Hello Places API for Android and iOS!

Posted by Jen Kovnats Harrington, Product Manager, Google Maps APIs

Originally posted to Google Geo Developers blog

People don’t think of their location in terms of coordinates on a map. They want context on what shops or restaurants they’re at, and what’s around them. To help your apps speak your users’ language, we’re launching the Places API for Android, as well as opening a beta program for the Places API for iOS.

The Places API web service and JavaScript library have been available for some time. By providing native support for Android and iOS devices, you can optimize the mobile experience with the new APIs by taking advantage of the device’s location signals.

The Places APIs for Android and iOS bridge the gap between simple geographic locations expressed as latitude and longitude, and how people associate location with a known place. For example, you wouldn’t tell someone you were born at 25.7918359,-80.2127959. You’d simply say, “I was born in Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, Florida.” The Places API brings the power of Google’s global places database into your app, providing more than 100 million places, like restaurants, local businesses, hotels, museums, and other attractions.

Key features include:

• Add a place picker: a drop-in UI widget that allows your users to specify a place


• Get the place where the user is right now


• Show detailed place information, including the place’s name, address, phone number, and website


• Use autocomplete to save your users time and frustration typing out place names, by automatically completing them as they type


• Make your app stand out by adding new places that are relevant to your users and seeing the places appear in Google's Places database


• Improve the map around you by reporting the presence of a device at a particular place.

To get started with the Places API for Android, watch this DevByte, check out the developer documentation, and play with the demos. To apply for the Places API for iOS beta program, go here.

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Google Play services 7.0 - Places Everyone!

Posted by Ian Lake, Developer Advocate

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.

Location Settings Dialog

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.

Places API

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.

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.

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.

Google Fit

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.

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:

• SENSORS_API to access raw sensor data via SensorsApi


• RECORDING_API to record data via RecordingApi


• HISTORY_API for inserting, deleting, or reading data via HistoryApi


• SESSIONS_API for managing sessions via SessionsApi


• BLE_API to interact with Bluetooth Low Energy devices via BleApi


• CONFIG_API to access custom data types and settings for Google Fit via ConfigApi

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.

Google Play Games

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

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.

Changes to GoogleApiClient

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.

SDK Now Available!

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.

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New Code Samples for Lollipop

Posted by Trevor Johns, Developer Programs Engineer

With the launch of Android 5.0 Lollipop, we’ve added more than 20 new code samples demonstrating how to implement some of the great new features of this release. To access the code samples, you can easily import them in Android Studio 1.0 using the new Samples Wizard.

Go to File > Import Sample in order to browse the available samples, which include a description and preview for each. Once you’ve made your selection, select “Next” and a new project will be automatically created for you. Run the project on an emulator or device, and feel free to experiment with the code.

Samples Wizard in Android Studio 1.0

Newly imported sample project in Android Studio

Alternatively, you can browse through them via the Samples browser on the developer site. Each sample has an Overview description, Project page to browse app file structure, and Download link for obtaining a ZIP file of the sample. As a third option, code samples can also be accessed in the SDK Manager by downloading the SDK samples for Android 5.0 (API 21) and importing them as existing projects into your IDE.

Sample demonstrating transition animations

Material Design

When adopting material design, you can refer to our collection of sample code highlighting material elements:

• Floating action button


• Reveal effect


• CardView


• Drawable tinting


• Elevation


• Drag-and-drop with elevation


• View clipping


• Animation interpolators

For additional help, please refer to our design checklist, list of key APIs and widgets, and documentation guide.

To view some of these material design elements in action, check out the Google I/O app source code.

Platform

Lollipop brings the most extensive update to the Android platform yet. The Overview screen allows an app to surface multiple tasks as concurrent documents. You can include enhanced notifications with this sample code, which shows you how to use the lockscreen and heads-up notification APIs.

We also introduced a new Camera API to provide developers more advanced image capture and processing capabilities. These samples detail how to use the camera preview and take photos, how to record video, and implement a real-time high-dynamic range camera viewfinder.

Elsewhere, Project Volta encourages developers to make their apps more battery-efficient with new APIs and tools. The JobScheduler sample demonstrates how you can schedule background tasks to be completed later or under specific conditions.

