Posted by Chet Haase
We’ve just finished the first series in the MAD Skills series of videos and articles on Modern Android Development. This time, the topic was Navigation component, the API and tool that helps you create and edit navigation paths through your application.
The great thing about videos and articles is that, unlike performance art, they tend to stick around for later enjoyment. So if you haven’t had a chance to see these yet, check out the links below to see what we covered. Except for the Q&A episode at the end, each episode has essentially identical content in the video and article version, so use whichever format you prefer for content consumption.
The first episode provides a quick, high-level overview of Navigation Component, including how to create a new application with navigation capability (using Android Studio’s handy application templates), details on the containment hierarchy of a navigation-enabled UI, and an explanation of some of the major APIs and pieces involved in making Navigation Component work.
Or in article form: https://medium.com/androiddevelopers/navigation-component-an-overview-4697a208c2b5
Episode 2 explores how to use the API to navigate to dialog destinations. Most navigation takes place between different fragment destinations, which are swapped out inside of the NavHostFragment object in the UI. But it is also possible to navigate to external destinations, including dialogs, which exist outside of the NavHostFragment.
NavHostFragment
Or in article form: https://medium.com/androiddevelopers/navigation-component-dialog-destinations-bfeb8b022759
This episode covers SafeArgs, the facility provided by Navigation component for easily passing data between destinations.
Or in article form: https://medium.com/androiddevelopers/navigating-with-safeargs-bf26c17b1269
This episode is on Deep Links, the facility provided by Navigation component for helping the user get to deeper parts of your application from UI outside the application.
Or in article form: https://medium.com/androiddevelopers/navigating-with-deep-links-910a4a6588c
Finally, to wrap up the series (as we plan to do for future series), I hosted a Q&A session with Ian Lake. Ian fielded questions from you on Twitter and YouTube, and we discussed everything from feature requests like multiple backstacks (spoiler: it’s in the works!) to Navigation support for Jetpack Compose (spoiler: the first version of this was just released!) to other questions people had about navigation, fragments, Up-vs-Back, saving state, and other topics. It was pretty fun — more like a podcast with cameras than a Q&A.
(There is no article for this one; enjoy the video above)
The application used for most of the episodes above is DonutTracker, an app that you can use for tracking important data about donuts you enjoy (or don’t). Or you can just use it for checking out the implementation details of these Navigation features; your choice.
Posted by Lily Sheringham, Global Marketing, Platforms & Ecosystems
We are launching the second series of the Apps, Games, & Insights podcast.
Over the summer, we teamed up with a new group of leading industry insiders and experts to bring you 8 new podcast episodes over the next couple of months. We are bringing you their exceptional business stories, experiences and discussion on some of the latest big questions in the apps and games industry.
We are joined again by your hosts—Tamzin Taylor, who heads up Apps & Games Business Development for Google Play in Western Europe, and Dirk Primbs, who leads the Ecosystem Developer Relations team in Europe— and you can find out who they have been cajoling and corralling in the new series, below.
In the first series, the guests covered topics ranging from responsible growth and building for the long term, through advice from mergers and acquisitions and venture capital experts, to hot topics such as privacy and accessibility.
Apps, Games, & Insights podcast series 2 brings you a similarly diverse range of insights, stories, and learnings, and without further ado, get a sneak peek as to what we have lined up...
We kickoff with Elliott Rayner, Head Of Product Marketing, and John Quintana, Head of Guided Learning Experiences, from Babbel the online language learning company. Here in episode 9 we talk about how the new normal is disrupting the delivery of all types of education. Elliott and John discuss how Babbel is transforming and adapting and has been "thinking big" about the future of education: ultimately can apps take the place of traditional classroom education?
Most of us are very aware how critical environmental change is, but how do we raise awareness to fight climate change through our businesses? In episode 10 we are joined by Jennifer Estaris, Games Director at SYBO Games and Deborah Mensah-Bonsu, Founder of Games for Good and formerly at Space Ape Games, to learn how others are changing the game. In the recent Green Game Jam, 11 game studios came together to find innovative and engaging ways to educate and empower players about climate change through games. Jennifer and Deborah discuss how they ensured that the ideas were more than just another collection of tips for better recycling, and then pulled together a jam to bring great minds together and actualise change.
