Posted by the Android team

In 2020, the Mercari team took on a big initiative to update its app’s technical infrastructure. At the time, its codebase was seven years old and hadn’t undergone any major architectural updates. This affected the team’s ability to develop new features and release timely app updates. To resolve this technical debt, Mercari launched what it called the GroundUP initiative—a complete rewrite of its application across platforms, including Android.

The goal was to create a completely modernized application with a scalable design. While retooling the app, Mercari developers turned to Jetpack Compose, Android’s modern declarative toolkit for creating native UI. During the evaluation, the team learned rewriting in Jetpack Compose would help clean up their codebase and have more control over how the app looks.

A rewrite with less code

The Mercari team completely rewrote the architecture and tech stack for its Android app using Jetpack Compose. Mercari developers created a new design system and completely integrated it using Compose, enabling them to easily test and implement new features. Using this new design system, the Mercari team rewrote more than 130 UI screens for its marketplace and modernized the look and feel of many of their components.

With the help of the Jetpack Libraries, Mercari’s team eliminated all legacy code during the rewrite, drastically reducing its codebase and making it more manageable for developers. “Virtually, it’s the same app with way less code,” said Allan Conda, Android technology lead at Mercari. “The rewritten app has about 355,000 fewer lines of code, which is about 69% less than what it had before.”

Interoperability with Views as an early adopter

When the Mercari team first began its GroundUP initiative, Jetpack Compose was only available in developer preview. They wanted the app written completely in Jetpack Compose due to its new declarative approach to creating UI. However, because it was still so new, they found themselves having to solve for unique edge cases using both toolkits.

For example, on Mercari’s listing form screens, users are prompted to input details about the merchandise they want to list. Users were then supposed to be able to select photos from their device gallery and rearrange them on this screen using a drag gesture. Gesture APIs weren’t available in Jetpack Compose at the time, so the team took advantage of Compose's AndroidView to seamlessly integrate Views that handled gestures on the listing form screen. This provided a stable yet temporary solution to implementing drag gestures until the feature became available with Jetpack Compose.

The Mercari team was impressed by how easy it was to switch between the two toolkits, and having the option to use Views alongside Compose gave them better control of edge cases like this. Compose now supports gesture APIs, and Mercari developers have since completely written and integrated the drag gesture component solely using Compose.

Jetpack Compose has matured a lot since Mercari’s initial adoption, and most Android developers no longer need to worry about having to interoperate with both toolkits as Android apps can now be written completely in Compose.

Improving and monitoring performance with Compose

Using Compose, the Mercari team automated baseline profile generation for every stable release of the app and found it to be really helpful. The home screen renders frames up to 2x faster with the default Compose baseline profile compared to without a baseline profile. By providing a custom profile, there’s an additional improvement of up to 20% faster when Mercari users are scrolling compared to just having the default baseline profile.

The team also wrote automated performance tests based on the app’s core scenarios with Android Macrobenchmark. “Using Android Macrobenchmark, we can automatically test start-up, scroll, and screen load times performance,” said Allan. “Currently, we have six core scenarios covered by these tests, like search results and browsing items.”

Additionally, Mercari developers integrated Firebase Performance Monitoring, a real-time app performance monitoring tool, with custom code to calculate scrolling performance on Compose screens. With Firebase Performance Monitoring, the Mercari team detected a performance issue on its search result screen. Using the Android Profiler to pinpoint the problem, Mercari developers discovered there were poor frame rates when scrolling search results. This resulted in the slow rendering instances being reduced by around 23.6%.

The Mercari team solved this frame rate issue with guidance from Google’s Compose performance best practices and Compose stability. Mercari developers had the app skip its Composables and hoist the unused states on the search results screen, significantly improving the frame rates.

More opportunities with Jetpack Compose

With less code to maintain, it’s much easier for Mercari developers to test and implement features. “We have a ton of experiments we can finally conduct using our refreshed platforms. Our users can expect new features coming to the Mercari app at a faster rate,” said Allan.

Mercari’s developers are excited to further develop the app using Animation APIs. With Compose, it’s much easier to animate components, which can result in huge improvements for Android UXs.

Get started

Optimize your UI development with Jetpack Compose.

Posted by the Android team

Concepts is a digital illustration app created by TopHatch that helps creative thinkers bring their visions to life. The app uses an infinitely-large canvas format, so its users can sketch, plan, and edit all of their big ideas without limitation, while its vector-based ink provides the precision needed to refine and reorganize their ideas as they go.

For Concepts, having more on-screen real estate means more comfort, more creative space, and a better user experience overall. That’s why the app was specifically designed with large screens in mind. Concepts’ designers and engineers are always exploring new ways to expand the app’s large screen capabilities on Android. Thanks to Android’s suite of developer tools and resources, that’s easier than ever.

Evaluating an expanding market of devices

Large screens are the fastest growing segment of Android users, with more than 270 million users on tablets, foldables, and ChromeOS devices. It’s no surprise then that Concepts, an app that benefits users by providing them with more screen space, was attracted to the format. The Concepts team was also excited about innovation with foldables because having the large screen experience with greater portability gives users more opportunities to use the app in the ways that are best for them.

The team at Concepts spends a lot of time evaluating new large screen technologies and experiences, trying to find what hardware or software features might benefit the app the most. The team imagines and storyboards several scenarios, shares the best ones with a close-knit beta group, and quickly builds prototypes to determine whether these updates improve the UX for its larger user base.

For instance, Concepts’ designers recently tested the Samsung Galaxy Fold and found that users benefited from having more screen space when the device was folded. With help from the Jetpack WindowManager library, Concepts’ developers implemented a feature to automatically collapse the UI when the Galaxy’s large screen was folded, allowing for more on-screen space than if the UI were expanded.

Concepts’ first release for Android was optimized for ChromeOS and, because of this, supporting resizable windows was important to their user experience from the very beginning. Initially, they needed to use a physical device to test for various screen sizes. Now, the Concepts team can use Android’s resizeable emulator, which makes testing for different screen sizes much easier.

Android’s APIs and toolkit carry the workload

The developers’ goal with Concepts is to make the illustration experience feel as natural as putting pen to paper. For the Concepts team, this meant achieving as close to zero lag as possible between the stylus tip and the lines drawn on the Concepts canvas.

When Concepts’ engineers first created the app, they put a lot of effort into creating low-latency drawing themselves. Now, Android’s graphical APIs eliminate the complexity of creating efficient inking.

“The hardware to support low-latency inking with higher refresh rate screens and more accurate stylus data keeps getting better,” said David Brittain, co-founder and CEO of TopHatch, parent company of Concepts. “Android’s mature set of APIs make it easy.”

Concepts engineers also found that the core Android View APIs take care of most of the workload for supporting tablets and foldables and make heavy use of custom Views and ViewGroups in Concepts. The app’s color wheel, for example, is a custom View drawing to a Canvas, which uses Animators for the reveal animation. View, Canvas, and Animator are all classes from the Android SDK.

“Android’s tools and platform are making it easier to address the variety of screen sizes and input methods, with well-structured APIs for developing and increasing the number of choices for testing. Plus, Kotlin allows us to create concise, readable code,” said David.

Concepts’ users prefer large screens

Tablets and foldables represent the bulk of Concepts’ investments and user base, and the company doesn’t see that changing any time soon. Currently, tablets deliver 50% higher revenue per user than smartphone users. Tablets also account for eight of the top 10 most frequently used devices among Concepts’ users, with the other two being ChromeOS devices.

Additionally, Concepts’ monthly users spend 70% more time engaging with the app on tablets than on traditional smartphones. The application’s rating is also 0.3 stars higher on tablets.