For those interested in the enterprise device administration use case, there are sample apps on setting app restrictions and creating a managed profile.

Android Wear

For Android Wear, we have a speed tracker sample to show how to take advantage of GPS support on wearables. You can browse the rest of the Android Wear samples too, and here are some highlights that demonstrate the unique capabilities of wearables, such as data synchronization, notifications, and supporting round displays:

• DataLayer


• FindMyPhone


• GridViewPager


• Notifications


• RecipeAssistant


• SynchronizedNotifications


• WatchViewStub

Android TV

Extend your app for Android TV using the Leanback library described in this training guide and sample.

To try out a game that is specifically optimized for Android TV, download Pie Noon from Google Play. It’s an open-source game developed in-house at Google that supports multiple players using Bluetooth controllers or touch controls on mobile devices.

Android Auto

For the use cases highlighted in the Introduction to Android Auto DevByte, we have two code samples. The Media Browser sample (DevByte) demonstrates how easy it is to make an audio app compatible with Android Auto by using the new Lollipop media APIs, while the Messaging sample (DevByte) demonstrates how to implement notifications that support replies using speech recognition.

Google Play services

Since we’ve discussed sample resources for the Android platform and form factors, we also want to mention that there are existing samples for Google Play services. With Google Play services, your app can take advantage of the latest Google-powered APIs such as Maps, Google Fit, Google Cast, and more. Access samples in the Google Play services SDK or visit the individual pages for each API on the developer site. For game developers, you can reference the Google Play Games services samples for how to add achievements, leaderboards, and multiplayer support to your game.

Check out a sample today to help you with your development!

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Google Play services and DEX method limits

Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

A constraint for some Android apps is the total number of methods that the underlying compiled .dex file can support. It’s limited by 16 bits, or 65,536 values.

When you include third-party libraries in your application, you will have all of their methods in your .dex file. Larger APIs, such as those included in Google Play services, will then begin eating into the limit very quickly.

You can learn more about this, and ways that you can work around it with the Android Studio 1.0 build system here.

Additionally, with Google Play services version 6.5 or later, it is possible for you to include Google Play services in your application using a number of smaller client libraries, so that only Google Play services APIs you use will get compiled into your .dex file, and therefore their methods won't count towards your method limit.

Prior to version 6.5, you would typically have a line like this in your build.gradle file:

compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services:6.5.87'

Starting with version 6.5, of Google Play services, you’ll be able to pick from a number of individual APIs, and you can see which ones have their own include files in the documentation. For example, if all you want to use is Maps, you would instead have:

compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-maps:6.5.87'

Note that this will transitively include the ‘base’ libraries, which are used across all APIs. You can include them independently with the following line:

compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-base:6.5.87'

The complete list of API names is below. More details can be found on the Android Developer site.

com.google.android.gms:play-services-base:6.5.87

com.google.android.gms:play-services-ads:6.5.87

com.google.android.gms:play-services-appindexing:6.5.87

com.google.android.gms:play-services-maps:6.5.87

com.google.android.gms:play-services-location:6.5.87

com.google.android.gms:play-services-fitness:6.5.87

com.google.android.gms:play-services-panorama:6.5.87

com.google.android.gms:play-services-drive:6.5.87

com.google.android.gms:play-services-games:6.5.87

com.google.android.gms:play-services-wallet:6.5.87

com.google.android.gms:play-services-identity:6.5.87

com.google.android.gms:play-services-cast:6.5.87

com.google.android.gms:play-services-plus:6.5.87

com.google.android.gms:play-services-appstate:6.5.87

com.google.android.gms:play-services-wearable:6.5.87

com.google.android.gms:play-services-all-wear:6.5.87


Note: At the time of writing, the correct version to use is 6.5.87. As this is a very granular number, it will get updated quite quickly, so be sure the check the latest version when you are coding. Often people will use a ‘+’ to denote versions, such as 6.5.+ to use the latest 6.5 build. However, it’s typically discouraged to use a ‘+’ as it can lead to inconsistencies.