We also explore how to be successful with 4x strategy games—turn-based and real-time strategy games where you build an empire—in episode 11. We’re joined by David Eckleberry, General Manager and Vice President at Scopely, and Howard Chen, Google Play Growth Consultant. We hear how Star Trek Fleet Command has successfully built it’s loyal player base and the stories that bring to life the learnings about player affinity, KPI growth, comparative analysis with other game genres, and more.
With literally thousands of languages to choose from, language learning apps are in a unique position to reflect humanity’s diversity. The team at Drops have taken this opportunity by incorporating several indigenous languages into their app portfolio. So, while supporting the usual suspects of popular languages, users of Drops can also learn Hawaiian, Maori (from New Zealand), and Innu (from Japan) among others. In episode 12, we talk with Drops CEO and Co-Founder, Daniel Farkas and Chief Customer Officer, Drew Banks about how they actively foster diversity and inclusion in their product and company.
Have you ever wondered what goes behind the scenes to help you order your favourite foods from delivery apps? Delivering a quality app is essential to the success of your business, in both acquiring and retaining users. In episode 13, we’re joined by Maria Neumayer, Staff Software Engineer, at food delivery service Deliveroo and Shobhit Chugh, Product Manager, Firebase to talk about the practical steps you can take to design quality into an app or game. Discover and rectify quality problems in testing and production and hear Maria’s insights into how Deliveroo has adapted to the new normal.
Mobile gaming offers developers of PC and console games a significant opportunity. By going mobile, game developers can expand their player base and drive retention by providing a platform for players to stay engaged while they’re on the move. Jen Donahoe, Marketing and Growth lead for TeamFight Tactics at Riot Games joins us in episode 14 to discuss the challenges and opportunities they had in taking their games mobile.
What makes retention so critical to the success of a business over other measures, and how do you optimize this strategy? We speak to Marcus Gners, Chief Strategy Officer and Co-founder at health and fitness app developer Lifesum to hear how about the models they use and how they approach habitual usage. In episode 15, alongside Marcus, we are joined by best-selling author of “Hooked” and “Indistractable,” Nir Eyal, to explore the behavior apps should foster to drive retention, and how to measure this effectively.
So as to not give the whole game away, we are keeping the details of our final episode under wraps, so keep an eye out for more details shortly.
The new episodes of the Apps, Games, & Insights podcast are sure to spark the interest of business and app or gaming enthusiasts, and developers, who want to get the inside scoop from industry experts on business strategies and their success stories, and how to create successful apps and games businesses in these rapidly changing times. We look forward to you joining us on this journey.
To find out more about what’s coming, check out our Apps, Games, & Insights podcast homepage and find links to all the latest episodes.
Subscribe and listen to our first episode here, or on your favorite podcast platform including Google Podcasts, Spotify, Apple, Libsyn, Pocket Casts and Overcast, Deezer, and iHeartRadio.
Keep an eye out on @GooglePlayDev and @AndroidDev on Twitter where we will be announcing the launch of the new episodes each week.
How useful did you find this blog post?
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
By Andrew Ahn, Product Manager, Google Play App Safety
At Google Play, we want to foster an ecosystem of safe, engaging, useful, and entertaining apps used and loved by billions of Android users worldwide. That’s why we regularly update and revise our Google Play Developer Policies and Developer Distribution Agreement, detailing the boundaries of app content and functionalities allowed on the platform, as well as providing latest guidance on how developers can promote and monetize apps.
In recent efforts in analyzing apps for policy compliance on Google Play we identified some common mistakes and violations that developers make, and we’re sharing these with the developer community with tips and guides on how to avoid them, mitigating the risks of apps and developer accounts being suspended for violating our policies.
One of the most common mistakes we see are apps that have buttons and menus that link out to the Play Store -- either to apps by the same developer, or other apps that may be affiliated with the developer, but not being clear that these are ads or promotional links. Without this clarity, apps may get enforced for having deceptive / disguised ads. One of the ways to avoid such mistakes is by explicitly calling these out by labeling the buttons and links as ‘More Apps’, ‘More Games’, ‘Explore’, ‘Check out our other apps’, etc.
