Thursday, 26 June 2014

Android L Developer Preview and Android Studio Beta

By Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android







At the Google I/O keynote yesterday we announced the L Developer Preview — a development version of an upcoming Android release. The Developer Preview lets you explore features and capabilities of the L release and get started developing and testing on the new platform. You can take a look at the developer features and APIs in the API Overview page.



Starting today, the L Developer Preview is available for download from the L Developer Preview site. We're also announcing that Android Studio is now in beta, and making great progress toward a full release.



Let’s take a deeper dive into what’s included in the preview and what it means for you as a developer as you prepare your apps for the next Android release.



What’s in the L Developer Preview



The L Developer Preview includes updated SDK tools, system images for testing on an emulator, and system images for testing on a Nexus 5 or Nexus 7 device.



You can download these components through the Android SDK Manager:




  • L Developer Preview SDK Tools

  • L Developer Preview Emulator System Image - 32-bit (64-bit experimental emulator image coming soon)

  • L Developer Preview Emulator System Image for Android TV (32-bit)



(Note: the full release of Android Wear is a part of Android KitKat, API Level 20. Read more about Android Wear development here.)



Today, we are also providing system image downloads for these Nexus devices to help with your testing as well:




  • Nexus 5 (GSM/LTE) “hammerhead” Device System Image

  • Nexus 7 [2013] - (Wifi) “razor” Device System Image



You can download both of these system images from the L Developer Preview site.

With the SDK Tools, and Nexus device images, you can get a head start on testing out your app on the latest Android platform months before the official launch. You can use the extra lead time to take advantage of all the new app features and APIs in your apps. The Nexus device images can help you with testing, but keep in mind that they are meant for development purposes only and should not be used on a production device.



Notes on APIs and publishing



The L Developer Preview is a development release and does not have a standard API level. The APIs are not final, and you can expect minor API changes over time.



To ensure a great user experience and broad compatibility, you can not publish versions of your app to Google Play that are compiled against L Developer Preview. Apps built for L Developer Preview will have to wait until the full official launch to publish on Google Play.



Android Studio Beta



To help you develop your apps for the upcoming Android version and for new Android device types, we’re also happy to announce Android Studio Beta. Android Studio Beta helps you develop apps by enabling you to:




  • Incorporate the new material design and interaction elements of the L Developer Preview SDK

  • Quickly create and build apps with a new app wizard and layout editor support for Android Wear and Android TV



Building on top of the build variants and flavors features we introduced last year, the Android Studio build system now supports creating multiple apks, such as for devices like Android Wear. You can try out all the new features with the L Developer Preview by downloading the Android Studio Beta today.



How to get started



To get started with the L Developer Preview and prepare your apps for the full release, just follow these steps:




  1. Try out Android Studio Beta

  2. Visit the L Developer Preview site

  3. Explore the new APIs

  4. Enable the material theme and try out material design on your apps

  5. Get the emulator system images through the SDK Manager or download the Nexus device system images.

  6. Test your app on the new Android Runtime (ART) with your device or emulator

  7. Give us feedback





As you use the new developer features and APIs in the L Developer Preview, we encourage you to give us your feedback using the L Developer Preview Issue Tracker. During the developer preview period, we aim to incorporate your feedback into our new APIs and adjust features as best as we can.




You can get all the latest downloads, documentation, and tools information from the L Developer Preview site on developer.android.com. You can also check our Android Developer Preview Google+ page for updates and information.




We hope you try the L Developer Preview as you start building the next generation of amazing Android user experiences.













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Wednesday, 25 June 2014

Google I/O: Design, Develop, Distribute

By Monica Tran, Head of Developer Marketing








Today at Moscone, we kicked off our 7th annual Google I/O. This year, we’re focusing on three key themes: design, develop, distribute, helping you build your app from start to finish.



It’s been amazing to see how far you’ve come: in fact, since the last Google I/O, we’ve paid developers more than $5 billion, a testament to the experiences you’re creating. In the keynote, we had a number of announcements geared towards meeting the user wherever they go: on the TV, in the car and on your wrist. Below is a taste of some of the goodies we unveiled to help you along the way.



DESIGN




  • Material design — we introduced material design, which uses tactile surfaces, bold graphic design, and fluid motion to create beautiful, intuitive experiences.

  • L-Release of Android, with material design — Bringing material design to Android is a big part of the L-Release of Android: we’ve added the new Material theme (which you can apply to your apps for a new style) and the ability to specify a view’s elevation, allowing you to cast dynamic, real-time shadows in your apps.

  • Bringing material design to Polymer — As a developer, you’ll now have access to all the capabilities of material design via Polymer, bringing tangibility, bold graphics, and animations to your applications on the web, all at 60fps.



DEVELOP



  • Android L Developer Preview — Get extra lead time to make great apps for the next version of Android, with lots of new APIs to make Android simpler and more consistent on screens everywhere

  • Google Play services 5.0 is rolling out worldwide with great new features for developers.

  • Android TV SDK — Explore, learn and build apps and games for the biggest screen in the home. Your hard work will pay off in the fall when Asus, Razer and other partners launch their first Android TV devices.

  • Google Cast SDK — Help users find your content more easily with the improved Google Cast SDK developer console, which lets your app get discovered on chromecast.com/apps and on Google Play.

  • Android Auto SDK coming — Bring your app experience to the car by extending your existing app with Android Auto APIs. Be in millions of cars — with just one app.

  • Google Fit — An open fitness platform giving users control of their fitness data so that developers can focus on building smarter apps and manufacturers can focus on creating amazing devices.

  • Gaming — Learn what's new about Google Play Games and the Android platform to take games to the next level.

  • Google Cloud Platform — Get help with debugging, tracing, and monitoring applications in with new developer productivity tooling. Also, try Cloud Dataflow, a new fully managed service that simplifies the process of creating data pipelines.

  • The new Gmail API — Add Gmail features to your app with RESTful access to threads, messages, labels, drafts and history.

  • Android features for Enterprise — Secure apps and data without complicating the user experience. Build for the enterprise with no changes to the apps you're already developing. Learn more here.



DISTRIBUTE
















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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.














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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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