Also, there are some changes to the names of the libraries that will impact you if you build applications for Android Wear. Previously you may have used play-services-wearable to include the entire Google Play services library for your wearable, and if you want to continue doing so, you should now use play-services-all-wear instead. You can continue to use play-services-wearable which will instead give you just the Wearable Data Layer API (see here). Should you do this, and you want to continue working with other Google Play services features, such as the Location APIs on your wearable, you would need to add play-services-location.

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Google Play services 6.5

Posted by Ian Lake, Developer Advocate

To offer more seamless integration of Google products within your app, we've now rolled out Google Play services 6.5.

Google Play services 6.5 includes new features in Google Maps, Google Drive and Google Wallet as well as the recently launched Google Fit API. We are also providing developers with more granular control over which Google Play services APIs your app depends on to help you maintain a lean app.

Google Maps

We’re making it easier to get directions to places from your app! The Google Maps Android API now offers a map toolbar to let users open Google Maps and immediately get directions and turn by turn navigation to the selected marker. This map toolbar will show by default when you compile against Google Play services 6.5.

In addition, there is also a new ‘lite mode’ map option, ideal for situations where you want to provide a number of smaller maps, or a map that is so small that meaningful interaction is impractical, such as a thumbnail in a list. A lite mode map is a bitmap image of a map at a specified location and zoom level.

In lite mode, markers and shapes are drawn client-side on top of the static image, so you still have full control over them. Lite mode supports all of the map types, the My Location layer, and a subset of the functionality of a fully-interactive map. Users can tap on the map to launch Google Maps when they need more details.

The Google Maps Android API also exposes a new getMapAsync(OnMapReadyCallback) method to MapFragment and MapView which will notify you exactly when the map is ready. This serves as a replacement for the now deprecated getMap() method.

We’re also exposing the Google Maps for Android app intents available to your apps including displaying the map, searching, starting turn by turn navigation, and opening Street View so you can build upon the familiar and powerful maps already available on the device.

Drive

You can now add both public and application private custom file properties to a Drive file which can be used to build very efficient search queries and allow apps to save information which is guaranteed to persist across editing by other apps.

We’ve also made it even easier to make syncing your files to Drive both user and battery friendly with the ability to control when files are uploaded by network type or charging status and cancel pending uploads.

Google Wallet

In addition to the existing ‘Buy with Google’ button available to quickly purchase goods & services using Google Wallet, this release adds a ‘Donate with Google’ button for providing the same ease of use in collecting donations.

Google Fit

The Google Fit SDK was recently officially released as part of Google Play services and can be used to super-charge your fitness apps with a simple API for working with sensors, recording activity data, and reading the user’s aggregated fitness data.

In this release, we’ve made it easier for developers to add activity segments (predefined time periods of running, walking, cycling, etc) when inserting sessions, making it easy to support pauses or multiple activity type workouts. We’ll also be adding additional samples to help kick-start your Google Fit integration.

Granular Dependency Management

As we’ve continued to add more APIs across the wide range of Google services, it can be hard to maintain a lean app, particularly if you're only using a portion of the available APIs. Now with Google Play services 6.5, you’ll be able to depend only on a minimal common library and the exact APIs your app needs. This makes it very lightweight to get started with Google Play services.

SDK Now Available

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 Play Services section on the Android Developer site.

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Tips for integrating with Google Accounts on Android

By Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

Happy Tuesday! We've had a few questions come in recently regarding Google Accounts on Android, so we've put this post together to show you some of our best practices. The tips today will focus on Android-based authentication, which is easily achieved through the integration of Google Play services. Let's get started.

Unique Identifiers

A common confusion happens when developers use the account name (a.k.a. email address) as the primary key to a Google Account. For instance, when using GoogleApiClient to sign in a user, a developer might use the following code inside of the onConnected callback for a registered GoogleApiClient.ConnectedCallbacks listener:

[Error prone pseudocode]

String accountName = Plus.AccountApi.getAccountName(mGoogleApiClient);
// createLocalAccount() is specific to the app's local storage strategy.
createLocalAccount(accountName);

While it is OK to store the email address for display or caching purposes, it is possible for users to change the primary email address on a Google Account. This can happen with various types of accounts, but these changes happen most often with Google Apps For Work accounts.