“We’re looking forward to future improvements in platform usability and customization while increasing experimentation with portable form factors. Continued efforts in this area will ensure high user adoption well into the future,” said David.

Start developing for large screens today

Learn how you can reach a growing audience of users by increasing development for large screens and foldables today.

Posted by Sheenam Mittal, Product Manager, Google Play

Google Play Commerce enables you to monetize your apps and games at scale in over 170 markets, without the complexities and time consumption required to run your own global commerce platform. It enables you to easily transact with millions of users around the world and gives users trusted and safe ways to pay for your digital products and content. Ensuring developers and users have a secure purchase experience has been a key pillar of Play Commerce, and we achieve this by continuously preventing and monitoring for bad actors looking to defraud and abuse your apps.

Preventing fraud and securing purchases

In 2022, we prevented over $2 billion in fraudulent and abusive transactions. Bad actors looking to carry out abuse on apps implement an array of strategies across both one–time purchases as well as auto-renewing payments. For example, they may attempt to purchase an item in your app with a compromised form of payment, or request a refund for an in-app purchase that’s been already consumed or sold, or use scammed gift cards for purchases. When a combined or coordinated attempt is carried out by bad actors, it can result in large-scale abuse on your app. Preventing such fraud and abuse requires a comprehensive approach, consisting of automated solutions and an array of internal monitoring tools combined with human expertise.

Empower developers with tools to mitigate app abuse

Information asymmetry between Google Play and developers is commonly exploited by bad actors. Two of the most effective solutions that you can implement to help address this are Voided Purchases API and Obfuscated Account ID. Over 70% of our top 200 monetizing developers have integrated these solutions to reduce fraud and abuse on their apps.

• Voided Purchases API provides you with a list of in-app and subscription orders for each user that have been voided. You can implement revocation that prevents the user from accessing products from those orders.

Benefits of Voided Purchases API

• Obfuscated Account ID helps Play detect fraudulent transactions, such as many devices making purchases on the same account in a short period of time.

You can also use Play Integrity API to protect your apps and games from potentially risky and fraudulent interactions, such as cheating and unauthorized access. You call the Play Integrity API at important moments to check that user actions or server requests are coming from your unmodified app, installed by Google Play, running on a genuine Android device. If something is wrong, your app’s backend server can respond with appropriate actions to prevent attacks and reduce abuse. Developers using the API have seen an average of over 50% reduction in unauthorized access of their apps and games. Stay tuned for new highly-requested feature updates.

Flowchart of how Play Integrity API works

Looking forward

This month, we launched Purchases.product.consume, which allows you to consume in-app items using the Play Developer API, reducing the risk of client-side abuse by shifting more business logic to your secure backends. For example, if a bad actor purchases an item from your app but tampers with the client side, the purchase will be automatically refunded due to lack of acknowledgement after 3 days of purchase. Using server side consumption will prevent this type of app abuse.

Google Play Commerce is committed to providing developers and users a secure purchase experience. Learn more about how to prevent bad actors from harming users and abusing your app by visiting this guide, as well as other 2023 initiatives helping keep Android and Google Play safe.

Posted by Sheenam Mittal, Product Manager, Google Play

Google Play Commerce enables you to monetize your apps and games at scale in over 170 markets, without the complexities and time consumption required to run your own global commerce platform. It enables you to easily transact with millions of users around the world and gives users trusted and safe ways to pay for your digital products and content. Ensuring developers and users have a secure purchase experience has been a key pillar of Play Commerce, and we achieve this by continuously preventing and monitoring for bad actors looking to defraud and abuse your apps.

Preventing fraud and securing purchases

In 2022, we prevented over $2 billion in fraudulent and abusive transactions. Bad actors looking to carry out abuse on apps implement an array of strategies across both one–time purchases as well as auto-renewing payments. For example, they may attempt to purchase an item in your app with a compromised form of payment, or request a refund for an in-app purchase that’s been already consumed or sold, or use scammed gift cards for purchases. When a combined or coordinated attempt is carried out by bad actors, it can result in large-scale abuse on your app. Preventing such fraud and abuse requires a comprehensive approach, consisting of automated solutions and an array of internal monitoring tools combined with human expertise.

Empower developers with tools to mitigate app abuse

Information asymmetry between Google Play and developers is commonly exploited by bad actors. Two of the most effective solutions that you can implement to help address this are Voided Purchases API and Obfuscated Account ID. Over 70% of our top 200 monetizing developers have integrated these solutions to reduce fraud and abuse on their apps.

• Voided Purchases API provides you with a list of in-app and subscription orders for each user that have been voided. You can implement revocation that prevents the user from accessing products from those orders.

Benefits of Voided Purchases API

• Obfuscated Account ID helps Play detect fraudulent transactions, such as many devices making purchases on the same account in a short period of time.

You can also use Play Integrity API to protect your apps and games from potentially risky and fraudulent interactions, such as cheating and unauthorized access. You call the Play Integrity API at important moments to check that user actions or server requests are coming from your unmodified app, installed by Google Play, running on a genuine Android device. If something is wrong, your app’s backend server can respond with appropriate actions to prevent attacks and reduce abuse. Developers using the API have seen an average of over 50% reduction in unauthorized access of their apps and games. Stay tuned for new highly-requested feature updates.

Flowchart of how Play Integrity API works

Looking forward

This month, we launched the Purchases.product.consume, which allows you to consume in-app items using the Play Developer API, reducing the risk of client-side abuse by shifting more business logic to your secure backends. For example, if a bad actor purchases an item from your app but tampers with the client side, the purchase will be automatically refunded due to lack of acknowledgement after 3 days of purchase. Using server side consumption will prevent this type of app abuse.

Google Play Commerce is committed to providing developers and users a secure purchase experience. Learn more about how to prevent bad actors from harming users and abusing your app by visiting this guide, as well as other 2023 initiatives helping keep Android and Google Play safe.

Posted by Nevin Mital - Developer Relations Engineer, Android Media

Today, we’re pleased to announce the full release of the Jetpack Media3 library. After sharing a first look at the library at Android Developer Summit 2021, we published several alpha and beta releases over the past several months to ensure a high-quality set of APIs that we now encourage everyone to adopt.

Media3 is the new home for APIs that enable you to create rich audio and video experiences. If you’ve used libraries like ExoPlayer, MediaCompat, or Media2, you’ll find Media3 to be familiar. However, instead of using these separate libraries, Media3 provides a unified API for playback use-cases and also expands to cover new use-cases like video editing and transcoding. The APIs are simple to use yet powerful, customizable to meet your needs, and reliable and optimized so you can build for the diverse Android device ecosystem.

In this blog post, we’ll focus on the playback APIs in Media3, so please stay tuned for an upcoming post where we’ll dive deeper into the video editing and transcoding APIs. As a brief introduction, the following table describes key components for playback in Media3:

Our developer documentation has more details on these components. Let’s take a closer look into what this new library offers and how you can start using it.

Keeping it simple

By consolidating the APIs for the playback developer journey into a single library, Media3 is able to introduce a Player interface that is used by several components, such as MediaSession and MediaController. This interface outlines traditional high-level functionality for audio and video playback, such as playback controls and the ability to query properties of the currently playing media.

Having a common interface for all “player-like” components means that creating new instances of these objects is straightforward:

Media3's MediaSession and MediaController will automatically reflect the state of the components they're connected to. As a result, you can also simplify your app’s architecture by removing connectors like ExoPlayer’s MediaSessionConnector and more easily follow the flow of logic through your app. Calling play() on the MediaController will forward the action to the MediaSession, which will then forward it to the player.

Similarly, Media3 aims to make background playback cases easier to handle. The PlayerNotificationManager from ExoPlayer is no longer needed, as Media3’s MediaSessionService and MediaLibraryService automatically handle publishing a media notification as needed. The library handles configuring, starting, and stopping a foreground service for you as needed, but please also note some known issues summarized in this comment.