Example of app content that link out to app listing on Play
Another mistake we frequently observe is where developers ‘stuff’ keywords in the app description in hope for better discoverability and ranking against certain keywords and phrases. Text blocks or lists that contain repetitive or unrelated keywords or references violate our Store Listing and Promotion policy. Writing a clear app description intended and optimized for user’s readability and understanding is one of the best ways to avoid this violation.
Watch this video to learn how to avoid spammy store listings and efforts to artificially boost app visibility.
There are apps that have been published by the developers a long time ago, and are no longer being maintained. Abandoned and unmaintained apps often create user experience issues -- broken app functionality, for example. Not only are such apps at risk of getting a low star rating and negative user reviews, they will also be flagged as violating the minimum functionality policy. To mitigate the negative impact to the developer reputation and app enforcement, consider unpublishing such apps from the Play Store. Note the updated unpublish action won’t affect existing users who already installed the app, and developers can always choose to re-publish them after addressing the broken experiences.
Example of an abandoned app that provides a broken app experience
Take the ‘Minimum and Broken Functionality Spam’ course on Play Academy
Lastly, we observe a large volume of app submissions that are just webviews of existing websites. Most of these apps are submitted with a primary purpose of driving traffic rather than providing engaging app experiences to Android users. Such apps are considered webview spam, and are removed from Play. Instead, consider thinking through what users can do or do better with the app than in a web experience and implement relevant features and functionalities that enrich the user experience.
Example of a webview without any app functionality
Take the ‘Webview Spam’ course on Play Academy
While the above are one of the most frequent mistakes, make sure to stay up to date with the latest policies by visiting the Play Developer Policy Center. Check out Google Play Academy’s Policy training, including our new Spam courses, and watch our Play PolicyBytes videos to learn more about recent policy updates.
Posted by Eric Bahna, Product Manager
In August, we announced plans to expand Android Auto’s app ecosystem to enable new navigation, parking, and electric vehicle charging apps. We’ve been hard at work collaborating with our early access partners to test and refine the Android for Cars App Library. Today, we’re releasing the library into an open beta, for any developer to use. This means you’ll now be able to design, develop, and test your navigation, parking or charging app on Android Auto. We’re looking forward to enabling Google Play Store publishing for your beta apps in the coming months.
Three of our early access partners: ChargePoint, SpotHero, and Sygic
The design phase is the time to familiarize yourself with our design guidelines and app quality guidelines. Driver safety is core to our mission and we want to help you optimize your app for the car.
When it comes time to build your app, our new library will hopefully make development easy. Get started with the developer guide and please give us feedback via our public issue tracker.
In the testing phase, see your app come alive on the Desktop Head Unit (DHU), our emulator that lets you simulate a car infotainment display. The DHU now supports multiple screen sizes, displaying information in the instrument cluster, and simulating vehicles with touchpad input.
The DHU simulating an instrument cluster, a widescreen head unit, and a touchpad
You can get started with the Android for Cars App Library here. We’re excited to see what you build next!
Steve Suppe, Product Manager, Google Play
Publishing your app or game is one of the most important moments in your app’s lifecycle. You want everything to go smoothly, from making sure the production release is stable, to getting test releases out quickly, to getting your marketing message just right.
That’s why visibility is key. Knowing when your app is in review, when it’s been approved, and when it can go live on Google Play helps you set your own schedule.
Now, with two new features in the new Google Play Console, you can do just that. The Publishing overview page helps you better understand your publishing process and Managed publishing gives you better control of when your app updates go live on Google Play. When the new Play Console rolls out to everyone starting November 2, these features will be the recommended way to control your release timing, so let’s take a closer look.
The new Publishing overview page displays all your recent changes to your releases, store listings, and more, including those that are currently being reviewed or processed by Google Play. For those of you with larger teams, this means you can now coordinate all your changes in one place and publish everything at the same time.
Unlike the developer activity log, the Publishing overview only shows changes that will be visible on Google Play, or what you’ve told us about how we should consider and review your app.
The “Changes in review” section lets you quickly see changes that have not been published yet.
These changes are organized by the type of change or release track so it’s easy to understand at a glance.
Many of you may be familiar with Timed publishing in the old Play Console. In the new Play Console, we’ve replaced Timed publishing with Managed publishing, to give you a clearer and more predictable publishing experience.
