need to update your game.
Today, we announced that users who have set up Direct Carrier Billing on their smartphone can also make purchases on Google Play from their tablet, charging to the same mobile phone bill. In addition to our recent launch of payments through PayPal, these new user payment options expand monetization opportunities for your apps.
As announced earlier this year, Google Analytics is now directly available in the AdMob interface, giving you powerful segmentation tools to determine the best monetization strategy for each user. For example, you might want to display in-app purchase ads to users most interested in buying, while showing regular ads to those less likely to buy right now. Once you’ve segmented your audience in this way, you can use AdMob to build interstitial ads that promote in-app purchase items to users at a point in your app that’s useful to them. This creates a more customized experience for users, can help prolong engagement and grow in-app purchase revenue. Learn more.
If you're at Google I/O 2014, please join us at our breakout sessions today and tomorrow, where we'll be talking about these features in much more detail. (Add us to your calendar!) And if you can't make I/O, you can always join us on the livestream or watch the videos online later.
By Dave Burke and Majd Bakar, Engineering Directors and TV Junkies
Last summer, we launched Chromecast, a small, affordable device that lets you cast online video, music and anything from the web to your TV. Today at Google I/O, we announced Android TV, the newest form factor to the Android platform, and a way to extend the reach of Google Cast to more devices, like televisions, set-top boxes and consoles.
Check out Coming to a Screen Near You for some details on everything we’re doing to make your TV the place to be.
For developers though--sorry, you don’t get to unwind in front of the TV. We need you to get to work and help us create the best possible TV experience, with all of the new features announced at I/O today.
In addition to Google Cast apps that send content to the TV, you can now build immersive native apps and console-style games on Android TV devices. These native apps work with TV remotes and gamepads, even if you don’t have your phone handy. The Android L Developer Preview SDK includes the new Leanback support library that allows you to design smoother, simpler, living room apps.
And this is just the beginning. In the fall, new APIs will allow you to cast directly to these apps, so users can control the app with the phone, the remote, or even their Android Wear watch. You’ll also start seeing Android TV set-top boxes, consoles and televisions from Sony, TP Vision, Sharp, Asus, Razer and more.
We want to help users more easily find your content, so we’ve improved the Google Cast SDK developer console to let you upload your app icon, app name, and app category for Android, iOS and Chrome. These changes will help your app get discovered on chromecast.com/apps and on Google Play.
Additional capabilities have also been added to the Google Cast SDK. These include: Media Player Library enhancements, bringing easier integration with MPEG-DASH Smooth Streaming, and HLS. We’ve also added WebAudio & WebGL support, made the Cast Companion Library available, and added enhanced Closed Caption support. And coming soon, we will add support for queuing and ID delegation.
Ready to get started? Visit developer.android.com/tv and developers.google.com/cast for the SDKs, style guides, tutorials, sample code, and the API references. You can also request an ADT-1 devkit to bootstrap your Android TV development.
Many Android developers like Snapchat or Pulse build and host their app backends on the Google Cloud Platform, and enjoy automatic management, with simple expansion to support millions of users.
To quickly add a Google Cloud Platform backend to your Android app, you can now use a number of built-in features in Android Studio 0.6.1+.
Google App Engine enables you to run your backend applications on Google's infrastructure, without ever requiring you to maintain any servers.
To simplify the process of adding an App Engine backend to your app, Android Studio now provides three App Engine backend module templates which you can add to your app. You can find them under "New → Module" menu:
When you choose one of these template types, a new Gradle module with your specified module/package name will be added to your project containing your new App Engine backend. All of the required dependencies/permissions will be automatically set up for you.
You can then run it locally (on http://localhost:8080) by selecting the run configuration with your backend's module name, as shown in the image below.
For more information about these backend templates, including their deployment live to App Engine and code examples which show how to connect your Android app to these backends, see their documentation on GitHub. (Also, the code for these templates lives in the same GitHub repository, so do not hesitate to submit a pull request if you have any suggestions!)
Once you have added the backend module to your Android application, you can use Google Cloud Endpoints to streamline the communication between your backend and your Android app. Cloud Endpoints automatically generate strongly-typed client libraries from simple Java server-side API annotations, automate Java object marshalling to and from JSON, provide built-in OAuth 2.0 support and so on.