ExoPlayer is deprecated, long live ExoPlayer!

ExoPlayer has a new home and is the default implementation of the aforementioned Player interface in Media3. The standalone ExoPlayer project, with package name com.google.android.exoplayer2, will soon be discontinued, and future updates will be published in Media3. For the next few months, we’ll continue publishing equivalent releases of both Media3 and ExoPlayer to help you make the transition to Media3. For example, this means that ExoPlayer 2.18.5 and ExoPlayer in Media3 1.0.0 are identical aside from their package names. However, this is only temporary and we will deprecate the standalone ExoPlayer later this year, so we highly recommend migrating to Media3 as soon as possible. The “Migrating to Media3” section below describes the process in more detail, which includes a script that handles most of the work for you.

Note that Media3 is developed with the same philosophy as ExoPlayer (and in fact, is developed by the same team!). In other words, Media3 retains ExoPlayer’s customizable components, open source development on GitHub, receptivity to pull requests, and public issue tracker, to name a few similarities.

Migrating to Media3

As mentioned previously, the standalone ExoPlayer project, with package name com.google.android.exoplayer2, will soon be discontinued, so to continue receiving updates, you will need to migrate to Media3 ExoPlayer. Other Media APIs that should be migrated to Media3 include, but are not limited to, MediaSessionConnector, MediaBrowserServiceCompat, and MediaBrowserCompat.

We’ve prepared two key resources to help you achieve this migration as smoothly as possible:

1. A migration guide to walk you through the process step-by-step
2. A migration script to convert your standalone ExoPlayer project packages to the corresponding new modules and packages under Media3

The good news is that if you’re currently using ExoPlayer, there’s no need for any code changes and no need to re-integrate or re-write any customizations. The standalone ExoPlayer and Media3 ExoPlayer are identical aside from the package name, and the conversion can be done automatically with the aforementioned migration script. Just make sure you’ve updated your project to use the latest version of ExoPlayer before getting started. For full details and steps, please refer to the migration guide.

Furthermore, since Media3 is fully backwards-compatible with prior media APIs such as MediaControllerCompat and MediaMetadataCompat, your existing integrations will continue to work as before even after the migration. Note that new features such as per-controller customization of commands are only available for clients using Media3. That is to say, for example, all legacy controllers, such as MediaControllerCompat, will receive the same set of available commands. You can identify a legacy controller by checking if getControllerVersion() returns 0 in the MediaSession.ControllerInfo.

The power of Media3, in the palm of your hand

Media3 offers several options for you to adjust its behavior to better fit your needs. The next few sections describe some such mechanisms.

Although ExoPlayer is the recommended Player implementation to use for audio and video streaming apps, Media3 also introduces the SimpleBasePlayer to minimize the number of methods you need to implement to integrate with a custom player. Start by implementing the getState method. This is where you can declare the Command set supported by your player and configure metadata such as the currently playing media item index and the current timestamp.

The SimpleBasePlayer class will enforce valid player state and handle informing listeners of state changes. Additionally, any methods related to a Command you don’t declare as available are ignored, so beyond getState, you only need to implement the methods that will actually be used.

The MediaSession and MediaController APIs have also been updated to give you more control. With Media3, you can advertise your app’s playback capabilities on a per-controller basis. Modify the commands available to a client app in the onConnect method of your MediaSession.Callback. For example, to prevent a client app with package name com.example.myClient from having access to the “seek to next media item” Player.Command:

Posted by Parul Tyagi, Developer Marketing

Every month, over 2.5 billion people visit Google Play to discover millions of apps and games, which are created by people with all sorts of backgrounds, who founded companies big and small.

#WeArePlay celebrates this community of people building apps and games businesses, with monthly spotlights of founders from across the world.

Last summer we went on a virtual tour of the USA, sharing stories from every state, and today we’re continuing our tour across the world with our next stop: India.

To kick us off, we are spotlighting 20 stories from across the country, with many more coming throughout the year.

First, we begin with Pramit from Gurugram, Haryana. He was climbing the corporate ladder when medication he was taking damaged his retina, therefore losing his vision. No longer able to read, he required help from friends and family to perform daily tasks. One day, when a friend was booking a driver for him, Pramit got the idea to create a tool that could function exactly like a virtual friend through voice-activated commands. Using his app Louie Voice Control, people can operate other apps using their voice, making technology infinitely more accessible for the visually impaired.

Next, meet Sourav and Gunjan from Kolkata, West Bengal. When Sourav and Gunjan had their son, they noticed how fascinated he was watching videos on their phones. This gave Gunjan the idea to provide meaningful screen time for him by making educational games for young children. Fast forward to today and they have 42 apps, including Yoga for Kids where youngsters follow along with simple yoga poses and unlock animated pets as rewards.

Now onto Tejas from Rajkot, Gurajat. He was always determined to go his own way in life and pursue programming, rather than his family's construction business. After discovering how popular cooking games are, his company TheAppGuruz makes versions catered specifically for Asian audiences - with some full of Indian dishes and specialties. Now, Tejas and his team are developing more cooking simulation titles, as well as traditional board games for a global audience.

And last but not least, Anshul and Rohan from Mumbai, Maharashtra. After bonding over their experiences in overcoming mental health struggles, they discovered they had the same goal: to create something in the mental wellness space. So they built Evolve - an app with guided meditations, breathing exercises and daily affirmations. During the pandemic, the pair realized the LGBTQ+ community was one of the most underserved in mental health support, so they adapted Evolve to meet their needs.

Check out all the stories now at g.co/play/weareplay-india and stay tuned for even more coming soon.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Posted by Jolanda Verhoef, Android Developer Relations Engineer

Today, as part of the Compose March ‘23 Bill of Materials, we’re releasing version 1.4 of Jetpack Compose, Android's modern, native UI toolkit that is used by apps such as Booking.com, Pinterest, and Airbnb. This release contains new features like Pager and Flow Layouts, and new ways to style your text, such as hyphenation and line-break behavior. It also improves the performance of modifiers and fixes a number of bugs.

Swipe through content with the new Pager composable

Compose now includes out-of-the-box support for vertical and horizontal paging between different content. Using VerticalPager or HorizontalPager enables similar functionality to the ViewPager in the view system. However, just like the benefits of using LazyRow and LazyColumn, you no longer need to create an adapter or fragments! You can simply embed a composable inside the Pager:

These composables replace the implementation in the Accompanist library. If you already use the Accompanist implementation, check out the migration guide. See the Pager documentation for more information.

Get your content flowing with the new Flow Layouts

FlowRow and FlowColumn provide an efficient and compact way to lay out items in a container when the size of the items or the container are unknown or dynamic. These containers allow the items to flow to the next row in the FlowRow or next column in the FlowColumn when they run out of space. These flow layouts also allow for dynamic sizing using weights to distribute the items across the container.

Here’s an example that implements a list of filters for a real estate app:

Performance improvements in Modifiers

The major internal Modifier refactor we started in the October release has continued, with the migration of multiple foundational modifiers to the new Modifier.Node architecture. This includes graphicsLayer, lower level focus modifiers, padding, offset, and more. This refactoring should bring performance improvements to these APIs, and you don't have to change your code to receive these benefits. Work on this continues, and we expect even more gains in future releases as we migrate Modifiers outside of the ui module. Learn more about the rationale behind the changes in the ADS talk Compose Modifiers deep dive.

Increased flexibility of Text and TextField

Along with various performance improvements, API stabilizations, and bug fixes, the compose-text 1.4 release brings support for the latest emoji version, including backwards compatibility with older Android versions 🎉🙌. Supporting this requires no changes to your application. If you’re using a custom emoji solution, make sure to check out PlatformTextStyle(emojiSupportMatch).