So what's a developer to do? Use the Google Account ID (as opposed to the Account name) to key any data for your app that is associated to a Google Account. For most apps, this simply means storing the Account ID and comparing the value each time the onConnected callback is invoked to ensure the data locally matches the currently logged in user. The API provides methods that allow you to get the Account ID from the Account Name. Here is an example snippet you might use:

[Google Play Services 6.1+]

String accountName = Plus.AccountApi.getAccountName(mGoogleApiClient);
String accountID = GoogleAuthUtil.getAccountId(accountName);
createLocalAccount(accountID);

[Earlier Versions of Google Play Services (please upgrade your client)]

Person currentUser = Plus.PeopleApi.getCurrentPerson(mGoogleApiClient);
String accountID = currentUser.getID();
createLocalAccount(accountID);

This will key the local data against a Google Account ID, which is unique and stable for the user even after changing an email address.

So, in the above scenario, if your data was keyed on an ID, you wouldn’t have to worry if your users change their email address. When they sign back in, they’ll still get the same ID, and you won’t need to do anything with your data.

Multiple Accounts

If your app supports multiple account connections simultaneously (like the Gmail user interface shown below), you are calling setAccountName on the GoogleApiClient.Builder when constructing GoogleApiClients. This requires you to store the account name as well as the Google Account ID within your app. However, the account name you’ve stored will be different if the user changes their primary email address. The easiest way to deal with this is to prompt the user to re-login. Then, update the account name when onConnected is called after login. Any time a login occurs you, can use code such as this to compare Account IDs and update the email address stored locally for the Account ID.

[Google Play Services 6.1+]

String accountName = Plus.AccountApi.getAccountName(mGoogleApiClient);
String accountID = GoogleAuthUtil.getAccountId(accountName);
// isExistingLocalAccount(), createLocalAccount(), 
// getLocalDataAccountName(), and updateLocalAccountName() 
// are all specific to the app's local storage strategy.
boolean existingLocalAccountData = isExistingLocalAccount(accountID);
if (!existingLocalAccountData) {
    // New Login.
    createLocalAccount(accountID, accountName);
} else {
    // Existing local data for this Google Account.
    String cachedAccountName = getLocalDataAccountName(accountID);    
    if (!cachedAccountName.equals(accountName)) {
        updateLocalAccountName(accountID, accountName);
    }
}

This scenario reinforces the importance of using the Account ID to store data all data in your app.

Online data

The same best practices above apply to storing data for Google Accounts in web servers for your app. If you are storing data on your servers in this manner and treating the email address as the primary key:

ID [Primary Key]	Field 1	Field 2	Field 3
user1@gmail.com	Value 1	Value 2	Value 3

You need to migrate to this model where the primary key is the Google Account ID.:

ID [Primary Key]	Email	Field 1	Field 2	Field 3
108759069548186989918	user1@gmail.com	Value 1	Value 2	Value 3

If you don't make Google API calls from your web server, you might be able to depend on the Android application to notify your web server of changes to the primary email address when implementing the updateLocalAccountName method referenced in the multiple accounts sample code above. If you make Google API calls from your web server, you likely implemented it using the Cross-client authentication and can detect changes via the OAuth2 client libraries or REST endpoints on your server as well.

Conclusion

When using Google Account authentication for your app, it’s definitely a best practice to use the account ID, as opposed to the account name to distinguish data for the user. In this post, we saw three scenarios where you may need to make changes to make your apps more robust. With the growing adoption of Google for Work, users who are changing their email address, but keeping the same account ID, may occur more frequently, so we encourage all developers to make plans to update their code as soon as possible.

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Google Play Services 6.1

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.

Analytics

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.

Drive

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.

Google Fit

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.

Get Started

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!

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New in Android: L Developer Preview and Google Play Services 5.0

By Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

Earlier today, at Google I/O, we showed a number of projects we’ve been working on to the thousands of developers in the audience and the millions more tuning in on the livestream. These projects extend Android to the TV (Android TV), to the car (Android Auto) and to wearables (Android Wear), among others.

At Google, our focus is providing a seamless experience for users across all of the screens in their lives. An important component to that is making sure that you as developers have all of the tools necessary to easily deploy your apps across to those screens. Increasingly, Android is becoming the fabric that weaves these experiences together, which is why you’ll be excited about a number of things we unveiled today.