As a concrete example, "App Engine Java Endpoints Module" contains a simple annotated Endpoints API at <backend-name>/src/main/java/<package-name>/MyEndpoint.java file (shown below):
<backend-name>/src/main/java/<package-name>/MyEndpoint.java
import javax.inject.Named; @Api(name = "myApi", version = "v1", namespace = @ApiNamespace(ownerDomain = "<package-name>", ownerName = "<package-name>", packagePath="")) public class MyEndpoint { @ApiMethod(name = "sayHi") public MyBean sayHi(@Named("name") String name) { MyBean response = new MyBean(); response.setData("Hi, " + name); return response; } }
On deployment, this annotated Endpoints API definition class generates a RESTful API. You can explore this generated API (and even make calls to it) by navigating to Endpoints API explorer as shown in the image below:
MyEndpoint.java
To simplify calling this generated API from your Android app, Android Studio will automatically set up your project to automatically include all compile dependencies and permissions required to consume Cloud Endpoints, and will re-generate strongly-typed client libraries if your backend changes. This means that you can start calling the client libraries from your Android app immediately after defining the server-side Endpoints API:
As server-side Endpoints API definitions have to conform to a number of syntactic rules, Android Studio also includes a number of Endpoints-specific inspections and quick-fixes, which help you to avoid mistakes when writing Endpoints APIs.
For example, "@Named" annotation is required for all non-entity type parameters passed to server-side methods. If you forget to add this annotation when modifying sayHi method in MyEndpoint.java file, Android Studio will underline the problematic statement as-you-type:
@Named
sayHi
Furthermore, to help you easily fix the problems with Cloud Endpoints, Android Studio will provide quick-fixes for the most common Cloud Endpoints development mistakes. To see these quick-fix suggestions, press Alt + Enter if you're running on Linux/Windows or ⌥ + Enter if you're running on Mac:
As expected, choosing the first quick-fix ("Add @Named") will automatically add "@Named" annotation to method's parameter, solving this problem in two key presses.
Under the hood, Gradle is used to build both your app and your App Engine backend. In fact, when you add an App Engine backend to your Android app, an open-source App Engine plug-in for Gradle is automatically downloaded by Android Studio, and common App Engine tasks become available as Gradle targets. This allows you to use the same build system across your IDE, command-line or continuous integration environments.
For example, to deploy your backend to App Engine from Android Studio, you can launch the "appengineUpdate" task from the "Gradle tasks" tool window:
Similarly, if you want to integrate your backend's deployment into your command-line scripts, simply launch "./gradlew backend:appengineUpdate" command from your project's root directory.
./gradlew backend:appengineUpdate
If you want to give these features a spin in a more guided environment, try out our Cloud Endpoints codelab for Android. We will also be demonstrating some of these features live at Less Code, More Services, Better Android Apps session in Google I/O 2014 (as well as some of the new and even more exciting stuff), so don't forget to tune in!
We look forward to your questions or feedback, and learning about the amazing applications you have built using Android Studio and Google Cloud Platform. You can find us lurking on StackOverflow's App Engine and Cloud Endpoints forums!
By Wouter van Oortmerssen, Fun Propulsion Labs at Google
Game developers, we've just released FlatBuffers, a C++ serialization library that allows you to read data without unpacking or allocating additional memory, as an open source project.
FlatBuffers stores serialized data in buffers in a cross-platform way, supporting format evolution that is fully forwards and backwards compatible through a schema. These buffers can be stored in files or sent across the network as-is, and accessed in-place without parsing overhead.
The FlatBuffers schema compiler and runtime is written in platform independent C++ with no library dependencies outside the STL, which makes it possible to use on any platform that has a C++ compiler. We have provided methods to build the FlatBuffers library, example applications, and unit tests for Android, Linux, OSX and Windows. The schema compiler can generate code to read and write FlatBuffers binary files for C++ and Java. It can additionally parse JSON-formatted data into type-safe binaries.
Game developers can use this library to store game data with less overhead than alternative solutions (e.g. Protocol Buffers or JSON). We’re excited about the possibilities, and want to hear from you about how we can make this even better!
Download the latest release from the FlatBuffers page in GitHub and join our discussion list!
Fun Propulsion Labs is a team within Google that's dedicated to advancing gaming on Android and other platforms.
A few weeks ago, Timothy and I were chatting about designing apps for wearables to validate some of the content we’re planning for Google I/O 20141. We talked a lot about how these devices require scrutiny to preserve user attention while exposing some unique new surface areas for developers. We also discussed user context and how the apps we make should be opportunistic, presenting themselves in contexts where they’re useful; it’s more important than ever to think of apps on wearable devices not as icons on a grid but rather as functional overlays on the operating system itself.
But while I’d designed a number of touch UIs for Android in the past and Timothy had a ton of experience with Glass, neither of us had really gone through the exercise of actually designing an app for Android Wear. So we set out to put our ideas in practice and see what designing for this new platform is like.
Before we got started, we needed an idea. Last year, I participated in an informal Glass design sprint in NYC run by Nadya Direkova, and my sprint team came up with a walking tour app. The idea was you’d choose from a set of nearby tours, walk between the stops, and at each stop on the tour, learn about the destination.
