Author Archives: Android Developers

Notes from Google Play: growing for the next decade

Posted by Purnima Kochikar, Vice President of Play Partnerships

Hello everyone,

This year, Google Play celebrated our first decade of partnering with your businesses. So whether you just launched your first app or game, or have been with us since the beginning, thank you for joining us — and more than 2.5 billion users — on this journey.

2022 was a year of uncertainty, with challenges to the global economy leaving many people and businesses looking for ways to adapt to difficult circumstances. But despite these difficult circumstances, your apps and games continued to help people manage, live and enjoy their lives.

We launched #WeArePlay this year to document your stories from around the world and showcase how your apps and games are improving people’s lives.One of my favorites is from brothers Kennedy and Duke, who use their ambition to help small businesses with their finance needs to create Kippa, and are now helping to empower entrepreneurs all across Africa.

In the US, Andrew Glantz used his passion to support local communities to create GiftAMeal, a fantastic app which encourages restaurant customers to take photos of their meal, following which a meal is given to someone at a local food bank. Andrew estimates that 500 restaurants have donated over 1 million meals to date, which is an amazing achievement. We’re excited to continue spotlighting your stories from all over the world throughout next year.

In the mobile-first world we live in today, it is clear to see the impact of the experiences you build on people's lives, and it inspires my team every day.

Helping you grow your businesses more efficiently

In uncertain economic times, we know it’s important to keep your costs low, improve your outcomes, and stay productive. That’s why we recently made a number of enhancements to help you acquire and re-engage your users more efficiently, and shared actionable best practices through our app growth series.

For example, you now can create up to 50 Custom Store Listings to appeal to specific segments of people, so you can communicate what’s great about your app in ways that are relevant to each audience. I am also excited to see the impact of Churned-user Custom Store Listings in the new year; these will tell a more customized story to people who uninstalled your apps or games, and help you bring them back. You can be one of the first to try this new feature by expressing your interest here.

For select titles, another efficient way to engage with new and existing users is by utilizing Promotional content cards, which games have been using for a while. This is a great way to reach users on Google Play with offers, launches, and events. For example, Three Kingdoms Tactics used the cards for exposure on all major events like pre-registration, new version release, and new season. The cards released during their first anniversary event in Hong Kong SAR and Taiwan increased their game’s exposure in the Play Store by 35%.

We are also excited to see apps starting to use the cards. Live streaming service Twitch has run almost 200 Promotional content campaigns this year, generating 36 million unique viewers and over 50 thousand app installs from the cards. It is wonderful to see these results.

On average, businesses using Promotional content cards drive +3.6% increase in revenue and a +5.1% increase in 28 daily active users versus similar titles that don’t. By measuring your success with the new reporting dashboard, you’ll see that the opportunities for optimization are huge. If you're one of the thousands of titles that already use Promotional Content, look for messages in your Play Console Inbox to find out more. We're looking to expand access to even more apps and games next year.

Helping you enter new markets

One great way to find new users is to go global. For mobile games, mature markets like Western Europe show a good growth rate, but the global growth rate is even higher thanks to the number of mobile gamers growing in emerging markets such as Southeast Asia, Latin America, India, and the Middle East & Africa. An increasing number of apps and games are monetizing successfully across emerging markets — for example, Türkiye has seen a ~70% increase in consumer spend on apps this year, and a ~50% increase for games.

For those considering entering new markets, local payments and monetization tools can help you increase buyer conversion, engagement, and retention. This year we launched strategic guidance in Play Console, which brings you a number of insights including peerset comparisons and per-country breakdowns. These can help you quickly identify growth opportunities, like what markets are underperforming and where you are a market leader. For more best practices for entering new markets, check out our Google Play Academy courses, with more coming soon.

Supporting you to find users on more devices

As we look to the future for your business growth, it is not only about reaching people in more markets, but also about reaching people on more devices. Users are increasingly investing in connected devices beyond their phones. Just this year, the number of active non-mobile Android devices has grown by almost 30%. That’s why it’s more important than ever to be able to meet your users where they are, whatever their device.

