Posted by Vishal Das, Community Manager
This year the Google Developer Educators India team launched the “Android Learn and Inspire Series” for Android Developers who were eager to learn Jetpack Compose and inspire others to upskill. Meet the developers who completed the series and hosted workshops on Jetpack Compose to find out their motivation to teach others!
I experimented with a few methods in the Android Learn and Inspire series. There are a few that I found quite effective.
One tip I would like to share is let’s bring those good engineers in Android who are expert in solving Android problems but shy in sharing knowledge.
Posted by Maru Ahues Bouza, Director, Android Developer Relations
This past year was a special one for the Android community, from the release of Android 13, a big investment in tablets and large screens, the latest in wearable technology to all of the investments in Modern Android Development! It was terrific to see many of you for the first time again in-person at Android Dev Summit and other events around the world.From the experiences you build for users to feedback you provide us to make your tools better, we wanted to say a very special holiday thank you!
We put together a highlights recap, and a commemorative poster celebrating 2022 - download it to bring some holiday cheer to your workspace, wherever you may be this season.
Now available in 150 countries, they’re looking to the future as they begin working on adding more languages and more exercises. The positive impact the app is having spurs them on - "we like reading the reviews to see how the app has changed people's lives. Some are simply commenting they are now doing job interviews. This was something that could be a struggle for many".
Check out all the stories now at g.co/play/weareplay and stay tuned for even more coming soon.
Posted by Purnima Kochikar, Vice President of Play Partnerships
Hello everyone,
This year, Google Play celebrated our first decade of partnering with your businesses. So whether you just launched your first app or game, or have been with us since the beginning, thank you for joining us — and more than 2.5 billion users — on this journey.
2022 was a year of uncertainty, with challenges to the global economy leaving many people and businesses looking for ways to adapt to difficult circumstances. But despite these difficult circumstances, your apps and games continued to help people manage, live and enjoy their lives.
We launched #WeArePlay this year to document your stories from around the world and showcase how your apps and games are improving people’s lives.One of my favorites is from brothers Kennedy and Duke, who use their ambition to help small businesses with their finance needs to create Kippa, and are now helping to empower entrepreneurs all across Africa.
In the US, Andrew Glantz used his passion to support local communities to create GiftAMeal, a fantastic app which encourages restaurant customers to take photos of their meal, following which a meal is given to someone at a local food bank. Andrew estimates that 500 restaurants have donated over 1 million meals to date, which is an amazing achievement. We’re excited to continue spotlighting your stories from all over the world throughout next year.
In the mobile-first world we live in today, it is clear to see the impact of the experiences you build on people's lives, and it inspires my team every day.
In uncertain economic times, we know it’s important to keep your costs low, improve your outcomes, and stay productive. That’s why we recently made a number of enhancements to help you acquire and re-engage your users more efficiently, and shared actionable best practices through our app growth series.
For select titles, another efficient way to engage with new and existing users is by utilizing Promotional content cards, which games have been using for a while. This is a great way to reach users on Google Play with offers, launches, and events. For example, Three Kingdoms Tactics used the cards for exposure on all major events like pre-registration, new version release, and new season. The cards released during their first anniversary event in Hong Kong SAR and Taiwan increased their game’s exposure in the Play Store by 35%.
We are also excited to see apps starting to use the cards. Live streaming service Twitch has run almost 200 Promotional content campaigns this year, generating 36 million unique viewers and over 50 thousand app installs from the cards. It is wonderful to see these results.
On average, businesses using Promotional content cards drive +3.6% increase in revenue and a +5.1% increase in 28 daily active users versus similar titles that don’t. By measuring your success with the new reporting dashboard, you’ll see that the opportunities for optimization are huge. If you're one of the thousands of titles that already use Promotional Content, look for messages in your Play Console Inbox to find out more. We're looking to expand access to even more apps and games next year.
One great way to find new users is to go global. For mobile games, mature markets like Western Europe show a good growth rate, but the global growth rate is even higher thanks to the number of mobile gamers growing in emerging markets such as Southeast Asia, Latin America, India, and the Middle East & Africa. An increasing number of apps and games are monetizing successfully across emerging markets — for example, Türkiye has seen a ~70% increase in consumer spend on apps this year, and a ~50% increase for games.
For those considering entering new markets, local payments and monetization tools can help you increase buyer conversion, engagement, and retention. This year we launched strategic guidance in Play Console, which brings you a number of insights including peerset comparisons and per-country breakdowns. These can help you quickly identify growth opportunities, like what markets are underperforming and where you are a market leader. For more best practices for entering new markets, check out our Google Play Academy courses, with more coming soon.
As we look to the future for your business growth, it is not only about reaching people in more markets, but also about reaching people on more devices. Users are increasingly investing in connected devices beyond their phones. Just this year, the number of active non-mobile Android devices has grown by almost 30%. That’s why it’s more important than ever to be able to meet your users where they are, whatever their device.
