Posted by Joshua Gordon, Developer Advocate
Go for a run, improve your game, and explore the great outdoors with Android Wear! Developers are creating a diverse array of fitness apps that provide everything from pace and heart rate while running, to golf tips on your favorite course, to trail maps for hiking. Let’s take a look features of the open and flexible Wear platform they use to create great user experiences.
If your app supports always-on, you’ll never have to touch or twist your watch to activate the display. Running and want to see your pace? Glance at your wrist and it’s there! Runtastic, Endomondo, and MapMyRun use always-on to keep your stats visible, even in ambient mode. When it’s time for golf, I use Golfshot. Likewise, Golfshot uses always-on to continuously show yardage to the hole, so I never have to drop my club. Check out the doc, DevByte, and code sample to learn more.
It's encouraging to see how much ground I’ve covered when I go for a run or ride! Using the Maps API, you can show users their route, position, and place markers on the map they can tap to see more info you provide. All of this functionality is available to you using the same Maps API you’ve already worked with on Android. Check out the doc, DevByte, code sample, and blog post to learn more.
Google Fit is an open platform designed to make it easier to write fitness apps. It provides APIs to help with many common tasks. For example, you can use the Recording API to estimate how many steps the user has taken and how many calories they've burned. You can make that data to your app via the History API, and even access it over the web via REST, without having to write your own backend. Now, Google Fit can store data from a wide variety of exercises, from running to weightlifting. Check out the DevByte and code samples to learn more.
With the latest release of Android Wear, developers can now pair BLE devices directly with the Wearable. This is a great opportunity for all fitness apps -- and especially for running -- where carrying both a phone and the Wearable can be problematic. Imagine if your users could pair their heart rate straps or bicycle cadence sensors directly to their Wear device, and leave their phones at home. BLE is now supported by all Wear devices, and is supported by Google Fit. To learn more about it, check out this guide and DevByte.
When I’m running, carrying both a phone and a wearable can be a bit much. If you’re using an Android Wear device that supports onboard GPS, you can leave your phone at home! Since not all Wear devices have an onboard GPS sensor, you can use the FusedLocationProviderApi to seamlessly retrieve GPS coordinates from the phone if not available on the wearable. Check out this handy guide for more about detecting location on Wear.
When I’m back home and ready for more details on my activity, I can see them by opening the app on my phone. My favorite fitness apps transparently sync data between my Wearable and phone. To learn more about syncing data between devices, watch this DevByte on the DataLayer API.
Android Wear gives you the tools and training you need to create exceptional fitness apps. To get started on yours, visit developer.android.com/wear and join the discussion at g.co/androidweardev.
Posted by Alice Ching, Google Engineer
We are pleased to announce the release of Games in Motion, an open source game sample to demonstrate how developers can make fun games using Google Fit and Android Wear. Do you ever go on a jog and feel like there is a lack of incentive to help you run better? What if you were a secret agent and had to use your speed and your nifty gadget to complete missions?
With Games in Motion, you can enhance your exercise with missions and actions on your Android Wear device, while logging your jogs to the cloud.
Games in Motion is written in Java programming language using Android Studio. It demonstrates multiple Android technologies.
You can download the latest open source release from GitHub. We hope to inspire similar Android games, where multiple different form factors are combined for a fun experience.
Posted by Ian Lake, Developer Advocate
Today, we’re excited to give you new tools to build better apps with the rollout of Google Play services 7.3. With new Android Wear APIs, the addition of nutrition data to Google Fit, improvements to retrieving the user’s activity and location, and better support for optional APIs, there’s a lot to explore in this release.
Google Play services 7.3 extends the Android Wear network by enabling you to connect multiple Wear devices to a single mobile device.
While the DataApi will automatically sync DataItems across all nodes in the Wear network, the directed nature of the MessageApi is faced with new challenges. What node do you send a message to when the NodeApi starts showing multiple nodes from getConnectedNodes()? This is exactly the use case for the new CapabilityApi, which allows different nodes to advertise that they provide a specific functionality (say, the phone node being able to download images from the internet). This allows you to replace a generic NodeListener with a more specific CapabilityListener, getting only connection results and a list of nodes that have the specific functionality you need. We’ve updated the Sending and Receiving Messages training to explore this new functionality.