In addition, we’ve addressed one of the main pain points of using TextField. In some scenarios, a text field inside a scrollable Column or LazyColumn would be obscured by the on-screen keyboard after being focused. We re-worked core parts of scroll and focus logic, and added key APIs like PinnableContainer to fix this bug.

Finally, we added a lot of new customization options to Text and its TextStyle:

• Draw outlined text using TextStyle.drawStyle.
• Improve text transition and legibility during animations using TextStyle.textMotion.
• Configure line breaking behavior using TextStyle.lineBreak. Use built-in semantic configurations like Heading, Paragraph, or Simple, or construct your own LineBreak configuration with the desired Strategy, Strictness, and WordBreak values.
• Add hyphenation support using TextStyle.hyphens.
• Define a minimum number of visible lines using the minLines parameter of the Text and TextField composables.
• Make your text move by applying the basicMarquee modifier. As a bonus, because this is a Modifier, you can apply it to any arbitrary composable to make it move in a similar marquee-like fashion!

Marquee text using outline with shapes stamped on it using the drawStyle API.

Improvements and fixes for core features

• Test waitUntil now accepts a matcher! You can use this API to easily synchronize your test with your UI, with specific conditions that you define.
• animatedContent now correctly supports getting interrupted and returning to its previous state.
• Accessibility services focus order has been improved: the sequence is now more logical in common situations, such as with top/bottom bars.
• AndroidView is now reusable in LazyList if you provide an optional onReset lambda. This improvement lets you use complex non-Compose-based Views inside LazyLists.
• Color.lerp performance has been improved and now does zero allocations: since this method is called at high frequency during fade animations, this should reduce the amount of garbage collection pauses, especially on older Android versions.
• Many other minor APIs and bug fixes as part of a general cleanup. For more information, see the release notes.

Get started!

We’re grateful for all of the bug reports and feature requests submitted to our issue tracker - they help us to improve Compose and build the APIs you need. Continue providing your feedback, and help us make Compose better!

Posted by Rebecca Gutteridge, Senior Developer Relations Engineer

Hey there! I’m Rebecca Gutteridge, Senior Developer Relations Engineer at Google. As someone who has been working closely with developers to understand how we can make the Android platform better, I’m passionate about helping developers improve their app quality to create amazing experiences for users. In 2022 we announced Android Studio’s App Quality Insights (AQI) window which enables developers to discover, investigate, and reproduce issues reported by Firebase Crashlytics, directly within the context of your local Android Studio project. This is a big step in how Android developers can improve their app stability, and I wanted to learn more about the evolution of how mobile developers have managed crashes throughout the years. You can watch the behind the Scenes video on AQI here, and within the latest episode of #TheAndroidShow.

Early Days of Crash Management

I first chatted with Annyce Davis, VP of Engineering at Meetup and Android GDE. She has been in the mobile development space since 2010 and had a lot of hands on experience helping debug user experiences.

“In the early days, developers cared deeply about user crashes, but they didn’t have the tools to replicate or debug the issue, or to understand which users were being impacted. I remember spending lots of time trying to reproduce issues based on minimal information from bug reports.

One time I remember attempting to debug an experience only happening in a specific country, and no matter how many times I tried, I was unable to reproduce it. It wasn’t until I traveled there in person, I realized people were often using 2G. It never dawned on me to check the connection type!” -Annyce Davis

Firebase Crashlytics Changes the Game

Crashlytics was introduced in 2011 and it has helped developers track, prioritize, and fix app crashes faster. Annyce told me this was a game changer for crash management.

“We could now know which devices were experiencing issues, could be notified of trending issues, and finally we were able to show non-technical stakeholders crashes visually, to create buy-in for urgent work.

My team received crash reports for a particular screen of the Meetup app, but we could never reproduce the issue given how inconsistent it was. First, Crashlytics helped us narrow down which feature to examine. We found a crash that was due to a null pointer exception on data that we never expected to be null, so it didn’t seem like the crash could even be possible! An engineer on my team was able to use this data from Crashlytics to uncover that the source was a race condition that would lead to the null, and then he was able to fix it.” -Annyce Davis

Behind the Scenes of AQI

I wanted to learn more about the idea behind AQI, so I chatted with David Motsonashvili, a software engineer on the Firebase team who worked on the initial prototype.

“The original idea for the integration came from a quarterly Hackweek, where we were able to experiment on our own projects. We know Android developers use both Firebase console and Android Studio, so I had an idea to integrate Firebase into Android Studio to reduce their need to switch between the two.

The first prototype for this project was actually an integration with Firebase Performance Monitoring and Android Studio, but we realized Crashlytics would have a much bigger impact on developer workflow as an integration in Android Studio, so we pivoted in that direction instead, and the rest is history!” -David Motsonashvili

I loved that the idea came from wanting to help developers and make our tools easier for them to use! I asked David if he had any fun stories about the project.

“We had to be really scrappy about showing our test app's Crashlytics crash data in the IDE because of limitations we had with the API. It was a really fun project to figure out how to work around this during Hackweek!” -David Motsonashvili

I wanted to better understand how AQI evolved from being an idea during Hackweek, to where it is today.

“Once we launched the early developer preview we tested this with a few internal Google teams, and they loved it! We also started testing this with Android developers as part of an early access program. Some of the companies we talked to were Adobe, Luno, and Meetup. They had really valuable feedback that directly contributed to the roadmap. One example is when we learned many teams needed a place to collaborate within AQI, so we of course moved forward with adding the Crashlytics notes feature into AQI.” -David Motsonashvili

Modern Crash Management

Annyce and her team were early testers of AQI, and it was fun to learn about what they thought of the feature.

“I was truly happy to be able to go directly from a link in the stacktrace to the code. It was the feature in Android Studio that you never knew you needed! I especially like that you can filter issues based on the different variants in your app. Every engineer that I know and work with is passionate about delivering performant, quality code. App Quality Insights is the next step in the evolution of crash management, it can help engineers have more agency over addressing crashes while they also work on exciting new features.” -Annyce Davis

We’ve certainly come a long way with the tools developers have to manage bugs and crashes.

Get started with AQI

If you’re ready to try AQI out for yourself, download the latest version of Android Studio. You can also view the documentation, guide on medium, and our demo video to learn more about how to use it.

Posted by Greg Hartrell, Product Director, Games on Android & Google Play

Whether you’re working on your first game or your next season pass, Google remains committed to helping you across the development and publishing lifecycle. At our Google for Games Developer Summit, I was privileged to share some exciting new tools and insights from Android and Google Play that will help developers like you build games for everyone.

Check out our video playlist to watch the keynote and product sessions on demand, or keep reading for a quick recap of the highlights.

Building great Android games

App quality is the foundation of everything we do at Android and Google Play, and because every user matters, we have updated our approach to technical quality with more emphasis on the user experience.

Google Play’s technical quality bar now uses new user-perceived crash and ANR metrics, which we evaluate on a per-device basis as well as overall. We have introduced an 8% quality bar at the device level, and we now steer users on Google Play away from titles that do not meet this threshold on their phone. To help you meet these guidelines, we’ve launched a number of new features in Android vitals to make it easier to monitor and act on issues. Learn more about these features in this session and about our quality bar in this blog post.

• Performance is another key aspect of technical quality and for a smooth user experience, games on Google Play should aim for at least 30 frames per second. To help you reach this goal, we’ve just launched frame rate metrics for games in Android vitals. You can see these metrics in Play Console or with the Developer Reporting API. In due course, we will start steering users away from games that cannot achieve 20 frames per second on their phone. Learn more about the new metric in this session.