Supporting multi-platform gaming has been a major investment this year. We expanded Google Play Games to PCs as a beta experience across more markets around the world, gathering your feedback and improving the product to better fit the needs of your players around the world. Our greater aim is to help you to meet players where they are, and give them access to their games on as many devices as possible.

Many of you are already creating amazing experiences across multi-form factors, such as wearables and foldables. Strava is one great example of how building these experiences can boost engagement. They tapped into Google’s APIs, libraries and Android tools to take the app experience to the next level for people who have invested in a wearable, and found that wearable users also had 30% more active days than those who did not use a wearable.

Keeping the ecosystem safe

We know how hard you work to build and grow these amazing apps. As you scale your businesses, we are also committed to helping you better understand the policies that keep the ecosystem safe for people everywhere. Recent policies to help you navigate trust and safety on Google Play include expanding the Developer Helpline program to help navigate policy compliance issues, and launching a Strike Removal program to help compliance and deeper education on commonly misunderstood policy areas.

Rallying together into 2023

To maximize your success during periods of change, we need to rally together. We were so excited to celebrate 100,000 followers this year on our Google Play Business Community Twitter channel, and welcome you to follow our community spaces on Twitter and LinkedIn to connect with your peers and build knowledge.

Take care of yourselves and each other — and happy holidays from our team to yours.

Purnima Kochikar,
Vice President, Google Play Partnerships

Source: Android Developers Blog

Tips from Android Dev Summit 2022: How to scale made-for-mobile apps to ChromeOS

Posted by Patrick Fuentes, Developer Relations Engineer, Google ChromeOSPeople’s appetite for apps on larger screens is growing fast. In Q1 2022 alone, there were 270 million active Android users across Chromebooks, tablets, and foldables. So if you want to grow reach, engagement, and loyalty, taking your app beyond mobile will unlock a world of opportunity.

If your app is available in Google Play, there’s a good chance users are already engaging with it on ChromeOS. And if you’re just starting to think about larger screens, tailoring your app to ChromeOS — which runs a full Android framework — is a great place to start. What’s more is that optimizing for ChromeOS is very similar to optimizing for other larger-screen devices, so any work you do for one will scale to the other.

At Android Dev Summit 2022, I shared a few ChromeOS-specific nuances to keep in mind when tailoring your app to larger screens. Let’s explore the top five things devs should consider, as well as workarounds to common challenges.

1) Finessing input compatibility

One of the biggest differences between user behavior on mobile and larger-screen devices is people’s preference for input devices. About 90% of ChromeOS users interact with apps using a mouse and keyboard, and Android users across tablets and foldables often do the same.

About 90% of ChromeOS users interact with apps using a mouse and keyboard

The first step to meeting people’s expectations is testing your app’s support for a keyboard, mouse, and stylus. Once you’ve got your basics covered, you can add enhancements such as thoughtful focus states and context menus. You can also further enhance input compatibility on larger screens by testing app-specific input devices, such as game controllers.

Focus states and context menus shown on Chromebooks

2) Creating a fit-for-larger-screen UI

People freely resize apps on ChromeOS, so it’s important to think about how your app looks and feels in a variety of aspect ratios — including landscape orientations. Although ChromeOS offers automatic windowing compatibility support for made-for-mobile experiences, apps that specifically optimize for larger screens tend to drive more engagement.

The extra screen real estate on Chromebooks, tablets, and foldables gives both you and your users more room to play, explore, and create. So why not make the most of it? You can implement a responsive UI for larger screens with toolkits such as Jetpack Compose and create adaptive experiences by sticking to design best practices.

3) Implementing binary compatibility

If you’ve exclusively run your app on Android phones, you might only be familiar with ARM devices. But Chromebooks and many other desktops often use x86 architectures, which makes binary support critical. Although Gradle builds for all non-deprecated ABIs by default, you’ll still need to specifically account for x86 support if your app or one of your libraries includes C++ code.

Thanks to binary translation, many Android apps will run on x86 ChromeOS devices even if a compatible version isn’t available. But this can hinder app performance and hurt battery life, so it’s best to provide x86 support explicitly whenever you can.

