Top things to know in Android Platform and Quality at Google I/O '23

Posted by Dan Galpin, Developer Relations Engineer

Google I/O was HUGE for developers with exciting news all across the platform and more around quality. Here are the top three announcements around Android and App Quality from Google I/O 2023:

#1 Android 14 comes with new features in privacy and security, system UI, and more

Android 14 continues our effort to improve privacy and security on the platform with the CredentialManager, which has a unified API that brings support for passkeys and federated login. Health Connect is also now a core part of the platform and available on all Android mobile devices directly in Settings, helping to control how users’ health and fitness data is shared across apps.. In addition, the beta of Privacy Sandbox on Android ensures effective privacy-preserving personalized advertising experiences.

Additionally, you’ll find Foreground Service changes, with required types, new permissions, system runtime checks, and new purpose-built APIs for user initiated data transfers and VoIP telephony that behave more consistently across our entire ecosystem. Android 14 also introduces Grammatical Inflection to help your app correctly address your users, along with updated per-app language and regional preferences. Finally, check out the Updated Predictive Back APIs that support in-app animations.

Watch the sessions that will help you get your app ready:

Building for the future of Android

What's new in Health on Android

10 things to know about the Privacy Sandbox on Android

What's new in Android privacy and security

How to reduce reliance on passwords in Android apps with passkey support

#2 Premium devices mean premium app experiences with camera & media and on-device ML

To help devices become creative powerhouses, Media3's Transformer supports video editing and transcoding and Android 14 introduces Ultra HDR images and more premium camera extensions. To leverage that CPU and GPU power to enable new productivity experiences, ML Kit adds new, production-ready on-device machine learning models such as document scanning and face mesh, and the Acceleration service for your custom ML models is in public beta.

Check out the sessions from I/O to learn more:

Creating high-quality Android media experiences

Building high quality Android camera experiences

How to build smarter Android apps with on-device Machine Learning

#3 More around app quality: a new quality framework, quality hub, and design hub

We've introduced a quality framework and quality hub which includes insights into how Google Play views app quality. We also created a new UI design hub that gives you a centralized destination for guidance, Figma starter kits, UI samples, and inspirational galleries to help apply our best practices for phones, large screens, wearables, and TVs.

Be sure to catch the full Android Platform and Quality playlist from Google I/O for all these videos!