Android vitals in Play Console now offers frame rate metrics to help you understand how smooth and fluid your game feels to users.

We’ve also introduced a range of new tools and services to help you improve the quality of your game.

• We announced updates to Firebase Crashlytics to improve the quality of Unity stack traces, including Unity on-demand-fatal event reporting. We also now support the symbolication of native Android ANRs, and will soon support memory debugging for GWP-ASAN-enabled games.

• We’re also introducing a suite of Adaptability APIs to the Android Game Development Kit to help your game respond to changing device performance and thermal scenarios. The Android Dynamic Performance Framework includes a hinting library that can send signals about your workload to the CPU, so your game can tap into performance when you need it and save power when you don’t. There’s also a Thermal API to listen during runtime for when the device is about to thermally throttle so that you can adjust your workloads to smooth performance without overheating the device.

Connecting with players

Building and connecting with your players is key to success for many games, which is why we’re creating more opportunities to help you find new players or engage and re-acquire existing ones.

• We relaunched our LiveOps tools as Promotional content and made it available to more developers. Eligible developers can upload promotional assets in Play Console to promote in-game events, offers and deals, and major updates, and customize that content for new or returning users.

• Custom store listings allow you to create up to 50 different store listings with different descriptions and graphic assets based on country, pre-registration status, and more. We’ve now introduced inactive custom store listings, so you can target churned users with a different story about how to come back to your game.

• We also announced the early access program for Machine Translation in the Play Console, which can translate your game’s strings in minutes. This uses Google Translate and the best-in-class transformer-based language models for quality translation in over 8 languages including Simplified Chinese and Japanese. Sign up here to be one of the first developers to try it.

Reaching higher with large screens

Large screens offer new opportunities for an enhanced gaming experience. Our research shows that the majority of phone owners have access to a large screen, like a tablet, Chromebook, or PC, and gamers want to play their games across those screens. Large screens give you the real estate to implement high-resolution graphics, take advantage of multi-tasking or foldable-specific experiences, and add keyboard, mouse, and game controller support to give users more control.

The beauty of Android is that your games can be easily adapted for all these screens and we’ve made several updates to make the user experience better.

Easily adapt your game to different form factors so your users can play whenever and wherever they want. (Example shown here is Asphalt 9: Legends, subject to game availability and PC compatibility.)

• Although each form factor has its unique advantages, you don’t need to customize your game for each one independently. Watch this session to ensure great playability across large-screen platforms.

• Google Play Games for PC, now in beta in 13 countries, is expanding to Japan and countries in Europe in the coming months and is also expanding its catalog to include top games like Garena Free Fire, Ludo King, and MapleStory M.

• And starting today, we’re making it much easier to join Google Play Games on PC with your existing mobile build, whether you support x86 or not. Through our partnership with Intel, you can now submit your mobile build while you work on optimization — no need to recompile for x86 right away.

Posted by Arjun Dayal, Director, Google Play Game

Google Play Games on PC gives users the ability to play their favorite mobile games on PC, with the security and stability they expect from Google Play. With a catalog of top-tier games and over 10 billion monthly sessions on mobile, our users have met this product with enthusiasm for its high-quality, high-performance emulation and cross-screen gameplay.

Illustrative example of seamless sync across signed-in devices for Asphalt 9: Legends Subject to game availability and PC compatibility

At today’s Google for Games Developer Summit, we announced how we’re making cross-platform game development even easier, by continuing to simplify and improve the onboarding process for Google Play Games on PC. Watch our Google Play Games on PC playlist or, keep reading to check the most important updates from today.

Google Play Games is available to download in 13 countries*. Subject to game availability and PC compatibility

• Google Play Games on PC is expanding to more regions and including more games loved by billions of users worldwide. The program will be expanding to Japan and countries in Europe in the next couple of months and adding several new games including Garena Free Fire, Ludo King, and MapleStory M.

• Through our partnership with Intel, we’re making it easier to join Google Play Games on PC with an existing mobile build. While fully optimized games still offer the best experience for users and qualify for unique cross-platform marketing and promotion, we now offer the option to submit your existing mobile build in the meantime to reach players faster. So if your mobile game already plays well on desktop, you can express interest now to join Google Play Games.

• The new Google Play Games on PC developer emulator is a developer-focused build of Google Play Games specially designed for your debug and build process. It allows you to deploy games directly such as sideloading APKs via adb command or using Android Studio to adjust some graphics and hardware settings to validate different player configurations. To download the emulator, express your interest today.

• In order to ensure that players have a high-quality experience on Google Play Games, use our new release checklist to verify that you've completed all the necessary steps before submitting a build to ensure a quick approval process. This checklist covers key requirements including using high-resolution textures and assets, supporting Windows aspect ratios, and implementing mouse and keyboard input.

• With over 2 billion gamer profiles, Play Games Services stands at the core of ensuring seamless continuity across devices for Google Play Games. This year, we will roll out Next Generation Player IDs. These will keep a user's Player ID consistent across surfaces for any given game, while enabling them to be unique across different games.

• Over the last few years, there’s been a huge push for large-screen devices in the gaming industry, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and foldables. Even though each form factor has its unique advantages, you don’t need to customize your game for each one independently. Check out this session to learn how to ensure great playability across different platforms, all at once.

You can learn more about Google Play Games on PC at the developer site, and watch all the sessions from the Google for Games Developer Summit at g.co/gamedevsummit.

Posted by the Android team

Kakaonavi prides itself on providing fast, accurate routes while offering several other helpful features, including directions to the nearest EV charging stations, car wash order services, navigation data, maintenance reminders, and more. As Korea’s top ranking driving assistant, Kakaonavi wants to make the daily driving experience as easy as possible for its users. Recently, that meant making its services consistent across devices.

With an increasing number of people using large screen and foldable Android devices, Kakaonavi saw a need to evolve its application to optimize the driving experience across all screen shapes and sizes. To do this, the Kakaonavi team focused on establishing a high-quality user experience for large screens by using Android’s latest software features.

Before updating its app, Kakaonavi’s user experience wasn’t tailored for large screens and foldables. The different sizes of devices caused the UI to be displayed improperly on them, which affected the user experience because screen ratio and resolution have a significant impact on usability.

Additionally, some drivers, including professionals like truck drivers and taxi drivers, use Kakaonavi with three to four other apps simultaneously through Android OS’s split-screen mode. At the time, the Kakaonavi team had only established this type of multi-window supportfor devices with standard resolutions, leading to some of its users experiencing UI issues when trying to run multiple applications at once.

Developers at Kakaonavi addressed these issues by creating a common UI for large screen and foldable devices. They needed to ensure the UI was consistent whether the device was folded or unfolded, or in portrait or landscape mode. The UI also had to work efficiently while users ran multiple apps on their device’s main display. Because the ability to display map and location information on a larger screen is one of the benefits of these devices, creating consistency across layouts was essential to Kakaonavi’s success.

Using ConstraintLayout, which lets developers create large, complex layouts with a flatter app structure, the Kakaonavi team displayed a uniform, responsive UI regardless of the screen size or ratio. To handle configuration changes that are common on these devices, such as resizing windows or orientation changes, Kakaonavi's developers overrode onConfigurationChanged().

Overriding onConfigurationChanged() ensured the app ran smoothly on all screen sizes and during view mode changes by preventing the system from recreating UI elements triggered by folding and unfolding a device or opening multiple windows. Manually configuring these changes to preserve UI elements, rather than automatically deleting and recreating them, drastically improved the app’s UI performance for these new form factors.

“Since the map and UI state are updated frequently by GPS, we decided that the app would perform better by responding only to changes in screen orientation and screen size with onConfigurationChanged(), rather than restoring the previous state by restarting the Activity,” said Jaesun.