4) Giving apps a thorough test run

The surefire way of ensuring a great user experience? Run rigorous checks to make sure your apps and games work as expected on the devices you’re optimizing for. When you’re building for ChromeOS, testing your apps on Chromebooks or another larger-screen device is ideal. But you've still got options if a physical device isn’t available.

For instance, you can still test a keyboard or mouse on an Android handset by plugging them into the USB-C port. And with the new desktop emulator in Android Studio, you can take your app for a spin in a larger-screen setting and test desktop features such as window resizing.

A Chromebook featuring the Desktop Android Virtual Device in Android Studio

5) Polishing apps for publishing

Sometimes, even apps tested on Chromebooks — and listed in Google Play — aren’t actually available to ChromeOS users. This usually happens because there’s an entry in the app’s manifest declaring it requires features that aren’t available on the unsupported device.

Let’s say you specify your app requires “android.hardware.camera.” That entry refers to a rear-facing camera — so any devices with only a user-facing camera would be considered unsupported. If any camera will work for your app, you can use “android.hardware.camera.any” instead. And if a hardware feature isn’t a must for your app, it’s best to specify in your manifest that it’s not required by using “required=false.”

A Chromebook featuring recommended manifest entries for hardware features. These manifest entries are also featured on their own next to the Chromebook

Once you’ve got your manifest squared away, your app is ready to ship. Your app listing is often your first chance to impress and attract users. That’s why we’re excited the Play Console now enables you to upload screenshots specific to different form factors. With this new functionality, you can show off what your app experience is like on users’ favorite devices and entice them to download.

Connect with millions of larger-screen users

As people’s love for desktops, tablets, and foldables continues to grow, building for these form factors is becoming more and more important. Check out other talks from Android Dev Summit 2022 as well as resources on ChromeOS.dev and developer.android.com for more inspiration and how-tos as you optimize for larger screens. And don’t forget to sign up for the ChromeOS newsletter to keep up with the latest.

Source: Android Developers Blog

Per-App Language Preferences – Part 2

Posted by Neelansh Sahai Android Developer Relations Engineer (on Twitter and LinkedIn)

Context

In part 1 of the Per-App Language Preferences blog, we discussed what the feature is, how developers benefit from it, how to implement the feature, and the strong business impact of catering to multilingual users. In this part of the blog, we'll discuss how various top apps migrated to the Per-App Languages Feature and how it benefited them.

Developer Success Stories

Here are some top apps that migrated to the Per-App Languages Preferences APIs. Let’s have a look at them.

LinkedIn is a business and employment oriented online platform that is primarily used for professional networking and career development. It bridges the gap between an employer and a job seeker, by providing both a common ground to connect. LinkedIn operates over a huge set of 875+ M registered users spread across more than 200 countries and territories.

Due to the several regions they cover, it becomes important to support multiple languages in the app. LinkedIn supports 26 Languages in their app right now, and this brings forward an opportunity to provide the users with the best experiences of latest android features. With this as the target, the LinkedIn team invested their efforts in migrating to the new Per-App Language Preferences APIs, and went ahead to provide their consumers the complete flexibility and features of Android 13. The team also quoted, “It was an easy integration with minimal code changes”.

MyJio is the-one-stop destination for recharges, managing accounts & Jio devices, UPI & payments, entertainment services with movies, music, news, games, quizzes & a lot more. With over 500 M+ total installs spread across the globe, MyJio aims to provide its users better access to a variety of utilities. Also as the user-base of MyJio is quite vast, the app supports a total of over 12+ Languages. With these many features and a wide diversity of active multilingual users, MyJio has a strong reason to localize their app using the best practices.

MyJio developers implemented the Per App Language Preferences APIs right along with the Android 13 release, allowing their users the flexibility to select a language for their app from system settings as well.

One of the major use-cases was to retain user's language preference, when users switch devices and then log in again from the same account. In this case, when the data is restored from a previous backup, the language preference is also restored along with the rest of the data, maintaining the seamless MyJio user experience across devices. This shows the API's flexibility to work well with other Android features like Backup and Restore, and helps developers give their users a better user experience.

With over 16.7M+ monthly transacting customers in more than 1000 cities across India, it is one of the most popular food ordering and restaurant discovery services in the region. This also means that the app is used in several languages. Zomato currently supports over 15 languages on its app.