DataApi
DataItems
MessageApi
NodeApi
getConnectedNodes()
NodeListener
CapabilityListener
Another new addition for Android Wear is the ChannelApi, which provides a bidirectional data connection between two nodes. While assets are the best way to efficiently add binary data to the data layer for synchronization to all devices, this API focuses on sending larger binary data directly between specific nodes. This comes in two forms: sending full files via the sendFile() method (perfect for later offline access) or opening an OutputStream to stream real time binary data. We hope this offers a flexible, low level API to complement the DataApi and MessageApi.
ChannelApi
sendFile()
OutputStream
We’ve updated our samples with these changes in mind so go check them out here!
Google Fit makes building fitness apps easier with fitness specific APIs on retrieving sensor data like current location and speed, collecting and storing activity data in Google Fit’s open platform, and automatically aggregating that data into a single view of the user’s fitness data.
To make it even easier to retrieve up-to-date information, Google Play Services 7.3 adds a new method to the HistoryApi: readDailyTotal(). This automatically aggregates data for a given DataType from midnight on the current day through now, giving you a single DataPoint. For TYPE_STEP_COUNT_DELTA, this method does not require any authentication, making it possible to retrieve the current number of steps for today from any application whether on mobile devices or on Android Wear - great for watch faces!
HistoryApi
readDailyTotal()
DataType
DataPoint
TYPE_STEP_COUNT_DELTA
Google Fit is also augmenting its existing data types with granular nutrition information, including protein, fat, cholesterol, and more. By leveraging these details about the user’s diet, developers can help users stay more informed about their health and fitness.
LocationRequest is the heart of the FusedLocationProviderApi, encapsulating the type and frequency of location information you’d like to receive. An important, but small change to LocationRequest is the addition of a maximum wait time for location updates via setMaxWaitTime(). By using a value at least two times larger than the requested interval, the system can batch location updates together, reducing battery usage and, on some devices, actually improving location accuracy.
LocationRequest
FusedLocationProviderApi
setMaxWaitTime()
For any ongoing location requests, it is important to know that you will continue to get good location data back. The SettingsApi is still incredibly useful for confirming that user settings are optimal before you put in a LocationRequest, however, it isn’t the best approach for continual monitoring. For that, you can use the new LocationCallback class in place of your existing LocationListener to receive LocationAvailability updates in addition to location updates, giving you a simple callback whenever settings might have changed which will affect the current set of LocationRequests. You can also use FusedLocationProviderApi’s getLocationAvailability() to retrieve the current state on demand.
SettingsApi
LocationCallback
LocationListener
LocationAvailability
LocationRequests
getLocationAvailability()
One of the biggest benefits of GoogleApiClient is that it provides a single connection state, whether you are connecting to a single API or multiple APIs. However, this made it hard to work with APIs that might not be available on all devices, such as the Wearable API. This release makes it much easier to work with APIs that may not always be available with the addition of an addApiIfAvailable() method ensuring that unavailable APIs do not hold up the connection process. The current state for each API can then be retrieved via getConnectionResult(), giving you a way to check at runtime whether an API is available and connected.
GoogleApiClient
addApiIfAvailable()
getConnectionResult()
While GoogleApiClient’s connection process already takes care of checking for Google Play services availability, if you are not using GoogleApiClient, you’ll find many of the static utility methods in GooglePlayServicesUtil such as isGooglePlayServicesAvailable() have now been moved to the singleton GoogleApiAvailability class. We hope the move away from static methods helps you when writing tests, ensuring your application can properly handle any error cases.
GooglePlayServicesUtil
isGooglePlayServicesAvailable()
GoogleApiAvailability
Google Play services 7.3 is now available: get started with updated SDK now!
To learn more about Google Play services and the APIs available to you through it, visit the Google Play services section on the Android Developer site.
Today, we’re bringing you new tools to build better apps with the completion of the rollout of Google Play services 7.0. With this release, we’re delivering improvements to location settings experiences, a brand new API for place information, new fitness data, Google Play Games, and more.
While the FusedLocationProviderApi combines multiple sensors to give you the optimal location, the accuracy of the location your app receives still depends greatly on what settings are enabled on the device (e.g. GPS, wifi, airplane mode, etc). In Google Play services 7.0, we’re introducing a standard mechanism to check that the necessary location settings are enabled for a given LocationRequest to succeed. If there are possible improvements, you can display a one touch control for the user to change their settings without leaving your app.
