The first developer preview of Privacy Sandbox on Android

Posted by Fred Chung, Android Developer Relations

 

We recently announced the Privacy Sandbox on Android to enable new advertising solutions that improve user privacy, and provide developers and businesses with the tools to succeed on mobile. Since the announcement, we've heard from developers across the ecosystem on our initial design proposals. Your feedback is critical to ensure we build solutions that work for everyone, so please continue to share it through the Android developer site.

Today, we're releasing the first developer preview for the Privacy Sandbox on Android, which provides an early look at the SDK Runtime and Topics API. You'll be able to do preliminary testing of these new technologies and evaluate how you might adopt them for your solutions. This is a preview, so some features may not be implemented just yet, and functionality is subject to change. See the release notes for more details on what's included in the release.

What’s in the Developer Preview?

The Privacy Sandbox Developer Preview provides additional platform APIs and services on top of the Android 13 Developer Beta release, including an SDK, system images, emulator, and developer documentation. Specifically, you'll have access to the following:

• Android SDK and 64-bit Android Emulator system images that include the Privacy Sandbox APIs. See the setup guide.
• Device system images for Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6, Pixel 5a (5G), Pixel 5, Pixel 4, and Pixel 4a. This preview release is for developers only and not intended for daily or consumer use, so we're making it available by manual download only.
• Developer guides for the SDK Runtime and Topics API.
• Sample code that demonstrates the implementation of runtime-enabled SDKs and usage of the Topics API, available on GitHub.
• Privacy Sandbox API reference.

Things you can try

When your development environment is set up, consider taking the following actions:

• Familiarize yourselves with the technical proposals on the SDK Runtime, Topics, Attribution Reporting, and FLEDGE on Android.
• Topics API: Invoke the API and retrieve test values, representing a user's coarse-grained interests. See the documentation for detail.
• SDK Runtime: Build and install a runtime-enabled SDK on a test device or emulator. Create a test app to load the SDK in the runtime and request the SDK to remotely render a WebView-based ad in the app. See the documentation for detail.
• Review and run the sample apps.
• For details on capabilities and known limitations in this Developer Preview release, check out the release notes.

Over the coming months, we'll be releasing updates to the Developer Preview including early looks at the Attribution Reporting and FLEDGE APIs. For more information, please visit the Privacy Sandbox developer site. You can also share your feedback or questions, review progress updates so far, and sign up to receive email updates.

Happy testing!