The Zomato team wanted to make the user experience for users across geographies to be very seamless and delightful. Localizing the app based on the region and user preference was an important step in this direction. Zomato was quick to respond to the changes that were introduced in Android 13. They went ahead and migrated their language-switching logic to Per-App Language Preferences, within a week. Thereby helping their users find an easy way to use Zomato in their preferred language.

FROM THE DEVELOPERS :

At Zomato, providing the best customer experience possible is the core of our business and we believe localization is very critical in giving our customers a pleasant experience on the platform. Our team integrated with the new A13 Per-App Language Preferences API provided by Google to make it easy for our users to switch their preferred language on Zomato.

The ease of integrating the API helped us get it done effortlessly in less than a week’s time. Backward compatibility and stability of the API ensured that we are not compromising on the experience of our customers. With this, we hope to provide a better experience to the customer in their journey of online ordering via Zomato.

OkCredit is a credit management app with over 50M+ downloads, having total annual transactions of around 50 Billion USD on the app. As OKCredit supports both local and large-scale businesses and also around 10+ languages in their app, it was critical for them to support the ability to seamlessly switch the app language so that more users are able to onboard on their platform.

The developers from OkCredit have always been quick to adopt changes introduced in Android. They recently adopted the Per-App Language Preferences APIs within the timeframe of a week, providing their end users a better and more seamless experience around switching their app languages at their convenience.

FROM THE DEVELOPERS :

The demand for using apps in vernacular language is steadily growing in India. After Google announced Per-App Language Preferences recently, it was a straightforward decision to integrate them. The implementation was straightforward, stable, and compatible with older Android versions.

Conclusion

We saw that some top apps have implemented the Per-App Language Preferences APIs in their apps and have also circulated the updates out to the users. This easy migration was possible in such a short timespan due to the low amount of effort investment and minimal code changes required. Lastly, here are some resources that can help you understand the feature better.

Source: Android Developers Blog

Compose for Wear OS 1.1 is now stable: check out new features!

Posted by Kseniia Shumelchyk, Android Developer Relations Engineer

Today we’re releasing version 1.1 of Compose for Wear OS, our modern declarative UI toolkit to help developers build beautiful, responsive apps for Wear OS.

Since the first stable release earlier this year, we have seen many developers taking advantage of the powerful tools and intuitive APIs to make building their app simpler and more efficient. Todoist and Outdooractive are some of the developers that rebuilt their Wear apps with Compose and accelerated the delivery of a new, functional user experience.

Todoist increased its growth rate by 50% since rebuilding their app for Wear 3 and Outdooractive reduced development time by 30% and saw a significant boost in developer productivity and better design/developer collaboration:

“Compose makes the UI code more intuitive to write and read, allowing us to prototype faster in the design phase and also collaborate better on the code. What would have taken us days now takes us hours.”

The Compose for Wear OS 1.1 release contains new features and brings improvements to existing components, focusing on UX and accessibility. We’ve already updated our samples, codelab, and Horologist libraries to work with Compose for Wear OS 1.1.

New features and APIs

The Compose for Wear OS 1.1 release includes the following new functionality (baseline profiles already added for new components):

Outlined style for Chips and Buttons

To give you additional ability to customize the user interface, we added outlined styles for Chips and Buttons. New OutlinedChip and OutlinedButton composables provide a transparent component with a thin border that can be used for medium-emphasis actions. Also available for compact versions: OutlinedCompactChip and OutlinedCompactButton.

OutlinedChip and OutlinedButton composables

Modifying Chip and Button shapes

Starting from version 1.1, you can also modify shapes for Chip/ToggleChip and Button/ToggleButton components using new functions overloads.

Different Chip and Button shapes

Placeholder API

A new experimental API has been added to implement placeholder support. This can be used to achieve three distinct visual effects separately or all together:

A placeholder background brush effect used in containers such as Chip and Cards to draw over the normal background when waiting for content to load.
A Modifier.placeholder() to draw a stadium shaped placeholder widget over the top of content that is being loaded.
A Modifier.placeholderShimmer() for gradient/shimmer effect that is drawn over the top of the other effects to indicate to users that the current state is waiting for data to load.