The Kakaonavi team also used multi-resume to enhance the app’s multi-window support for large screens and foldables. Multi-resume lets its users keep multiple applications in an active state while on screen, making multitasking more convenient and reliable.

The number of people using large screen and foldable devices has grown significantly and will continue to grow as more of these devices become available. Currently, there are more than 270 million large screen Android devices in use, including tablets, foldables, and Chrome OS devices.

Kakaonavi has seen this same trend in devices used by its consumers. Since the brand began optimizing its application for large screens in January 2022, its number of monthly active users who use the app on foldables has increased by 24.5%, and the company has received positive feedback from drivers using tablets and foldables as their main source of navigation. As of today, Kakaonavi is optimized for all available tablets and foldables.

The Kakaonavi team is excited by the opportunities these new form factors will bring by giving its users more ways to interact with the app. Looking ahead, the brand plans to further optimize its UI with Jetpack Compose and is already considering how to further tailor its multi-window support to large screens and foldables.

“There will be more devices with various screen sizes and ratios in the future,” said Jaesun. “That’s why we believe it’s important to always provide an optimized UI and meet the needs of consumers’ frequently changing screens.”

Optimize your app for all form factors

Learn how you can optimize your application for large screens and upcoming form factors.

Posted by Marcel Pinto , Developer Relations Engineer, Android

Android is secure by default and private by design. The platform is focused on bringing the best experiences and latest innovations to users, while keeping them safe by protecting their security and privacy.

But that’s not enough. As Android developers, we have a unique opportunity to shape the privacy landscape for millions of users. With the increasing importance of data privacy, it's crucial for developers to understand the best practices for protecting user information in their apps while providing a great user experience.

During the Privacy Week for Android Developers, we will focus on the steps that you, the developer, can take to ensure that your apps are secure and privacy-conscious. From coding techniques to data storage and management, we'll explore the essential elements of Android privacy that every developer should know. We’ll also highlight several upcoming changes in Android 14.

What to expect this week?

• Daily new content with guides, tips, and news
• Guidance regarding the principles of permissions and how to minimize data and location access
• Updates about Android 14’s privacy-related changes
• …and more!
  

Where?

• Follow @AndroidDev account on Twitter and androiddev on LinkedIn
• Follow our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AndroidDevelopers
• Subscribe to our Medium and Android Developers Blog pages

Let’s start?

In addition, to make it easier for developers to follow privacy principles, we have created a cheat-sheet for you:

Click to enlarge

• Google I/O 2022: goo.gle/privacy-io
• Android Developer Summit: goo.gle/ADS-Platform

With special highlight to:

Stay tuned, there is more to come this week!

French consumer electronics company Withings hosts one of the largest ecosystems of digital health and wellness products in the world. The company’s products include smart watches, smart scales, blood pressure monitors, and its own health-tracking application. Formerly known as Health Mate, the Withings application gives Withings users an easy way to track all of their health information—like activity, weight, ECG records, and sleep—obtained from Withings devices.

While Withings works to create a central hub for its users to access their health-related data, the number of devices and applications for monitoring health has grown substantially. And as health and fitness data spread across multiple platforms, it can be difficult for users to easily track and analyze this information.

To extend access to additional metrics and give Withings users a chance to use the application with their non-Withings apps and devices, Withings integrated Health Connect, Android’s latest API offering that gives users a simpler way to consolidate and share their health and fitness data across applications.

Health data is more powerful together

Before integrating Health Connect, Withings users had to manually activate which health and fitness apps could sync data to and from the Withings app. Now, thanks to Health Connect, its users can grant permissions to new health and fitness applications and automatically sync their data to the Withings app, letting them find their data in one easy-to-manage place.

“We integrated Health Connect in Withings app to grow our health sphere and offer a more complete experience to our users by supporting a wider range of data,” said Sophie Zecri, a mobile software engineer at Withings. “Health Connect helped us create a richer health-tracking interface and a more efficient overview for users.”

By uniting health data using the Health Connect API, Withings application offers its users a more holistic view of their health and makes it easier to develop a deeper understanding of key health insights with the data they gather.

For instance, Withings’ users can now combine their other workout- or calorie-tracking applications with the Withings app. By doing this, users can more easily track how changes in one area of their health may be affecting another. Additionally, the Withings app can provide greater guidance and more specialized programs to meet each user's unique needs, such as specific dietary recommendations and recipes or more specialized exercise programs.

Withings also wanted the data available through the Withings application to be accessible in its users' other health and fitness apps. Integrating with Health Connect made this possible. “We wanted to extend access to additional metrics, giving our users a chance to use Withings devices with their other applications,” said Sophie.

Ensuring that users felt in control of their data was also a top priority for the Withings team. They saw Health Connect as a powerful tool that’s equally secure for both Withings and its users. With Health Connect, users can easily manage permissions in one place, with granular controls to see which apps are accessing data at any given time. And for Withings, setting up permission checks was as easy as dropping in a simple piece of code provided by Health Connect.

Simplify connectivity between apps with Health Connect

The amount of work required to connect with other third-party health and fitness applications was Withings’ biggest roadblock to giving its users access to additional syncs. All the APIs for every other app, with all their unique code, made integrations complex and expensive for Withings to maintain.

“Connecting with other apps’ APIs was onerous. Any changes had to be repeated for every API, which meant expanding the codebase and increasing the risk of bugs that could impact Withings app’s quality,” said Sophie.

Health Connect lets Withings developers maintain less code while preserving stability and minimizing potential bugs. This translates to a reduced codebase and increased productivity for other projects. By integrating Health Connect with the Withings app, Withings reduced the amount of code related to data sync with third-party applications by 50%.

Preparing for a future with Health Connect

The Withings team attributes much of its success to the available Android resources for developers looking to integrate Health Connect with their company’s app. Withings developers used the Health Connect UX developer guide to aid the integration, and they used the Health Connect toolbox for testing and to understand how Withings app behaves with other applications that have integrated Health Connect.

The Withings team is excited to support new data types as its product range grows and new biomarker measurements become available. Currently, the company plans to expand its use of Health Connect by adding more data types related to women’s health.

“I would recommend Health Connect to other engineers looking to unite data for its users,” said Sophie. “Health Connect is a powerful, interesting, and easy tool to use.”

Join the many other apps using Health Connect today

Streamline integrations with other health and fitness apps while providing your users with deeper health insights using Health Connect.

Get started by viewing Android’s Introduction to Health Connect. Then, head over to the Health Connect Codelab and learn how you can integrate the Health Connect API today.

]]> Fri, 10 Mar 2023 20:00:00 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/7__Qwdy9tj_hl-yQgUPNuilmFkX7M1Jw https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/7__Qwdy9tj-t9qEwSXbZ5JVjH6qdYdAk

Rebecca Gutteride and Madona Wambua, Co-Hosts of #TheAndroidShow

The latest Android large screens and foldables from our Android friends

One of the coolest moments for hardware enthusiasts was last week at Mobile World Congress, where Android device makers from around the world gather to unveil the latest innovations. It was an especially big year for foldables in particular, with a number of compelling devices coming out. We had the opportunity to catch up with three Android partners and see their latest hardware: the Oppo Find N2 Flip, the HONOR Magic Vs, and the Tecno Phantom V Fold. These launches bring new, high-quality devices into the foldable category, giving users more options as they look for their next mobile device and signaling an investment in foldables across the Android ecosystem. For developers, foldables can present unique opportunities (and challenges); large screen devices like foldables and tablets can challenge assumptions that you might have made in the past around configuration changes, cameras, and the shape and size of the screen - or screens. On devices with more screen real estate and folds, users are expecting better multi-tasking and more content-rich app experiences that adapt to these form factors.

