Posted by Amanda Alexander, Product Manager, Android
We are excited to announce that Android Studio Arctic Fox is now available to download in the stable release channel. This latest release brings to life Jetpack Compose 1.0, Android's new toolkit for building native UI. The release also focuses on devices, including Wear OS, and helps with developer productivity, with features like a new Background Task Manager. We used your feedback to create this suite of new Android Studio features that will help empower the developer community to create high quality, modern apps across devices faster!
Note: As we announced last year, we adjusted our version numbering of Android Studio to match the year and version of the IntelliJ IDEA that Android Studio is based on, plus our own patch number. We will be using code names (in alphabetical order); the first is Arctic Fox and the next is Bumblebee (currently in canary).Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) updates Android Studio to version 2020.3 of the IntelliJ platform which adds a slew of new features including debugger interactive hints, VCS updates, and several new code editor enhancements to speed up your workflow. Learn more.
To support rapid design of modern UI, we added additional features for Jetpack Compose. Compose Preview lets you create previews of multiple components of your Compose UI to instantly see the impact of your changes across dimensions (such as themes, screen and font sizes, and more). The Deploy Preview to device feature enables deploying snippets of your Compose code directly to a device or emulator so you can quickly test small parts of your code. If you want to dive deeper into your Layouts, we added Compose support to the Layout Inspector to help you understand how your layouts are rendered. Additionally, we added Live Editing of literals so you can instantly see your Compose code changes in previews and when running your app on an emulator or physical device without the need for compilation.
For increased device support, we built a new Wear OS pairing assistant to simplify the pairing of Wear OS emulators with physical or virtual phones. To use the newest Wear OS version, you can now access the developer preview of the Wear OS 3 system image. When you run the Wear OS emulator, you will also find added support for the Heart Rate Sensor API. For apps targeting Google TV, we added the newest Google TV Remote Control features and updated the Google TV system images to reflect the latest UI design. Additionally, we have completed the development and testing workflow for the Automotive OS by enabling the emulator to use car sensor data to simulate driving use cases. For apps targeting tablets, we have updated all templates to support landscape out of the box. Whether you are developing for small or large screen devices, we have included new features to help you keep innovating and building amazing apps.
Lastly, in an effort to boost developer productivity, we have added features to help you work more efficiently. For example, we added lint checks for Android 12 to provide guidance on building apps for the next version of Android. To help you test your code, we added an Accessibility Scanner for Layout Editor so you can more easily identify accessibility issues in your layouts and the new Test Matrix lets you view test results in real time across multiple devices in parallel. Additionally, we added preview support for Apple Silicon (arm64) hardware and extended the emulator controls for wider coverage in testing. Lastly, for debugging, the new Background Task Inspector helps you to analyze your app's background workers.
There are many enhancements to Android Studio Arctic Fox. To see the full list of changes, view the Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) Beta release blog and release notes. You can take a look below at some highlights of the changes.
What's new in Android Studio Arctic Fox
Use the @Preview annotation to generate previews of Compose code and visualize the different configurations of multiple components (e.g. devices or themes). Compose Preview can make it simpler for you to construct a mental mapping of the composables in your code.
Compose Preview
Layout Inspector for Compose
For both apps written fully in Compose and apps with some Compose alongside Views, Layout Inspector makes it possible to get more details on your layouts and troubleshoot. For example, you will be able to see the parameters and modifiers passed to each composable. There is an option to turn on Live Updates to stream data from your device as you develop your app.
Compose Layout Inspector
Live Edit of literals
You can now quickly edit literals (strings, numbers, booleans, etc.) inline and see the immediate results on the change on screen (previews, emulator, or physical device), without having to compile.
Live Edit of Literals: edit strings and see it reflected immediately in Preview
Wear OS Pairing
The new Wear OS Pairing assistant will help walk you through the pairing process to make pairing Wear OS emulators with virtual or physical phone simple. Note that this feature assists with pairing with Wear OS 2 companion; support for Wear OS 3 will be coming soon. Learn more.
