Android SDK Tools, Revision 20

[This post is by Xavier Ducrohet, Tech Lead for the Android developer tools]



Along with the preview of the Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) platform, we launched Android SDK Tools R20 and ADT 20.0.0. Here are a few things that we would like to highlight.

Application templates: Android ADT supports a new application templates for creating new application, blank activity, master-detail flow, and custom view. These templates support the Android style guide thus making it faster and easier to build beautiful apps. More templates will be added over time.

Tracer for GLES: With this new tool you can capture the entire sequence of OpenGL calls made by an app into a trace file on the host and replay the captured trace and display the GL state at any point in time.

Device Monitor: To help you to easily debug your apps, all the Android debugging tools like DDMS, traceview, hierarchyviewer and Tracer for GLES are now built into one single application.

Systrace: Improving app performance does not have to be a guesswork any more. Systrace for Jelly Bean and above lets you easily optimize your app. You can capture a slice of system activity plus additional information tagged from the Settings > Developer Options > Monitoring: Enable traces or with specific calls added to your application code.

To learn more on the layout editor, XML editing, build system & SDK Manager improvements, please read the ADT 20.0.0 and SDK Tools R20 release notes.



Join us today, June 28th, at the “What’s new in Android developer tools” session for some fun tool demos and a sneak-peak into what’s coming next.

Introducing Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) preview platform, and more

[This post is by Angana Ghosh, Product Manager on the Android team]

At Google I/O today we announced the latest version of the Android platform, Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean). With Jelly Bean, we’ve made the great things about Android even better with improved system performance and enhanced user features.



Improvements include a smoother and more responsive UI across the system, a home screen that automatically adapts to fit your content, a powerful predictive keyboard, richer and more interactive notifications, larger payload sizes for Android Beam sharing and much more. For a lowdown on what’s new, head over to the Jelly Bean platform highlights.



Of course, Jelly Bean wouldn’t be complete without a healthy serving of new APIs for app developers. Here are some of the new APIs that Jelly Bean introduces:

Expandable notifications: Android 4.1 brings a major update to the Android notifications framework. Apps can now display larger, richer notifications to users that can be expanded and collapsed with a pinch. Users can now take actions directly from the notification shade, and notifications support new types of content, including photos.

Android Beam: In Android 4.1, Android Beam makes it easier to share images, videos, or other payloads by leveraging Bluetooth for the data transfer.

Bi-directional text support: Android 4.1 helps you to reach more users through support for for bi-directional text in TextView and EditText elements.

Gesture mode: New APIs for accessibility services let you handle gestures and manage accessibility focus. Now you can traverse any element on the screen using gestures, accessories, you name it.

Media codec access: Provides low-level access to platform hardware and software codecs.

Wi-Fi Direct service discoverability: New API provides pre-associated service discovery letting apps get more information from nearby devices about the services they support, before they attempt to connect.

Network bandwidth management: New API provides ability to detect metered networks, including tethering to a mobile hotspot.

For a complete overview of new APIs in Jelly Bean, please read the API highlights document. Note that this is a preview of the Jelly Bean platform. While we’re still finalizing the API implementations we wanted to give developers a look at the new API to begin planning app updates. We’ll be releasing a final platform in a few weeks that you should use to build and publish applications for Android 4.1.



For Android devices with the Google Play, we launched the following at Google I/O today:

Smart app updates: For Android 2.3, Gingerbread devices and up, when there is a new version of an app in Google Play, only the parts of the app that changed are downloaded to users’ devices. On average, a smart app update is a third the size of a full apk update. This means your users save bandwidth and battery and the best part? You don’t have to do a thing. This is automatically enabled for all apps downloaded from Google Play.

App encryption: From Jelly Bean and forward, paid apps in Google Play are encrypted with a device-specific key before they are delivered and stored on the device. We know you work hard building your apps. We work hard to protect your investment.

Google Cloud Messaging for Android: This is the next version of C2DM and goes back to Froyo. Getting started is easy and has a whole bunch of new APIs than C2DM has to offer. If you sign-up for GCM, you will be able to see C2DM and GCM stats in the Android developer console. Most importantly, the service is free and there are no quotas. [Learn more.]

Starting from today, over 20 Android sessions at Google I/O will deep-dive in many of these areas. Join us in-person or follow us live.

Replying to User Reviews on Google Play

[This post is by Trevor Johns from the Android team — Tim Bray]

User reviews on Google Play are great for helping people discover quality apps and give feedback to developers and other potential app users. But what about when developers want to give feedback to their users? Sometimes a user just needs a helping hand, or perhaps a new feature has been added and the developer wants to share the good news.

That’s why we’re adding the ability for Google Play developers to respond to reviews from the Google Play Android Developer Console. Developers can gather additional information, provide guidance, and — perhaps most importantly — let users know when their feature requests have been implemented.

We’ll also notify the user who wrote the review via email that the developer has responded. Users can then contact the developer directly if additional followup is needed or update their review.

We’re releasing this feature today to those with a Top Developer badge (). And based on feedback from users and developers, we will offer it to additional Google Play developers in the future.

Conversations are meant to be two-sided, and facilitating discussion between developers and users will ultimately yield better apps, to the benefit of everyone.

Helping you build beautiful, powerful, successful apps

[This post is by Billy Rutledge, Director of Developer Relations for Android. — Tim Bray]

Just in time for Google I/O next week, the Android Developers site is stepping into a new look that is streamlined, simplified, and refocused. A developer’s tasks fall into three baskets: Designing, developing, and distributing. We're trying to make developer.android.com's organization reflect this reality, shepherding you through the app development life cycle, from start to finish.

Design

Earlier this year, we launched Android Design, an online style guide which lays out the principles, building blocks, and patterns for excellence in Android user interfaces. It seems to be working; every day, we see more and more beautiful apps arriving in Google Play. At I/O, we’ll continue to talk design, kicking off with Android Design for Success, led by Matias Duarte.

Develop

An Android app should be fast, powerful and useful. With Android Training, one of the many parts of the Develop section that we continue to build out, we lay out best practices in a variety of framework topics to help you achieve those goals. If you’re at I/O and you’re interested in Android tools, be sure to start off your show with What’s new in Android Developers’ Tools.

Distribute

The most important piece of the piece of the puzzle is about getting your app in front of millions and millions of Android users on Google Play. That’s why we added a section on distributing your app — a peek into the world of publishing and promoting your app. Chris Yerga on the Play team will be kicking off our how-to sessions on distributing your with Android apps in Google Play.

This is just a small sample of the Android sessions at Google I/O, many of which will be live-streamed so you can follow along even if you can’t make it out to San Francisco. In the meantime, we hope you find the new Android Developer site much more useful as you build great apps.

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