When you enable Managed publishing, approved changes will only go live when you decide instead of automatically after review and processing. This allows you to submit changes long before your intended release date, giving yourself time to review or make changes without sacrificing control over your publishing date.
See which changes have been reviewed and approved
When Managed publishing is on, the Publishing overview page contains two sections: one that shows which changes have been approved and are ready to publish, and another that shows changes that are still in review.
We’ve also made some improvements that many of you have been asking for:
See if Managed publishing is turned in the left-hand navigation menu
Soon, you’ll be able to see the Managed publishing icon in the left-hand nav next to Publishing overview. This way, you can tell Managed publishing is on from anywhere in the Play Console.
To learn more about publishing with the new Play Console, including scenarios when these features would be most useful, check out this course from Play Academy. And if you haven’t already, update to the new Play Console at play.google.com/console and give Managed publishing a try.
Posted by Scott Swarthout, Product Manager
Today, we’re excited to release the stable version of Android Studio 4.1, with a set of features addressing common editing, debugging, and optimization use cases. A major theme for this release was helping you be more productive while using Android Jetpack libraries, Android’s suite of libraries to help developers follow best practices and write code faster. Based on your feedback we made a number of improvements to the code editing experience with IDE integrations for popular Android libraries.
Some highlights of Android Studio 4.1 include a new Database Inspector for querying your app’s database, support for navigating projects that use Dagger or Hilt for dependency injection, and better support for on-device machine learning with support for TensorFlow Lite models in Android projects. We’ve also made updates to Apply Changes to make deployment faster. Based on your feedback, we’ve made several changes to help game developers with a new native memory profiler and standalone profiling tools.
Product quality continues to be a major focus for the team, and we’ve been hard at work tracking down bugs and performance issues. We’ve heard from many developers that they liked the focus on better performance and reliability, so we’re happy to report that during this release cycle we’ve fixed 2,370 bugs and closed 275 public issues. We stay committed to maintaining high quality since we know that is key to your developer productivity.
Thank you to those who gave your early feedback in preview releases. Your feedback helped us iterate and improve features in Android Studio 4.1. If you are ready for the next stable release, and want to use a new set of productivity features, Android Studio 4.1 is ready to download for you to get started.
Below is a full list of new features in Android Studio 4.1, organized by key developer flows.
Android Studio templates in the create New Project dialog now use Material Design Components (MDC) and conform to updated guidance for themes and styles by default. These changes will make it easier to use recommended material styling patterns and support modern UI features like dark themes.
Material Design Components updates in Project Templates
Updates include:
com.google.android.material:material
Theme.MaterialComponents.*
colors.xml
purple_500
colorPrimary
themes.xml
styles.xml
Theme.<ApplicationName>
DayNight
?attr/colorPrimary
We wanted to make it easier to inspect, query, and modify your app's databases using the new Database Inspector. To get started, deploy your app to a device running API level 26 or higher and select View > Tool Windows > Database Inspector from the menu bar. Whether your app uses the Jetpack Room library or the Android platform version of SQLite directly, you can now easily inspect databases and tables in your running app or run custom queries.
Because Android Studio maintains a live connection while you’re inspecting your app, you can also modify values using the Database Inspector and see those changes in your running app. If you use the Room persistence library, Android Studio also places run buttons next to each query in the code editor to help you quickly run queries you define in your @Query annotations. Learn more
Inspect, query, and modify your app’s databases with the Database Inspector
You can now run the Android Emulator directly in Android Studio. Use this feature to conserve screen real estate, to navigate quickly between the emulator and the editor window using hotkeys, and to organize your IDE and emulator workflow in a single application window. You can manage snapshots and common emulator actions like rotating and taking screenshots from within Studio, but access to the full set of options still requires running the stable emulator. You can opt-in to use this feature by going to File → Settings → Tools → Emulator → Launch in Tool Window.
Run the Android Emulator inside of Android Studio
Dagger is a popular library for dependency injection on Android. Android Studio makes it easier to navigate between your Dagger-related code by providing new gutter actions and extending support in the Find Usages window. For example, clicking on the gutter action next to a method that consumes a given type navigates you to the provider of that type. Conversely, clicking on the gutter action navigates you to where a type is used as a dependency. Android Studio also supports navigation actions for dependencies defined with the Jetpack Hilt library. Learn more.