As this category continues to expand, we want to make large screen optimization as easy as possible for you. We’ve established tiered quality guidelines to help prioritize which behaviors are the most important to focus on across screen sizes and, late last year, we announced new guidance and updated tools to help you update your app to meet those guidelines. To make it easier to quickly test apps on a variety of representative devices, we have a growing collection of resizable, foldable, tablet and desktop emulators, and updated Material adaptive design guidance for these devices with more specific Canonical Layout designs!

To get started, check out the gallery page to get inspired with high fidelity mockups, links to material design guidance, implementation guides, and case studies from apps like yours. Then, test your app for large screens using the resizable emulator in Android Studio to see how your app looks today!

MAD Skills: Compose Layouts & Modifiers

Our latest MAD skills series deep-dives into Compose layouts and modifiers. The initial episodes cover layout fundamentals including what out-of-the-box APIs Compose offers, how you can use modifiers to stylize your composables, and the different phases in Compose. We then dive deeper into modifier chaining and building custom layouts for complex use cases. The series culminates in a live Q&A–happening right now, where we'll be answering the questions you've been asking us using #AskAndroid. You can view the YouTube playlist to rewatch the videos in the series.

What it means to be an Android Google Developer Expert

The Android Developer community is at the heart of everything we do and at the core of this is our Android Google Developer Experts. Spanning all over the world, the community comes together to share best practices through speaking, open-source contributions, workshops, and articles, and gets involved in early access Android releases - providing valuable feedback to make improvements for developers everywhere! Tune in to #TheAndroidShow to hear from six GDEs about their journey as an Android Developer and Google Developer Expert and what this role means to them.

App Quality Insights in Android Studio

In 2022 we released Android Studio’s App Quality Insights (AQI) which helps you discover, investigate, and reproduce issues reported by Crashlytics within the context of your local Android Studio project. In this segment we go behind the scenes with David Motsonashvili, a Software Engineer on the Firebase team, to learn more about where the idea came from. We also explore how crash management has evolved throughout the years with Annyce Davis, VP of Engineering at Meetup and GDE. Tune into #TheAndroidShow to watch the segment, read the AQI documentation to learn more, and download the latest version of Android Studio to try it out.

Now in Android

Now in Android is your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development, and this week we covered the second Android 14 Developer Preview, Google Play policy changes around Wear OS app quality, the release of the full Android Basics with Compose course, Advanced Compose Layout Concepts, Drawing in Compose, Multi-Window and Activity Embedding, TensorFlow Lite in Google Play Services, and more.

Tune in!

#TheAndroidShow is your conversation with the Android developer community, this time hosted by Rebecca Gutteridge and Madona Wambua. Tweet us your questions, and let us know what you’d like to hear in future videos from the Android team. It’s all happening right now – and you can rewatch it at any time!

Posted by Yasmine Evjen, Community lead, Android DevRel

The community of Android developers is at the heart of everything we do. Seeing the community come together to build new things, encourage each other, and share their knowledge encourages us to keep pushing the limits of Android.

At the core of this is our Android Google Developer Experts, a global community that comes together to share best practices through speaking, open-source contributions, workshops, and articles. This is a caring community that mentors, supports each other, and isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty with early access Android releases, providing feedback to make it the best release for developers across the globe.

We asked, “What do you love most about being in the #AndroidDev and Google Developer Expert community?”

Gema Socorro,”I love helping other devs in their Android journey,” and Jaewoog Eum shares the joy of “Learning, building, and sharing innovative Android technologies for everyone.”

Hear from the Google Developer Expert Community

We also sat down with Ahmed Tikiwa, Annyce Davis, Dinorah Tovar, Harun Wangereka, Madona S Wambua, and Zarah Dominguez - to hear about their journey as an Android Developer and GDE and what this role means to them - watch them on The Android Show below.

Annyce, VP Engineer Meetup shares, “the community is a great sounding board to solve problems, and helps me stay technical and keep learning”

Does the community inspire you? Get involved by speaking at your local developer conferences, sharing your latest Android projects, and not being afraid to experiment with new technology. This year, we’re spotlighting community projects! Tag us in your blogs, videos, tips, and tricks to be featured in the latest #AndroidSpotlight.

Active in the #AndroidDev community? Become an Android Google Developer Expert.

Posted by Leticia Lago, Developer Marketing

This International Women’s Day, we’re dedicating our latest #WeArePlay stories to the inspirational women founders creating apps and games businesses on Google Play. Like Ania from Victoria in Canada, who is making mental health support more accessible worldwide.

When Ania was a student, she started experiencing debilitating panic attacks. Realizing there wasn’t much help readily available on mobile, she took it upon herself to do her own research and learn how to manage her anxiety. After feeling more confident again, she wanted to share what she had learned and help people, so began developing Rootd.

The app provides in-the-moment relief: with lessons to understand panic attacks, breathing exercises, and ways to make short-term and long-term changes to reduce anxiety. She is growing the app’s reach by expanding to different countries, with the hope it will eventually become one of the most widely used tools to overcome panic attacks in the world.

Celebrating more women founders

Alongside Ania, there are many other women founders doing incredible work in the apps and games space: like Bria from USA - founder of Honey B Games and creator of bubble tea game Boba Story, Lauren and Christina from Australia - co-founders of Lumi Interactive and their wellbeing app Kinder World: Cozy Plants, and Jelena from Montenegro - CEO of games studio 3Hills.

Check out their stories now at g.co/play/weareplay.

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Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering

Android delivers enhancements and new features year-round, and your feedback on the Android 14 developer preview and Quarterly Platform Release (QPR) beta program plays a key role in helping Android continuously improve. The Android 14 developer site has lots more information about the preview, including downloads for Pixel and the release timeline. We’re looking forward to hearing what you think, and thank you in advance for your continued help in making Android a platform that works for everyone.

Working across form factors

Privacy and security

Privacy and security have always been a core part of Android's mission, built on the foundation of app sandboxing, open source code, and open app development. In Android 14, we’re building the highest quality platform for all by providing a safer device environment and giving users more controls to protect their information.

Selected photos access

We recommend that you use the Photo Picker if your app needs to access media that the user selects; it provides a permissionless experience on devices running Android 4.4 onwards, using a combination of core platform features, Google Play system updates, and Google Play services.

In the new dialog, the permission choices will be:

• Allow access to all photos: the full library of all on-device photos & videos is available
• Select photos: only the user's selection of photos & videos will be temporarily available via MediaStore
• Don’t allow: access to all photos and videos is denied

Apps can prompt users to select media again by requesting the media permissions again and having the READ_MEDIA_VISUAL_USER_SELECTED permission declared in their app manifest.

Please test this new behavior with your apps and adapt your UX to handle the new permission and the media file reselection flow.

Credential manager

Android 14 adds Credential Manager as a platform API, and we're supporting it back to Android 4.4 (API level 19) devices through a Jetpack Library with a Google Play services implementation. It aims to make sign-in easier for users with APIs that retrieve and store credentials with user-configured credential providers. In addition to supporting passwords, the API allows your app to sign-in using passkeys, the new industry standard for passwordless sign-in. Passkeys are built on industry standards, can work across different operating systems and browser ecosystems, and can be used with both websites and apps. Developer Preview 2 features improvements in the UI styling for the account selector, along with changes to the API based upon feedback from Developer Preview 1. Learn more here.

Safer implicit intents

For apps targeting Android 14, creating a mutable pending intent with an implicit intent will throw an exception, preventing them from being able to be used to trigger unexpected code paths. Apps need to either make the pending intent immutable or make the intent explicit. Learn more here.