Wear OS emulator pairing assistant dialog
Phone + Watch emulators paired successful state
Background Task Inspector
You can use the new Background Task Inspector to visualize, monitor, and debug your app's background workers when using WorkManager library 2.5.0 or higher on a device running API level 26 and higher. You can access it by selecting View > Tool Windows > App Inspection from the menu bar. Learn more.
To recap, Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) Stable includes these new enhancements & features:
Check out the Android Studio release notes, Android Gradle plugin release notes, and the Android Emulator release notes for more details.
Download
You can download the latest version of Android Studio Arctic Fox from the download page and download the Apple Silicon preview build here. If you are using a previous release of Android Studio, you can simply update to the latest version of Android Studio. If you want to maintain a stable version of Android Studio, you can run the stable release version and canary release versions of Android Studio Arctic Fox at the same time. Learn more.
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. Follow us -- the Android Studio development team ‐ on Twitter and on Medium.
Posted by Anna-Chiara Bellini, Product Manager, Nick Butcher, Developer Relations
Today, we're launching version 1.0 of Jetpack Compose, Android's modern, native UI toolkit to help you build better apps faster. It's stable, and ready for you to adopt in production. We have been developing Compose in the open with feedback and participation from the Android community for the last two years. As we reach 1.0, there are already over 2000 apps in the Play Store using Compose - in fact, the Play Store app itself uses Compose! But that’s not all, we have been working with a number of top app developers and their feedback and support has helped us make the 1.0 release even stronger. Square, for instance, told us that by using Compose, they can “focus on things that are unique to Square and their UI infrastructure, rather than solving the broader issue of building a declarative UI framework”. Monzo said Compose allows them to “build higher quality screens more quickly”. And Twitter summed it up nicely: “We love it! ❤️”
We designed Compose to make it faster and easier to build native Android apps. With a fully declarative approach, you just describe your UI, and Compose takes care of the rest. As app state changes, your UI automatically updates, making it a lot simpler to build UI quickly. Intuitive Kotlin APIs help you build beautiful apps with way less code, and native access to all existing Android code means you can adopt at your own pace. Powerful layout APIs and code-driven UI make it easy to support different form factors, like tablets and foldables, and Compose support is coming for WearOS, Homescreen Widgets, and more!
This 1.0 release is ready for use in production, offering key features that you need:
The fully declarative approach in Jetpack Compose radically changes how you develop UI. To support new workflows and a different way of thinking, we are delivering new tools, designed specifically for Compose, and adding support for Compose to some of our existing tooling.
The new Compose Preview, available in Android Studio Arctic Fox allows you to see your Composables in different states, light and dark theme, or different font scalings, all at the same time, making component development easier, without having to deploy a whole app to your device. Enhanced with live editing of literals, you can see updates without recompiling your project.
If you ever wished to be able to test parts of the UI on a device, without having to navigate through your app to the screen you’re working on, you will like the new Deploy Preview: just create a preview for your Composable, and deploy it on your device for fast iteration.
Layout Inspector adds support for Composables, so that you can confidently mix Compose with existing Views.
Read more about Compose support in Android Studio Arctic Fox, here.
Adopting any new framework requires evaluation, especially something as far reaching as a new UI Toolkit. To help you to make an informed decision whether it’s the right time for you we’re publishing a public roadmap to share our plans to continue to build out Jetpack Compose.
To help you get composing, we’ve prepared an extensive set of resources for you and your team:
There’s a lot to learn! The Jetpack Compose Pathway provides a step-by-step journey through key codelabs, videos and docs to help guide you.
We really believe that Jetpack Compose is a huge leap forward, making it so much faster and easier to build great UIs; we can’t wait to see what you build with it. Now that Compose is stable at 1.0, it’s time to get started; there’s nothing better than getting right to the code. Happy Composing!
Posted by Suzanne Frey, VP, Product, Android Security and Privacy
Today, we’re announcing additional details for the upcoming safety section in Google Play. At Google, we know that feeling safe online comes from using products that are secure by default, private by design, and give users control over their data. This new safety section will provide developers a simple way to showcase their app’s overall safety. Developers will be able to give users deeper insight into their privacy and security practices, as well as explain the data the app may collect and why — all before users install the app.