While the design sprint ended at rough mocks, the idea stuck around in my mind, and came up again during this exercise. It seemed like a perfect example of a contextually aware app that could enhance your Android Wear experience.
We started fleshing out the idea by thinking through the app’s entry points: how will users “launch” this app? While exposing a “start XYZ walking tours app” voice command is pretty standard, it’d be interesting to also suggest nearby walking tours as you go about your day by presenting notifications in the user’s context stream. These notifications would be “low priority,” so you’d only see them after addressing the more important stuff like text messages from friends. And with today’s geofencing and location functionality in Google Play services, this type of contextual awareness is possible in a battery-friendly way.
At this point we were pretty excited and decided to begin mocking up the UI. Rather than starting from scratch, we used Taylor Ling’s excellent Android Wear 0.1 design template as a baseline, which includes templates for both square and round devices. We started with square since we were most familiar with rectangle UI design:
I’ve got to admit, it was pretty thrilling designing in such a constrained environment. 140x140 dp (280x280 px @ XHDPI) isn’t a lot of space to work with, so you need to make some tough choices about when and how to present information. But these are exactly the types of problems that make design really, really fun. You end up spending more time thinking and less time actually pushing pixels around in Photoshop or Sketch.
We pretty quickly fleshed out the rest of the app for square devices. They included just a handful of additional screens: a dynamic notification showing the distance to your next stop, and a 4-page detail screen when you arrive at the tour stop, where you can spend a few moments reading about where you’re standing.
Here’s the thing—there’s only so much you can do in Photoshop. To truly understand a platform as a designer, you really need to use (and ideally live with) a real device, and see your work on that device. Only then can you fully evaluate the complexity of your flows, the size of your touch targets, or the legibility of your text.
Luckily, Timothy and I both had test devices—I sported an LG G Watch prototype and Timothy carried a Moto 360 prototype. We then needed a way to quickly send screens to our devices so we could iterate on the design. A few years ago I’d published the Android Design Preview tool that lets you mirror a part of your screen to a connected Android device. Much to our delight, the tool worked great with Android Wear! After seeing our mocks show up on my LG G Watch, we made a few small tweaks and felt much more confident that the overall idea “felt right” on the wrist.
We’d never designed round UIs before, so we weren’t sure what this new adventure would be like. Quite frankly, it ended up being unbelievably easy: tweaking all 8 of our screen mocks for round took under an hour. When you’re only showing the most important 2 or 3 pieces of information on screen at a time, that’s only 2 or 3 pieces of information you need to optimize for round devices. All in all, there were only a few types of minor tweaks we made:
It’s hard to articulate the excitement we felt when we mirrored the mocks to Timothy’s Moto 360 prototype with Android Design Preview. To put it lightly, our minds were blown.
And that was it—with round and square mocks complete, and mirrored on our devices, we’d gotten our first glimpse at designing apps for this exciting new platform. Below are our completed mocks for the tour discovery and engagement flows, not a grid of app icons in sight. You can download the full PSDs here.
Designing for Android Wear is pretty different from designing for the desktop, phones or tablets. Just like with Glass, you really need to think carefully about the information and actions you present to the user, and even more so about the contexts in which your app will come to the surface.
As a designer, that’s the fun part—working with constraints involving scarce resources like device size and user attention means it’s more important than ever to think deeply about your ideas and iterate on them early and often. The actual pixel-pushing part of the process is far, far easier.
So there we were, putting our ideas into practice, on real actual device prototypes that we could’ve only dreamed about only a few years ago. It was the most fun I’ve had designing UIs in a long time. Remember that feeling when you first dreamed up an app, mocked or even coded it up, and ran it on your Android phone? It was that same feeling all over again, but amplified, because you were actually wearing your app. I can’t wait for you all to experience it!
1 Have we mentioned #io14 will have tons of great content around both design and wearable computing? Make sure to tune in June 25th and 26th!
By Ben Frenkel, Google Play Games team
Hey game developers, back in March you may remember we added new game statistics in the Google Play Developer Console for those of you who had implemented Google Play Games: our cross-platform game services for Android, iOS and the web.
Starting today, we're providing more insights into how your games are being used by adding country, age, and gender dimensions to the existing set of reports available in the Developer console. You’ll see demographics integrated into Overview stats as well as the Players reports for New and Active users.
In the Overview stats you can now see highlights of activity by age group, most active countries, and gender.
With a better understanding of your users’ demographic composition, you'll be able to make more effective decisions to improve retention and monetization. Here a few ways you could imagine using these new stats:
In the Players stats section the new metrics reveal trends in how your app is doing across age groups, countries, and gender.
Additionally, if you're already using Google Play game services, there's no extra integration needed! By logging in to the Google Play Developer Console you can start using demographics to better inform your decisions today.
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