The latest Android and Google Play news for app and game developers.
On the Android team, we view each dessert release as an opportunity to make Android better for our users and our ecosystem partners. One thing we've consistently heard from our device-maker partners is that updating existing devices to a new version of Android is incredibly time consuming and costly.
With Android O, we've been working very closely with device makers and silicon manufacturers to take steps toward solving this problem, and we're excited to give you a sneak peek at Project Treble, the biggest change to the low-level system architecture of Android to date.
First, it's helpful to understand the "life of an Android release". There are several steps a new Android release goes through before getting into the hands of users:
With Project Treble, we're re-architecting Android to make it easier, faster and less costly for manufacturers to update devices to a new version of Android.
Android was unveiled in 2007 as a free, open-source mobile operating system. From the beginning, we intended Android to be scaled across a variety of manufacturers. We knew that consistency of API was important for developers, so we created a compatibility program for the Developer API specified by the Compatibility Definition Document (CDD) and its associated Compatibility Test Suite (CTS), now comprising over a million tests.
The result today is that app developers can write a single app that works across over a billion devices running on different hardware from different manufacturers.
Project Treble aims to do what CTS did for apps, for the Android OS framework. The core concept is to separate the vendor implementation — the device-specific, lower-level software written in large part by the silicon manufacturers — from the Android OS Framework.
This is achieved by the introduction of a new vendor interface between the Android OS framework and the vendor implementation. The new vendor interface is validated by a Vendor Test Suite (VTS), analogous to the CTS, to ensure forward compatibility of the vendor implementation.
Today, with no formal vendor interface, a lot of code across Android needs to be updated when a device moves to a newer version of Android:
With a stable vendor interface providing access to the hardware-specific parts of Android, device makers can choose to deliver a new Android release to consumers by just updating the Android OS framework without any additional work required from the silicon manufacturers:
Project Treble will be coming to all new devices launched with Android O and beyond. In fact, the new Project Treble architecture is already running on the Developer Preview of O for Pixel phones.
In addition to the architectural changes, we're working with our silicon and device partners to take their code changes, such as features for a carrier network in a specific country, and move them into the common Android Open Source Project (AOSP) codebase. For example, Sony and Qualcomm contributed dozens of features and hundreds of bugfixes to Android O so they no longer need to rework these patches with each new release of Android.
We plan to publish the full documentation for Project Treble on source.android.com with the launch of O later this summer.
Posted by Alex Ames, Fun Propulsion Labs*
Originally posted to the Google Developers blog
At Fun Propulsion Labs we spend some of our time building sample games to help demonstrate how to make easy-to-build, performant, cross-platform games. With the growth of Google Cardboard, we got to work and over many long evenings, feeding our animal hunger on sushi, we came up with Zooshi. Zooshi is an open source, cross-platform game written in C++ which supports:
Zooshi serves as a demonstration of how to build Android games using a suite of newly released and updated open source game technologies from Google:
As in our previous release, Pie Noon, we also made extensive use of Flatbuffers, Mathfu, fplutil, and WebP.
You can download the game in the Play Store and the latest open source release from our GitHub page. We invite you to learn from the code to see how you can apply these libraries and utilities in your own Android games. Take advantage of our discussion list if you have any questions, and don’t forget to toss some sushi around while you’re at it!
* Fun Propulsion Labs is a team within Google that's dedicated to advancing gaming on Android and other platforms.
We’re pleased to announce Pie Noon, a simple game created to demonstrate multi-player support on the Nexus Player, an Android TV device. Pie Noon is an open source, cross-platform game written in C++ which supports:
Pie Noon serves as a demonstration of how to use the SDL library in Android games as well as Google technologies like Flatbuffers, Mathfu, fplutil, and WebP.
You can download the game in the Play Store and the latest open source release from our GitHub page. We invite you to learn from the code to see how you can implement these libraries and utilities in your own Android games. Take advantage of our discussion list if you have any questions, and don’t forget to throw a few pies while you’re at it!
By Bruno Oliveira, Tech Lead of the I/O app project
The source code for the 2014 version of the Google I/O app is now available. Since its first release on Google Play a few weeks before the conference, the I/O app was downloaded by hundreds of thousands of people, including on-site attendees, I/O Extended event participants and users tuning in from home. If one of the goals of the app is to be useful to conference attendees, the other primary goal is to serve as a practical example of best practices for Android app design and development.
In addition to showing how to implement a wide variety of features that are useful for most Android apps, such as Fragments, Loaders, Services, Broadcast Receivers, alarms, notifications, SQLite databases, Content Providers, Action Bar and the Navigation Drawer, the I/O app source code also shows how to integrate with several Google products and services, from the Google Drive API to Google Cloud Messaging. It uses the material design approach, the Android L Preview APIs and full Android Wear integration with a packaged wearable app for sending session feedback.
To simplify the process of reusing and customizing the source code to build apps for other conferences, we rewrote the entire sync adapter to work with plain JSON files instead of requiring a server with a specific API. These files can be hosted on any web server of the developer's choice, and their format is fully documented.
Storing and syncing the user's data (that is, the personalized schedule) is crucial part of the app. The source code shows how user data can be stored in the Application Data folder of the user's own Google Drive account and kept in sync across multiple devices, and how to use Google Cloud Messaging to trigger syncs when necessary to ensure the data is always fresh.
The project includes the source code to the App Engine app that can be reused to send GCM messages to devices to trigger syncs, as well as a module (called Updater) that can be adapted to read conference data from other backends to produce the JSON files that are consumed by the I/O app.
We are excited to share this source code with the developer community today, and we hope it will serve as a learning tool, a source of reusable snippets and a useful example of Android app development in general. In the coming weeks we will post a few technical articles with more detailed information about the IOSched source code to help bring some insight into the app development process. We will continue to update the app in the coming months, and as always, your pull requests are very welcome!
Over the past year, we announced Android, released several SDKs (eventually resulting in the 1.0 SDK), gave out the first half of the $10,000,000 prize money for the Android Developer Challenge, and prepared the first Android-powered device for users. Tomorrow, the T-Mobile G1 goes on sale.
But today, we're making what might just be the most exciting announcement of all: we and our Open Handset Alliance partners have now released the source code for Android. There's a huge amount of code and content there, so head over to http://source.android.com/ for all the details.
I'd like to offer a huge thank you and congratulations to my colleagues and the Alliance partners for what I hope will be a red-letter day for the open source community, and openness in the mobile industry.
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