Android L Developer Preview

For the first time since we launched Android, we’re giving you early access to a development version of an upcoming release. The L Developer Preview, available starting tomorrow, lets you explore many of the new features and capabilities of the next version of Android, and offers everything you need to get started developing and testing on the new platform. This is important because the platform is evolving in a significant way — not only for mobile but also moving beyond phones and tablets. Here are a few of the highlights for developers:

• Material design for the multiscreen world — We’ve been working on a new design language at Google that takes a comprehensive approach to visual, motion, and interaction design across a number of platforms and form factors. Material design is a new aesthetic for designing apps in today’s multi-device world. The L Developer Preview brings material design to Android, with a full set of tools for your apps. The system is incredibly flexible, allowing your app to express its individual character and brand with bold colors and a variety of responsive UI patterns and themeable elements.


• Enhanced notifications — New lockscreen notifications let you surface content, updates, and actions to users at a glance, without unlocking. Visibility controls let you manage the types of information shown on the lockscreen. Heads-up notifications display content and actions in a small floating window that’s managed by the system, no matter which app is in the foreground. Notifications are material themed and you can express your brand through accent colors and more.


• Document-centric Recents — Now you can organize your app by tasks and present these concurrently as individual “documents” in the Recents screen. Users can flip through Recents to find the specific task they want and then jump deep into your app with a single tap.


• Project Volta — New tools and APIs help your app run efficiently and conserve power. Battery Historian is a new tool that lets you visualize power events over time and understand how your app is using battery. A job scheduler API lets you set the conditions under which your background tasks and other jobs should run, such as when the device is idle or connected to an unmetered to a charger, to minimize battery impact.


• BLE Peripheral Mode — Android devices can now function in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) peripheral mode. Apps can use this capability to broadcast their presence to nearby devices — for example, you can now build apps that let a device to function as a pedometer or health monitor and transmit data to another BLE device.


• Multi-networking — Apps can work with the system to dynamically scan for available networks with specific capabilities and then automatically connect. This is useful when you want to manage handoffs or connect to a specialized network, such as a carrier-billing network.


• Advanced camera capabilities — A new camera API gives you new capabilities for image capture and processing. On supported devices, your app can capture uncompressed YUV capture at full 8 megapixel resolution at 30 FPS. The API also lets you capture raw sensor data and control parameters such as exposure time, ISO sensitivity, and frame duration, on a per-frame basis.


• New features for game developers — Support for OpenGL ES 3.1, gives you capabilities such as compute shaders, stencil textures, and texture gather for your games. Android Extension Pack (AEP) is a new set of extensions to OpenGL ES that bring desktop-class graphics to Android. Games will be able to take advantage of tessellation and geometry shaders, and use ASTC texture compression across multiple GPU techonolgies.


• Android Runtime (ART) — The L Developer Preview introduces the Android Runtime (ART) as the system default. ART offers ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation, more efficient garbage collection, and improved development and debugging features. In many cases it improves performance of the device with no action required by the developer.


• 64-bit support — The L Developer Preview adds support for 64-bit ABIs, for additional address space and improved performance with certain compute workloads. Apps written in the Java language can run immediately on 64-bit architectures with no modifications required. To support apps using native code, we’re also releasing an updated NDK that includes 64-bit support.

Watch for more details coming out tomorrow (26 June) on what’s in the L Developer Preview and how to get it.

Google Play Services 5.0

Along with the L Developer Preview, we also announced a new version of Google Play services that brings new capabilities and the latest optimizations to devices across the Android ecosystem. Google Play services ensures that you can build on the latest features from Google for your users, with the confidence that those services will work properly everywhere. The latest version has begun rolling out and here are some of the highlights:

• Services for Android wearables — Your apps can more easily communicate and sync with code running on Android wearables through an automatically synchronized, persistent data store and a reliable messaging interface.


• Play Games services — Build a great gaming experience with Quests, which allow event-based challenges for players to complete for rewards, Saved Games (a snapshot API allow synchronization of game data along with a cover-image and description), and Game Profile (providing experience points for players).


• App Indexing API — Surface deep content in your native mobile applications on Google search and drive additional user engagement.


• Google Cast — Use media tracks to enable closed-caption support for Chromecast.