Supporting multi-platform gaming has been a major investment this year. We expanded Google Play Games to PCs as a beta experience across more markets around the world, gathering your feedback and improving the product to better fit the needs of your players around the world. Our greater aim is to help you to meet players where they are, and give them access to their games on as many devices as possible.
Many of you are already creating amazing experiences across multi-form factors, such as wearables and foldables. Strava is one great example of how building these experiences can boost engagement. They tapped into Google’s APIs, libraries and Android tools to take the app experience to the next level for people who have invested in a wearable, and found that wearable users also had 30% more active days than those who did not use a wearable.
We know how hard you work to build and grow these amazing apps. As you scale your businesses, we are also committed to helping you better understand the policies that keep the ecosystem safe for people everywhere. Recent policies to help you navigate trust and safety on Google Play include expanding the Developer Helpline program to help navigate policy compliance issues, and launching a Strike Removal program to help compliance and deeper education on commonly misunderstood policy areas.
To maximize your success during periods of change, we need to rally together. We were so excited to celebrate 100,000 followers this year on our Google Play Business Community Twitter channel, and welcome you to follow our community spaces on Twitter and LinkedIn to connect with your peers and build knowledge.
Take care of yourselves and each other — and happy holidays from our team to yours.
Posted by Patrick Fuentes, Developer Relations Engineer, Google ChromeOSPeople’s appetite for apps on larger screens is growing fast. In Q1 2022 alone, there were 270 million active Android users across Chromebooks, tablets, and foldables. So if you want to grow reach, engagement, and loyalty, taking your app beyond mobile will unlock a world of opportunity.
If your app is available in Google Play, there’s a good chance users are already engaging with it on ChromeOS. And if you’re just starting to think about larger screens, tailoring your app to ChromeOS — which runs a full Android framework — is a great place to start. What’s more is that optimizing for ChromeOS is very similar to optimizing for other larger-screen devices, so any work you do for one will scale to the other.
At Android Dev Summit 2022, I shared a few ChromeOS-specific nuances to keep in mind when tailoring your app to larger screens. Let’s explore the top five things devs should consider, as well as workarounds to common challenges.
People freely resize apps on ChromeOS, so it’s important to think about how your app looks and feels in a variety of aspect ratios — including landscape orientations. Although ChromeOS offers automatic windowing compatibility support for made-for-mobile experiences, apps that specifically optimize for larger screens tend to drive more engagement.
The extra screen real estate on Chromebooks, tablets, and foldables gives both you and your users more room to play, explore, and create. So why not make the most of it? You can implement a responsive UI for larger screens with toolkits such as Jetpack Compose and create adaptive experiences by sticking to design best practices.
If you’ve exclusively run your app on Android phones, you might only be familiar with ARM devices. But Chromebooks and many other desktops often use x86 architectures, which makes binary support critical. Although Gradle builds for all non-deprecated ABIs by default, you’ll still need to specifically account for x86 support if your app or one of your libraries includes C++ code.
Thanks to binary translation, many Android apps will run on x86 ChromeOS devices even if a compatible version isn’t available. But this can hinder app performance and hurt battery life, so it’s best to provide x86 support explicitly whenever you can.
The surefire way of ensuring a great user experience? Run rigorous checks to make sure your apps and games work as expected on the devices you’re optimizing for. When you’re building for ChromeOS, testing your apps on Chromebooks or another larger-screen device is ideal. But you've still got options if a physical device isn’t available.
For instance, you can still test a keyboard or mouse on an Android handset by plugging them into the USB-C port. And with the new desktop emulator in Android Studio, you can take your app for a spin in a larger-screen setting and test desktop features such as window resizing.
Sometimes, even apps tested on Chromebooks — and listed in Google Play — aren’t actually available to ChromeOS users. This usually happens because there’s an entry in the app’s manifest declaring it requires features that aren’t available on the unsupported device.
Let’s say you specify your app requires “android.hardware.camera.” That entry refers to a rear-facing camera — so any devices with only a user-facing camera would be considered unsupported. If any camera will work for your app, you can use “android.hardware.camera.any” instead. And if a hardware feature isn’t a must for your app, it’s best to specify in your manifest that it’s not required by using “required=false.”
As people’s love for desktops, tablets, and foldables continues to grow, building for these form factors is becoming more and more important. Check out other talks from Android Dev Summit 2022 as well as resources on ChromeOS.dev and developer.android.com for more inspiration and how-tos as you optimize for larger screens. And don’t forget to sign up for the ChromeOS newsletter to keep up with the latest.
Posted by Neelansh Sahai Android Developer Relations Engineer (on Twitter and LinkedIn)
In part 1 of the Per-App Language Preferences blog, we discussed what the feature is, how developers benefit from it, how to implement the feature, and the strong business impact of catering to multilingual users. In this part of the blog, we'll discuss how various top apps migrated to the Per-App Languages Feature and how it benefited them.