Background activity launching

Android 10 (API level 29) and higher place restrictions on when apps can start activities when the app is running in the background. These restrictions help minimize interruptions for the user and keep them more in control of what's shown on their screen. To further reduce instances of unexpected interruptions, Android 14 gives foreground apps more control over the ability of apps they interact with to start activities. Specifically, apps targeting Android 14 need to grant privileges to start activities in the background when sending a PendingIntent or when binding a Service.

Streamlining background work

Android 14 continues our effort to optimize the way apps work together, improve system health and battery life, and polish the end-user experience.

Background optimizations

Fewer non-dismissible notifications

Notifications on Android 14 containing FLAG_ONGOING_EVENT will be user dismissible on unlocked handheld devices. Notifications will stay non-dismissible when the device is locked, and notification listeners will not be able to dismiss these notifications. Notifications that are important to device functionality, like system and device policy notifications, will remain fully non-dismissible.

Improved App Store Experiences

Android 14 introduces several new PackageInstaller APIs which allow app stores to improve their user experience, including the requestUserPreapproval() method that allows the download of APKs to be deferred until after the installation has been approved, the setRequestUpdateOwnership() method that allows an installer to indicate that it is responsible for future updates to an app it is installing, and the setDontKillApp() method that can seamlessly install optional features of an app through split APKs while the app is in use. Also, the InstallConstraints API gives installers a way to ensure that app updates happen at an opportune moment, such as when an app is no longer in use.

If you develop an app store, please give these APIs a try and let us know what you think!

Personalization

Regional preferences enable users to personalize temperature units, the first day of the week, and numbering systems. A European living in the United States might prefer temperature units to be in Celsius rather than Fahrenheit and for apps to treat Monday as the beginning of the week instead of the US default of Sunday.

App compatibility

We’re working to make updates faster and smoother with each platform release by prioritizing app compatibility. In Android 14 we’ve made most app-facing changes opt-in to give you more time to make any necessary app changes, and we’ve updated our tools and processes to help you get ready sooner.

Developer Preview 2 is in the period where we're looking for input on our APIs, along with details on how platform changes affect your apps, so now is the time to try new features and give us your feedback.

It’s also a good time to start your compatibility testing and identify any work you’ll need to do. You can test some of them without changing your app's targetSdkVersion using the behavior change toggles in Developer Options. This will help you get a preliminary idea of how your app might be affected by opt-in changes in Android 14.

App compatibility toggles in Developer Options.

Platform Stability is when we’ll deliver final SDK/NDK APIs and app-facing system behaviors. We’re expecting to reach Platform Stability in June 2023, and from that time you’ll have several weeks before the official release to do your final testing. The release timeline details are here.

Get started with Android 14

For the best development experience with Android 14, we recommend that you use the latest preview of Android Studio Giraffe (or more recent Giraffe+ versions). Once you’re set up, here are some of the things you should do:

• Try the new features and APIs - your feedback is critical during the early part of the developer preview. Report issues in our tracker on the feedback page.
• Test your current app for compatibility - learn whether your app is affected by default behavior changes in Android 14; install your app onto a device or emulator running Android 14 and extensively test it.
• Test your app with opt-in changes - Android 14 has opt-in behavior changes that only affect your app when it’s targeting the new platform. It’s important to understand and assess these changes early. To make it easier to test, you can toggle the changes on and off individually.

We’ll update the preview system images and SDK regularly throughout the Android 14 release cycle. This preview release is for developers only and not intended for daily or consumer use, so it will only available by manual download for new Android 14 developer preview users. Once you’ve manually installed a preview build, you’ll automatically get future updates over-the-air for all later previews and Betas. Read more here.

If you intend to move from the Android 13 QPR Beta program to the Android 14 Developer Preview program and don't want to have to wipe your device, we recommend that you move to Developer Preview 2 now. Otherwise, you may run into time periods where the Android 13 Beta will have a more recent build date which will prevent you from going directly to the Android 14 Developer Preview without doing a data wipe.

As we reach our Beta releases, we'll be inviting consumers to try Android 14 as well, and we'll open up enrollment for the Android 14 Beta program at that time. For now, please note that the Android Beta program is not yet available for Android 14.

For complete information, visit the Android 14 developer site.

Java and OpenJDK are trademarks or registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Posted by Jeanine Banks, VP & General Manager, Developer X, and Head of Developer Relations

Google I/O is back and you’re invited to join us online May 10! Learn about Google’s latest solutions, products, and technologies for developers, that help unlock your creativity and simplify your development workflow. You’ll also get to hear about ways to use the latest in technology, from AI and cloud, to mobile and web. Tune in to watch the live streamed keynotes from Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, CA, then dive into 100+ on-demand technical sessions and engage with helpful learning material. Visit the Google I/O site and register to stay informed about I/O and other related events coming soon.

• Register at the Google I/O website to receive event updates
• Join one of Google’s developer community groups in a city near you
• Create a Google developer profile to get I/O content recommendations

Stay tuned for more updates. We look forward to seeing you in May!

Posted by the Compose team

In just a few days, on Thursday, March 9 at 10AM PT, we’ll be kicking off another episode of #TheAndroidShow! In this episode, we’ll unpack the latest Android foldables and large screens for you to get building on, straight from Mobile World Congress last week in Barcelona, and sharing with you how to get started building.

Tweet us your Compose layouts & modifiers questions using #AskAndroid

In this episode of #TheAndroidShow, we’ll also be hosting a live Q&A from our latest MAD Skills series spotlighting the essentials of Compose layouts and modifiers. The initial episodes cover layout fundamentals including what out-of-the-box APIs Compose offers, how you can use modifiers to stylize your composables, and the different phases in Compose. We then dive deeper into modifier chaining and building custom layouts for complex use cases. The series culminates in a live Q&A where we’ll be answering your questions. You can view the YouTube playlist to rewatch the videos in the series. Tweet us your burning Compose layouts and modifiers questions using #AskAndroid. We've assembled a team of experts ready to answer your questions live!

#TheAndroidShow is your conversation with the Android developer community, this time hosted by Rebecca Gutteridge and Madona Wambua. You'll hear the latest from the developers and engineers who build Android. Don’t forget to tune in live on March 9 at 10AM PT, broadcast live on YouTube!

Posted by Bethel Otuteye, Senior Director, Product Management, Android App Safety

It’s our top priority to keep Android and Google Play safe for developers to build successful businesses and provide quality apps and games to billions of users around the world. Over the past years, we’ve continued to share more tools to help protect your apps, evolve our policies to help keep people and their families safe and secure, and collaborate with you to build more private advertising technology.

We know it can be difficult to keep up with how quickly the privacy and security landscape evolves. So, we’ve been sharing more product and policy support, frequent updates about our work, and advance notice about changes. As we did last year, we’re sharing a preview of some of our key priorities that we’re excited to collaborate with you on, on the behalf of our shared users.

What we look forward to this year

Now, we’re entering the next phase of this initiative: Rolling out the first Beta for the Privacy Sandbox on Android to a small percentage of Android devices. With the Beta, users and developers will be able to experience and evaluate these new solutions in the real world. See our developer guidance on how to participate in the Beta and follow our Privacy Sandbox blog for regular updates. We’ll continue to work in collaboration with developers, publishers, regulators and more as we navigate the transition to a more private mobile ecosystem.

You can also enhance your users’ safety by reducing the permissions you request for accessing users’ data. Your app can often leverage privacy-preserving methods for fulfilling its use case. For example, you can use the photo picker intent to allow users to select individual photos to share with your app rather than requesting access to all the photos on their device through runtime permissions. You can also start testing privacy, security, and transparency enhancements in our Android 14 Developer Preview 1. Stay tuned to our Android 14 and Google Play policy updates, as we’ll share more soon.