• Drive — Sort query results, create offline folders, and select any mime type in the file picker by default.


• Wallet — Build a "Save to Wallet" button for offers directly into your app; use geo-fenced in-store notifications to prompt the user to show and scan digital cards. Split tender allows payment to be split between Wallet Balance and a credit/debit card in Google Wallet.


• Analytics — Get insights into the full user journey and understand how different user acquisition campaigns are performing with Enhanced Ecommerce, letting you measure product impressions, product clicks, and more.


• Mobile Ads — Use improved in-app purchase ads and integrations for the Play store in-app purchase API client.


• Dynamic Security Provider — Offers an alternative to the platform's secure networking APIs that can be updated more frequently, for faster delivery of security patches.

We expect the rollout of Google Play services 5.0 to take several days, after which time you’ll be able to get started developing with these new APIs.

Join us at the Google I/O sessions

If you’d like to learn more, join us for sessions on Android development, material design, game development, and more. You’ll find the full session list on the Google I/O 2014 site, and you can filter the schedule to find livestreamed sessions of interest.

Google I/O 2014
I/O Livestreams
I/O Bytes Videos
+Android Developers

L Developer Preview
Material Design
Android Wear
Android TV
Android Auto

Explore the conference with the Google I/O 2014 Android app:

Games at Google I/O '14: Everyone's Playing Games

By Greg Hartrell, Product Manager, Google Play games

With Google I/O ‘14 here, we see Android and Google Play as a huge opportunity for game developers: 3 in 4 Android users are playing games, and with over one billion active Android users around the world, games are reaching and delighting almost everyone.

At Google, we see a great future where mobile and cloud services bring games to all the screens in your life and connect you with others. Today we announced a number of games related launches and upcoming technologies across Google Play Games, the Android platform and its new form factors.

Google Play Games

At last year’s Google I/O, we announced Google Play Games -- Google’s online game platform, with services and user experiences designed to bring players together and take Android and mobile games to the next level.

Google Play Games has grown at tremendous speed, activating 100 million users in the past 6 months. It’s the fastest growing mobile game network, and with such an incredible response, we announced more awesome enhancements to Google Play Games today.

Game Profile

The Play Games app now gives players a Game Profile, where they earn points and vanity titles from unlocking achievements. Players can also compare their profile with friends. Developers can benefit from this meta-game by continuing to design great achievements that reward players for exploring all the content and depth of their game.

Quests and Saved Games

Two new game services will launch with the next update for Google Play Services on Android, and through the Play Games iOS SDK:

• Quests is a service that enables developers to create online, time-based goals in their games without having to launch an update each time. Now developers can easily run weekend or daily challenges for their player community, and reward them in unique ways.


• Saved Games is a service that stores a player’s game progress across many screens, along with a cover image, description and total time played. Players never have to play level 1 again by having their progress stored with Google, and cover images and descriptions are used in Play Games experiences to indicate where they left off and attract them to launch their favorite game again.

We have many great partners who have started integrating Quests and Saved Games, here are just a few current or upcoming games.

More tools for game developers

Other developer tools are now available for Play Games, including:

• Play Games Statistics — Play Games adopters get easy effort game analytics through the Google Play Developer console today, including visualization of Player & Engagement statistics. What’s new is aggregated player demographic information for signed-in users, so you can understand the distribution of your player’s ages, genders and countries.


• Play Games C++ SDK is updated with more cross-platform support for the new services and experiences we announced. Cocos2D-x, a popular game engine, is an early adopter of the Play Games C++ SDK bringing the power of Play Games to their developers.

Game enhancements for the Android Platform

With the announcement of the developer preview of the Android L-release, there are some new platform capabilities that will make Android an even more compelling platform for game development.

• Support for OpenGL ES 3.1 in the L Developer Preview — Introducing powerful features like compute shaders, stencil textures, and texture gather, enables more interesting physics or pixel effects on mobile devices. Additional API and shading language improvements improve usability and reduce overhead.


• Android Extension Pack (AEP) in the L Developer Preview — a new set of extensions to OpenGL ES that bring desktop class graphics to Android. Games will be able to take advantage of tessellation and geometry shaders, and use ASTC texture compression.
  