This API provides a great opportunity to make for a much better user experience, particularly if location information is critical to the user experience of your app such as was the case with Google Maps when they integrated the Location Settings dialog and saw a dramatic increase in the number of users in a good location state.
Location can be so much more than a latitude and longitude: the new Places API makes it easy to get details from Google’s database of places and businesses. The built-in place picker makes it easy for the user to pick their current place and provides all the relevant place details including name, address, phone number, website, and more.
If you prefer to provide your own UI, the getCurrentPlace() API returns places directly around the user’s current location. Autocomplete predictions are also provided to allow a low latency search experience directly within your app.
getCurrentPlace()
You can also manually add places with the addPlace() API and report that the user is at a particular place, ensuring that even the most explorative users can input and share their favorite new places.
addPlace()
The Places API will also be available cross-platform: in a few days, you’ll be able to apply for the Places API for iOS beta program to ensure a great and consistent user experience across mobile platforms.
In Google Play services 7.0, the previous Fitness.API that you passed into your GoogleApiClient has now been replaced with a number of APIs, matching the high level set of Google Fit Android APIs:
Fitness.API
SENSORS_API
RECORDING_API
HISTORY_API
SESSIONS_API
BLE_API
CONFIG_API
This change significantly reduces the memory requirement for Google Fit enabled apps running in the background. Like always, apps built on previous versions of Google Play services will continue to work, but we strongly suggest you rebuild your Google Fit enabled apps to take advantage of this change.
Having all the data can be an empowering part of making meaningful changes and Google Fit is augmenting their existing data types with the addition of body fat percentage and sleep data.
Announced at Game Developers Conference (GDC), we’re offering new tools to supercharge your games on Google Play. Included in Google Play services 7.0 is the Nearby Connections API, allowing games to seamlessly connect smartphones and tablets as second-screen controls to the game running on your TV.
App Indexing lets Google index apps just like websites, enabling Google search results to deep-link directly into your native app. We've simplified the App Indexing API to make this integration even easier for you by combining the existing view()/viewEnd() and action()/end() flows into a single start() and end() API.
view()/viewEnd()
action()/end()
start()
end()
GoogleApiClient serves as the common entry point for accessing Google APIs. For this release, we’ve made retrieval of Google OAuth 2.0 tokens part of GoogleApiClient, making it much easier to request server auth codes to access Google APIs.
You can get started developing today by downloading the Google Play services SDK from the Android SDK Manager.
To learn more about Google Play services and the APIs available to you through it, visit the Google Services section on the Android Developer site.
Google Play services 6.1 is now rolled out to devices worldwide, bringing you the newest features from Google to help you optimize your apps. You can get started developing today by downloading the Google Play services SDK from the Android SDK Manager.
Google Play services 6.1 adds Enhanced Ecommerce analytics support from Google Tag Manager and offers new improvements to the Google Drive Android API. With the latest release, we’re also including a refresh of the Google Fit developer preview, so that you can test your fitness apps on any Android device.
Launched in Google Play services 5.0, Enhanced Ecommerce is an analytics extension designed to provide richer insights into pre-purchase shopping behavior and into product performance. It’s a great way to gain visibility into the full customer journey, helping you understand how different user acquisition campaigns are performing at a granular level. By including support for Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Tag Manager with the latest release of Google Play services, we are supercharging your ability to regularly update and manage tags on mobile apps more easily, so that you can consistently measure product impressions, shopping funnel events, and more.
To make it easier to use Drive, we added enhancements to the Google Drive Android API. With the new Completion Events feature, you can see when actions are committed to the server and improve the response time to conflicts. Material design elements have been incorporated into the File Picker UI, along with the addition of Recent and Starred views. A new setParents() method enables you to organize files and folders, while the previous Contents class has been replaced with a simpler DriveContents class.
Learn more about how to use these new features in this DevBytes video.
Initially introduced in August, the Google Fit Developer Preview has been refreshed to enable you to test your new fitness apps on any Android device. We expect to make additional changes to the APIs, so please check back with us on new developments.
To get started developing, download the latest Google Play services SDK from the Android SDK Manager. For details on the new APIs, take a look at the New Features documentation. For setup information, see Set Up Google Play Services SDK.
To learn more about Google Play services and the APIs available to you through it, visit the Google Services section on the Android Developers site.
We hope you enjoy this release of Google Play services!