Navigate between Dagger-related code with gutter actions
Android developers are using machine learning to create innovative and helpful experiences. TensorFlow Lite is a popular library for writing mobile machine learning models, and we wanted to make it easier to import these models into Android apps. Similar to view binding, Android Studio generates easy-to-use classes so you can run your model with less code and better type safety. The current implementation of ML Model Binding supports image classification and style transfer models, provided they are enhanced with metadata.
To see the details for an imported model and get instructions on how to use it in your app, double-click the .tflite model file in your project to open the model viewer page. Learn more.
.tflite
View TensorFlow Lite model metadata in Android Studio 4.1
Android Studio
In addition to recently adding 5G cellular testing support, we’ve added support for foldables in the Android emulator. With Android emulator 30.0.26 and above, you can configure foldable devices with a variety of fold designs and configurations. When a foldable device is configured, the emulator will publish hinge angle sensor updates and posture changes, so you can test how your app responds to these form factors. See the Developing for Android 11 with the Android Emulator blogpost to read more.
Faster builds help developers make changes to their app more easily and quickly. To help you be more productive as you iterate on your app, we've made multiple enhancements to Apply Changes for devices running Android 11 or higher.
We've invested heavily in optimizing your iteration speed by developing a method to deploy and persist changes on a device without installing the application. After an initial deploy, subsequent deploys to Android 11 devices using either Apply Code Changes or Apply Changes and Restart Activity are now significantly faster. We’ve also added support for additional code changes in Apply Changes. Now if you add a method, you can deploy those changes to a running app by clicking either Apply Code Changes or Apply Changes and Restart Activity.
Android Gradle Plugin 4.0 added the ability to import Prefab packages in AAR dependencies. We wanted to extend the capability of this feature to support sharing native libraries as well. AGP version 4.1 enables exporting libraries from your external native build in an AAR for an Android Library project. To export your native libraries, add the following to the android block of your library project's build.gradle file:
build.gradle
buildFeatures { prefabPublishing true } prefab { mylibrary { headers "src/main/cpp/mylibrary/include" } myotherlibrary { headers "src/main/cpp/myotherlibrary/include" } }
When a crash or ANR occurs in native code, the system produces a stack trace, which is a snapshot of the sequence of nested functions called in your program up to the moment it crashed. These snapshots can help you to identify and fix any problems in the source, but they must first be symbolicated to translate the machine addresses back into human-readable function names.
If your app or game is developed using native code, like C++, you can now upload debug symbols files to the Play Console for each version of your app. The Play Console uses these debug symbols files to symbolicate your app's stack traces, making it easier to analyze crashes and ANRs. To include debug symbols in your app bundle, add the following line to your project’s build.gradle file:
android.buildTypes.release.ndk.debugSymbolLevel = 'SYMBOL_TABLE'
In Android Studio 4.1 we’ve overhauled System Trace, an optimization tool that gives you a real-time look at how your app is using system resources. We made it easier to select a trace with box selection mode, added a new analysis tab, and added more frame rendering data to help you investigate rendering issues in your app’s UI. Learn more.
Box selection: In the Threads section, you can now drag your mouse to perform a box selection of a rectangular area, which you can zoom into by clicking the Zoom to Selection button on the top right (or use the M keyboard shortcut). When you drag and drop similar threads next to each other, you can select across multiple threads to inspect all of them at once.
Use box selection to more easily select traces.
Summary tab: The new Summary tab in the Analysis panel displays:
View aggregated statistics in the Summary tab
Display data: In the Display section, new timelines for SurfaceFlinger and VSYNC help you investigate rendering issues in your app's UI.
It's now possible to access the Android Studio Profilers in a separate window from the primary Android Studio window. This is useful when optimizing Android games built with other tools like Unity or Visual Studio.
To run the standalone profilers, do the following:
Windows/Linux: <studio-installation-folder>\bin
<studio-installation-folder>\bin
macOS: <studio-installation-folder>/Contents/bin
<studio-installation-folder>/Contents/bin
profiler.exe
profiler.sh
The standalone profiler will allow you to connect to the Android emulator or any connected devices.