  

  We're pleased to be working with different GPU vendors to adopt AEP including Nvidia, ARM, Qualcomm, and Imagination Technologies.




• Google Gamepad standards — We recently published a standard for gamepad input for OEMs and partners who create and enable these awesome input devices on Android. The standard makes this input mechanism compatible across Google platforms on Android, Chrome and Chromebooks. You can learn more here: Supporting Game Controllers.

Play Games on Android TV

And Google's game network is a part of the Android TV announcement — so think of Android on a TV, with a rich interface on a large screen, and fun games in your living room! Players will be able to earn achievements, climb leaderboards and play online with friends from an Android TV. This is only available through the developer preview, so game developers seeking a hardware development kit (the ADT-1) can make a request at http://developer.android.com/tv.

Updates rolling out soon

That’s a lot of games announcements! Our Play Games changes will roll out over the next few weeks with the update of Google Play Services and the Play Games App, and Android L-release changes are part of the announced developer preview. This gets us a big step closer to a world where Android and our cloud services enable games to reach all the screens in your life and connect you with others.

Greg Hartrell is the lead product manager for Google Play Games: Google's game platform that helps developers reach and unite millions of players. Before joining Google, he was VP of Product Development at Capcom/Beeline, and prior to that, led product development for 8 years at Microsoft for Xbox Live/360 and other consumer and enterprise product lines. In his spare time, he enjoys flying birds through plumbing structures, boss battles and pulling rare objects out of mystery boxes.

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Building Successful Global App Businesses

By: Purnima Kochikar, Director, Google Play Apps & Games

With over 1 billion active Android users, an increasing number of developers like you are building successful global businesses on Google Play. Since the last Google I/O, we’ve also paid out more than $5 billion to developers.

This week at Google I/O, we announced new ways to help you build a successful business. These solutions work together at scale to help you find more users, understand and engage them, and effectively convert your active users into buyers.

Build an engaging app

Last year, Google Play became an even better place to try new ideas. Since May 2013, Google Play offers Alpha and Beta Testing so that you can engage users early to get feedback on your new app. Feedback provided by users is private, allowing you to fix issues before publicly launching the app, and without impacting your public ratings and reviews. Over 80,000 apps on Google Play are actively using beta testing. You can also ensure new versions get a positive response by updating through staged rollouts.

Scale operations

As your app business grows, you dedicate more time to release management. Today we announced the Google Play Developer Publishing API to help you scale your release operations. The new API will let you upload APKs, manage your in-app products and localized store listings. You will be able to integrate publishing operations with your release processes and toolchain through a RESTful API. With the Google Play Developer Publishing API you’ll spend less time managing your releases and more time managing your business. This API is currently in closed beta and we look forward to making it available to all developers.

Actionable insights

The Google Play Developer Console now offers more actionable insights into your app’s performance by sending you email notifications for Alerts and providing Optimization Tips. We’re also offering new revenue metrics including number of buyers and average revenue per paying user. You’ll also be able to export user reviews for further analysis. Click on Announcements in the Developer Console for a list of new features.

For game developers, we recently launched enhanced Play Games statistics on the Google Play Developer Console. You get a daily dashboard that visualizes player and engagement statistics for signed in users, including daily active users, retention analysis, and achievement and leaderboard performance.

Enhance discovery and engagement

With AdWords, we're building a robust platform to help you promote your app and drive re-engagement. This week we are launching Installed App Category Targeting, a new way to promote your app to new users. It helps you reach potential customers across the AdMob network who have already installed apps from related categories on Google Play and other app stores. For example, an action-oriented game developer may wish to reach users who have previously installed apps from the category Action & Adventure Games.

Ads can also remind users about the apps they already have. Through Google mobile display and search ads deep linking, you can re-engage users who have already installed your Android app by taking them directly to specific pages in the app. Let’s say someone has the Hotel Tonight app installed on their phone. If they search Google for “hotels in San Francisco," they'll see an ad that will open Hotel Tonight app and take them directly to a list of San Francisco hotels.

This deep-linking is also available through search for all apps that implement app indexing. If a user with the Walmart Android app searches for “Chromecast where to buy”, they’ll go directly to the Chromecast page in the Walmart app. The new App Indexing API is now open to all Android developers, globally. Get started now.