Ultimately, all Google Play store apps will be required to share information in the safety section. We want to give developers plenty of time to adapt to these changes, so we’re sharing more information about the data type definitions, user journey, and policy requirements of this new feature.
Images are directional and subject to change
Users will see the new summary in an app’s store listing page. It’ll share the developer’s explanation of what data an app collects or shares and highlight safety details, such as whether:
Users can tap into the summary to see details like:
In designing our labels, we learned developers appreciate when they can provide context about their data practices and more detail on whether their app automatically collects data versus if that collection is optional. We also learned that users care about whether their data is shared with other companies, and why.
The final design is subject to change as we continue working with developers and designing for the best blend of developer and user experiences.
Policy changes to support the safety section
Today we announced new user data policies designed to provide more user transparency and to help people make informed choices about how their data is collected, protected and used.
This applies to all apps published on Google Play, including Google's own apps.
We want to provide developers with plenty of time and resources to get prepared.
Target Timeline. Dates subject to change.
Starting in October, developers can submit information in the Google Play Console for review. We encourage you to start early in case you have questions along the way. The new safety section will launch for apps in Google Play in Q1 2022.
We know that some developers will need more time to assess their apps and coordinate with multiple teams. So, you’ll have until April 2022 before your apps must have this section approved. Without an approved section, your new app submission or app update may be rejected.
If your app’s information is not approved by the time we launch the safety section in Google Play to users in Q1 2022, then it will display “No information available.”
We’ll continue to share more guidance, including specific dates, over the next few months.
Thank you for your continued partnership in building this feature alongside us and in making Google Play a safe and trustworthy platform for everyone.
Posted by Krish Vitaldevara, Director, Product Management
We are always looking to make Google Play a safer and more trustworthy experience for developers and consumers. Today, we’re announcing new policy updates to bolster user control, privacy, and security.
We’re sharing our new policy for the upcoming safety section in Google Play alongside additional information, like data definitions. Learn more.
We’ve long offered users meaningful controls with advertising ID, like being able to reset their identifier at any time or opt out of allowing the identifier to be used for ads personalization. We’re continuing to add more controls this year.
As we pre-announced to developers on June 2, we’re making a technical change as part of Google Play services update in late 2021. When users opt out of interest-based advertising or ads personalization, their advertising ID will be removed and replaced with a string of zeros. As a reminder, this Google Play services change will be a phased rollout, affecting apps running on Android 12 devices starting late 2021 and expanding to all apps running on devices that support Google Play in early 2022. Also, apps updating their target API level to Android 12 will need to declare a new Google Play services permission in the manifest file in order to use advertising ID.
We will also test a new feature that notifies developers and ad/analytics service providers of user opt-out preferences to help developers implement user choice and add to existing policy restrictions on how advertising ID can be used. When a user deletes their advertising ID, developers will receive a notification so they can promptly erase advertising IDs that are no longer in use.
In addition, we’re prohibiting linking persistent device identifiers to personal and sensitive user data or resettable device identifiers. This policy adds an additional layer of privacy protection when users reset their device identifiers or uninstall apps.
And last, we’re offering a developer preview of app set ID for essential use cases such as analytics or fraud prevention. App set ID is a unique ID that, on a given device, allows you to correlate usage or actions across a set of apps owned by your organization. You cannot use app set ID for ads personalization or ads measurement. It will also automatically reset if all the developers’ apps on the device are uninstalled or none of the apps have accessed the ID in 13 months.
As we introduce app set ID for analytics and fraud prevention, we are also making changes to further enhance privacy for kids. If an app is primarily directed to children, it cannot transmit identifiers like advertising ID. If an app’s audience is both kids and adults, then it needs to avoid transmitting these identifiers for kids.
Over the next several months, we’ll share more information for a smooth transition.