MyJio is the-one-stop destination for recharges, managing accounts & Jio devices, UPI & payments, entertainment services with movies, music, news, games, quizzes & a lot more. With over 500 M+ total installs spread across the globe, MyJio aims to provide its users better access to a variety of utilities. Also as the user-base of MyJio is quite vast, the app supports a total of over 12+ Languages. With these many features and a wide diversity of active multilingual users, MyJio has a strong reason to localize their app using the best practices.MyJio developers implemented the Per App Language Preferences APIs right along with the Android 13 release, allowing their users the flexibility to select a language for their app from system settings as well.
FROM THE DEVELOPERS :At Zomato, providing the best customer experience possible is the core of our business and we believe localization is very critical in giving our customers a pleasant experience on the platform. Our team integrated with the new A13 Per-App Language Preferences API provided by Google to make it easy for our users to switch their preferred language on Zomato.
The ease of integrating the API helped us get it done effortlessly in less than a week’s time. Backward compatibility and stability of the API ensured that we are not compromising on the experience of our customers. With this, we hope to provide a better experience to the customer in their journey of online ordering via Zomato.
FROM THE DEVELOPERS :The demand for using apps in vernacular language is steadily growing in India. After Google announced Per-App Language Preferences recently, it was a straightforward decision to integrate them. The implementation was straightforward, stable, and compatible with older Android versions.
We saw that some top apps have implemented the Per-App Language Preferences APIs in their apps and have also circulated the updates out to the users. This easy migration was possible in such a short timespan due to the low amount of effort investment and minimal code changes required. Lastly, here are some resources that can help you understand the feature better.
Posted by Kseniia Shumelchyk, Android Developer Relations Engineer
Today we’re releasing version 1.1 of Compose for Wear OS, our modern declarative UI toolkit to help developers build beautiful, responsive apps for Wear OS.
Since the first stable release earlier this year, we have seen many developers taking advantage of the powerful tools and intuitive APIs to make building their app simpler and more efficient. Todoist and Outdooractive are some of the developers that rebuilt their Wear apps with Compose and accelerated the delivery of a new, functional user experience.
Todoist increased its growth rate by 50% since rebuilding their app for Wear 3 and Outdooractive reduced development time by 30% and saw a significant boost in developer productivity and better design/developer collaboration:
“Compose makes the UI code more intuitive to write and read, allowing us to prototype faster in the design phase and also collaborate better on the code. What would have taken us days now takes us hours.”
The Compose for Wear OS 1.1 release contains new features and brings improvements to existing components, focusing on UX and accessibility. We’ve already updated our samples, codelab, and Horologist libraries to work with Compose for Wear OS 1.1.
The Compose for Wear OS 1.1 release includes the following new functionality (baseline profiles already added for new components):
A new experimental API has been added to implement placeholder support. This can be used to achieve three distinct visual effects separately or all together:
Check out the reference docs and sample in Horologist to see how to apply the placeholder to common use cases, such as a Chip with icon and a label that puts placeholder over individual content slots and draws a placeholder shimmer on top while waiting for data to load.
Horologist’s fadeAway modifier has been graduated to scrollAway modifier in version 1.1. Modifier.scrollAway scrolls an item vertically in and out of view, based on the scroll state, and already has overloads to work with Column, LazyColumn and ScalingLazyColumn.
CurvedTextStyle now supports additional parameters (fontFamily, fontWeight, fontStyle, fontSynthesis) to specify font details when creating a curved text style. Extended curved text style can be used on both curvedText and basicCurvedText.
The 1.1 release also focuses on bringing a refined user experience, improvements for TalkBack support and overall better accessibility:
To begin developing with Compose for Wear OS, get started with hands-on experience trying our codelab, and make sure to check out the documentation and samples. Visit Compose for Wear OS release notes for full list of changes available in version 1.1.
Note that using version 1.1 of Compose for Wear OS requires using the version 1.3 of androidx.compose libraries and therefore Kotlin 1.7.10. Check out the Compose to Kotlin Compatibility Map for more information.
Compose for Wear OS continues to evolve with the features you’ve been asking for. Please do continue providing us feedback on the issue tracker and join Kotlin Slack #compose-wear channel to connect with the Google team and dev community.
We’re excited to see a growing number of apps using Compose for Wear OS in production, and we’re grateful for all issues and requests that help us to make the toolkit better!
Discover even more with technical sessions from the Android Dev Summit providing guidance on app architecture, testing, handling rotary input, and verticalized sessions for media and fitness.
Posted by Wolfram Klein, Product Manager, Android TV OSToday we’re releasing the newest version of Android TV OS, Android 13 for TV! This latest release brings further improvements in performance and accessibility to help our developers build engaging apps for the next generation of TVs.
Here’s a look at some of what’s new in Android 13 for TV.
Android 13 brings new APIs to the big screen that help developers deliver high quality experiences to users across different device types.
Android 13 brings new features to make interacting with TV more adaptable.
Check out the Android TV OS developer site for details on even more features that come with Android 13 on TVs. The new release is now available for both ADT-3 and the Android TV emulator, and developers can choose to test on either the Google TV interface or the standard Android TV interface. As always, we are thankful to our developers for the continued support of Android TV OS. We can’t wait to see what amazing and innovative experiences you’ll continue to build for the big screen.
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