New services for game developers

For game developers using Play Games, we announced a new Game Profile that is automatically customized based on the gameplay and achievements earned in those games. Since its launch last year, users have loved saving their game progress in the cloud. We’re now evolving this feature to Saved Games, where users can save up to 3 “bookmarks” of their progress in the Play Games app, complete with images and descriptions. Finally, we announced a new service called Quests — it you run online, time-based goals in your game; for example, players can collect bunch of in-game items on a specific day, and the quests services coordinates with your game to know who completed the goal. These APIs run events for your players, and reward them, without the need to update your game.

New monetization tools

Today, we announced that users who have set up Direct Carrier Billing on their smartphone can also make purchases on Google Play from their tablet, charging to the same mobile phone bill. In addition to our recent launch of payments through PayPal, these new user payment options expand monetization opportunities for your apps.

As announced earlier this year, Google Analytics is now directly available in the AdMob interface, giving you powerful segmentation tools to determine the best monetization strategy for each user. For example, you might want to display in-app purchase ads to users most interested in buying, while showing regular ads to those less likely to buy right now. Once you’ve segmented your audience in this way, you can use AdMob to build interstitial ads that promote in-app purchase items to users at a point in your app that’s useful to them. This creates a more customized experience for users, can help prolong engagement and grow in-app purchase revenue. Learn more.

Join us

If you're at Google I/O 2014, please join us at our breakout sessions today and tomorrow, where we'll be talking about these features in much more detail. (Add us to your calendar!) And if you can't make I/O, you can always join us on the livestream or watch the videos online later.

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Google Play services 4.4

A new release of Google Play services has now been rolled out to the world, and as usual we have a number of features that can make your apps better than before. This release includes a major enhancement to Maps with the introduction of Street View, as well as new features in Location, Games Services, Mobile Ads, and Wallet API.



Here are the highlights of Google Play services release 4.4:

Google Maps Android API

Starting with a much anticipated announcement for the Google Maps Android API: Introducing Street View. You can now embed Street View imagery into an activity enabling your users to explore the world through panoramic 360-degree views. Programmatically control the zoom and orientation (tilt and bearing) of the Street View camera, and animate the camera movements over a given duration. Here is an example of what you can do with the API, where the user navigates forward one step:

We've also added more features to the Indoor Maps feature of the API. You can turn the default floor picker off - useful if you want to build your own. You can also detect when a new building comes into focus, and find the currently-active building and floor. Great if you want to show custom markup for the active level, for example.

Activity Recognition

And while we are on the topic of maps, let’s turn to some news in the Location API. For those of you that have used this API, you may have seen the ability already there to detect if the device is in a vehicle, on a bicycle, on foot, still, or tilting.



In this release, two new activity detectors have been added: Running, and Walking. So a great opportunity to expand your app to be even more responsive to your users. And for you that have not worked with this capability earlier, we hardly need to tell the cool things you can do with it. Just imagine combining this capability with features in Maps, Games Services, and other parts of Location...

Games Services Update

In the 4.3 release we introduced Game Gifts, which allows you to request gifts or wishes. And although there are no external API changes this time, the default requests sending UI has been extended to now allow the user to select multiple Game Gifts recipients. For your games this means more collaboration and social engagement between your players.

Mobile Ads

For Mobile Ads, we’ve added new APIs for publishers to display in-app promo ads, which enables users to purchase advertised items directly. We’re offering app developers control of targeting specific user segments with ads, for example offering high-value users an ad for product A, or new users with an ad for product B, etc.



With these extensions, users can conveniently purchase in-app items that interest them, advertisers can reach consumers, and your app connects the dots; a win-win-win in other words.

Wallet Fragments

For the Instant Buy API, we’ve now reduced the work involved to place a Buy With Google button in an app. The WalletFragment API introduced in this release makes it extremely easy to integrate Google Wallet Instant Buy with an existing app. Just configure these fragments and add them to your app.

And that’s another release of Google Play services. The updated Google Play services SDK is now available through the Android SDK manager. Coming up in June is Google I/O, no need to say more…

For the release video, please see:

DevBytes: Google Play services 4.4



For details on the APIs, please see:

New Features in Google Play services 4.4

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