Security is fundamental to enabling privacy across our platform. We’re announcing a few policy updates to help keep user data secure.
First, Google Play remains a safer ecosystem when developers actively maintain their apps. So, we will close dormant accounts if the account is inactive or abandoned after a year. This includes accounts where the developer has never uploaded an app or accessed Google Play Console in a year.
We will continue supporting developers with actively growing apps. We won’t close accounts with apps that have 1000+ installs or have in-app purchases in the last 90 days. Developers whose accounts are closed can create new ones in the future, but they won’t be able to reactivate old accounts, apps, or data.
Second, it’s important for users to have an accessible experience that is secure. So, we’re adding new requirements on how AccessibilityService API and IsAccessibilityTool can be used. These tools help build accessible experiences, which often require access to user data and device functionality. Now, all apps that use the AccessibilityService API will need to disclose data access and purpose in Google Play Console and get approval. Learn more.
As we shared earlier in July, after careful consideration of feedback from both large and small developers, we are giving developers an option to request a 6-month extension until March 31, 2022 to comply with our Payments policy.
Thank you for helping us make Google Play an even more trustworthy platform for everyone.
Posted by Madan Ankapura, Product Manager
Building on our effort to enable developers to create app experiences across navigation, parking, and charging apps via Android for Cars App Library as part of Jetpack, today we’re announcing the availability of CarHardwareManager APIs as part of version 1.1 alpha02 to get developer feedback.
CarHardwareManager can be used to query the vehicle’s hardware data, such as model and make, fuel levels and other sensors. Currently, this feature is only available for Android Auto 6.7+ in the open-testing channel. Testing this in a desktop environment requires a new version of the Desktop Head Unit which will be released separately. Stay tuned here for details on when the new version becomes available.
For the entire list of changes in alpha02, please see the release notes. To start building your app for the car, check out our updated developer documentation, car quality guidelines and design guidelines. These library features are available for testing only with the Desktop Head Unit. We will announce when these features are available to run in cars in the future.
In addition, if you are a developer of a parking app, you can now integrate with Google Assistant to enable users to talk to Google to open their favorite parking app and find parking while driving.
If you’re interested in joining our Early Access Program in the future, please fill out this interest form. You can get started with the Android for Cars App Library today, by visiting g.co/androidforcars.
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.
Posted by Oli Gaymond, Product Manager, Android ML
On-Device Machine Learning provides lower latency, more efficient battery usage, and features that do not require network connectivity. We have found that development teams deploying on-device ML on Android today encounter these common challenges:
To help solve these problems, we’ve built Android ML Platform - an updateable, fully integrated ML inference stack. With Android ML Platform, developers get:
Built in on-device inference essentials - TensorFlow Lite for Android
TensorFlow Lite will be available on all devices with Google Play Services. Developers will no longer need to include the runtime in their apps, reducing app size. Moreover, TensorFlow Lite for Android will use metadata in the model to automatically enable hardware acceleration, allowing developers to get the best performance possible on each Android device.
Optimal performance on all devices - Automatic Acceleration
Automatic Acceleration is a new feature in TensorFlowLite for Android. It enables per-model testing to create allowlists for specific devices taking performance, accuracy and stability into account. These allowlists can be used at runtime to decide when to turn on hardware acceleration. In order to use accelerator allowlisting, developers will need to provide additional metadata to verify correctness. Automatic Acceleration will be available later this year.
A consistent API that spans Android versions
Besides keeping TensorFlow Lite for Android up to date via regular updates, we’re also going to be updating the Neural Networks API outside of OS releases while keeping the API specification the same across Android versions. In addition we are working with chipset vendors to provide the latest drivers for their hardware directly to devices, outside of OS updates. This will let developers dramatically reduce testing from thousands of devices to a handful of configurations. We’re excited to announce that we’ll be launching later this year with Qualcomm as our first partner.
Sign-up for our early access program
While several of these features will roll out later this year, we are providing early access to TensorFlow Lite for Android to developers who are interested in getting started sooner. You can sign-up for our early access program here.
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