Optimize your app with the Standalone Android Studio Profilers
Tracking native memory usage is important for game developers and other developers using C++ to understand how to optimize their app’s memory consumption. The Android Studio Memory Profiler now includes a Native Memory Profiler for apps deployed to physical devices running Android 10 or later. The Native Memory Profiler tracks allocations/deallocations of objects in native code for a specific time period and provides information about total allocations and remaining system heap size.
To initiate a recording, click Record native allocations at the top of the Memory Profiler window:
View native memory allocations with the Native Memory Profiler
To recap, Android Studio 4.1 includes these new enhancements & features:
Design
Develop
Build & Test
Optimize
These materials are not sponsored by or affiliated with Unity Technologies or its affiliates. “Unity” is a trademark or registered trademark of Unity Technologies or its affiliates in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Posted by Kylie McRoberts, Program Manager and Alec Guertin, Security Engineer
Google’s Android Security & Privacy team has launched the Android Partner Vulnerability Initiative (APVI) to manage security issues specific to Android OEMs. The APVI is designed to drive remediation and provide transparency to users about issues we have discovered at Google that affect device models shipped by Android partners.
Android incorporates industry-leading security features and every day we work with developers and device implementers to keep the Android platform and ecosystem safe. As part of that effort, we have a range of existing programs to enable security researchers to report security issues they have found. For example, you can report vulnerabilities in Android code via the Android Security Rewards Program (ASR), and vulnerabilities in popular third-party Android apps through the Google Play Security Rewards Program. Google releases ASR reports in Android Open Source Project (AOSP) based code through the Android Security Bulletins (ASB). These reports are issues that could impact all Android based devices. All Android partners must adopt ASB changes in order to declare the current month’s Android security patch level (SPL). But until recently, we didn’t have a clear way to process Google-discovered security issues outside of AOSP code that are unique to a much smaller set of specific Android OEMs. The APVI aims to close this gap, adding another layer of security for this targeted set of Android OEMs.
The APVI covers Google-discovered issues that could potentially affect the security posture of an Android device or its user and is aligned to ISO/IEC 29147:2018 Information technology -- Security techniques -- Vulnerability disclosure recommendations. The initiative covers a wide range of issues impacting device code that is not serviced or maintained by Google (these are handled by the Android Security Bulletins).
The APVI has already processed a number of security issues, improving user protection against permissions bypasses, execution of code in the kernel, credential leaks and generation of unencrypted backups. Below are a few examples of what we’ve found, the impact and OEM remediation efforts.
In some versions of a third-party pre-installed over-the-air (OTA) update solution, a custom system service in the Android framework exposed privileged APIs directly to the OTA app. The service ran as the system user and did not require any permissions to access, instead checking for knowledge of a hardcoded password. The operations available varied across versions, but always allowed access to sensitive APIs, such as silently installing/uninstalling APKs, enabling/disabling apps and granting app permissions. This service appeared in the code base for many device builds across many OEMs, however it wasn’t always registered or exposed to apps. We’ve worked with impacted OEMs to make them aware of this security issue and provided guidance on how to remove or disable the affected code.
A popular web browser pre-installed on many devices included a built-in password manager for sites visited by the user. The interface for this feature was exposed to WebView through JavaScript loaded in the context of each web page. A malicious site could have accessed the full contents of the user’s credential store. The credentials are encrypted at rest, but used a weak algorithm (DES) and a known, hardcoded key. This issue was reported to the developer and updates for the app were issued to users.
The checkUidPermission method in the PackageManagerService class was modified in the framework code for some devices to allow special permissions access to some apps. In one version, the method granted apps with the shared user ID com.google.uid.shared any permission they requested and apps signed with the same key as the com.google.android.gsf package any permission in their manifest. Another version of the modification allowed apps matching a list of package names and signatures to pass runtime permission checks even if the permission was not in their manifest. These issues have been fixed by the OEMs.
checkUidPermission
PackageManagerService
com.google.uid.shared
com.google.android.gsf
Keep an eye out at https://bugs.chromium.org/p/apvi/ for future disclosures of Google-discovered security issues under this program, or find more information there on issues that have already been disclosed.
Acknowledgements: Scott Roberts, Shailesh Saini and Łukasz Siewierski, Android Security and Privacy Team