These effects are designed to be coordinated and shimmer and wipe-off in an orchestrated fashion.

Placeholder API usage examples

Check out the reference docs and sample in Horologist to see how to apply the placeholder to common use cases, such as a Chip with icon and a label that puts placeholder over individual content slots and draws a placeholder shimmer on top while waiting for data to load.

Modifier.scrollAway

Horologist’s fadeAway modifier has been graduated to scrollAway modifier in version 1.1. Modifier.scrollAway scrolls an item vertically in and out of view, based on the scroll state, and already has overloads to work with Column, LazyColumn and ScalingLazyColumn.

Use this modifier to make TimeText fade out of the view as the user starts to scroll a list of items upwards.

ScrollAway modifier usage with TimeText

Additional parameters in CurvedTextStyle

CurvedTextStyle now supports additional parameters (fontFamily, fontWeight, fontStyle, fontSynthesis) to specify font details when creating a curved text style. Extended curved text style can be used on both curvedText and basicCurvedText.

Applying different font to curved text

UX and accessibility improvements

The 1.1 release also focuses on bringing a refined user experience, improvements for TalkBack support and overall better accessibility:

ToggleChip and SplitToggleChip support usage of animated toggle controls (Checkbox, Switch and RadioButton) that can be used instead of the static icons provided by ToggleChipDefaults.
Default gradient colors for Chip/ToggleChip and Cards were adjusted to match the latest UX specification.
Updated a number of the default colors in the MaterialTheme to improve accessibility as the original colors did not have sufficient contrast.
Accessibility improvements to Picker so that multi-picker screens are navigable with screen readers and the content description is accessible.
InlineSlider and Stepper now have button roles, so that TalkBack can recognize them as buttons.
The PositionIndicator in Scaffold is now positioned and sized so that it only takes the space needed. This is useful when semantic information is added to it, so TalkBack gets the correct bounds of the PositionIndicator on screen.

It’s time ⌚ to bring your app to the wrist!

Get started

To begin developing with Compose for Wear OS, get started with hands-on experience trying our codelab, and make sure to check out the documentation and samples. Visit Compose for Wear OS release notes for full list of changes available in version 1.1.

Note that using version 1.1 of Compose for Wear OS requires using the version 1.3 of androidx.compose libraries and therefore Kotlin 1.7.10. Check out the Compose to Kotlin Compatibility Map for more information.

Provide feedback

Compose for Wear OS continues to evolve with the features you’ve been asking for. Please do continue providing us feedback on the issue tracker and join Kotlin Slack #compose-wear channel to connect with the Google team and dev community.

We’re excited to see a growing number of apps using Compose for Wear OS in production, and we’re grateful for all issues and requests that help us to make the toolkit better!

Start building for Wear OS now

Discover even more with technical sessions from the Android Dev Summit providing guidance on app architecture, testing, handling rotary input, and verticalized sessions for media and fitness.

Source: Android Developers Blog

Android 13 for TV is now available

Posted by Wolfram Klein, Product Manager, Android TV OSToday we’re releasing the newest version of Android TV OS, Android 13 for TV! This latest release brings further improvements in performance and accessibility to help our developers build engaging apps for the next generation of TVs.

Here’s a look at some of what’s new in Android 13 for TV.

Performance and Quality

Android 13 brings new APIs to the big screen that help developers deliver high quality experiences to users across different device types.

Improvements to the AudioManager API allow developers to anticipate audio attribute support for the active audio device and select the optimal format without starting playback.
Users can now change the default resolution and refresh rate on supported HDMI source devices for a more reliable playback experience.
HDMI state changes are now surfaced to the MediaSession lifecycle, allowing TV dongles and other HDMI source devices to save power and pause content in reaction to HDMI state changes.

Accessibility and Input Controls

Android 13 brings new features to make interacting with TV more adaptable.

The InputDevice API now supports different keyboard layouts. Game developers can also reference keys by their physical location to support different layouts of physical keyboards.
A newly created audio descriptions API in AccessibilityManager allows your app to query the new system-wide audio description preference setting, helping developers provide audio descriptions in line with a user’s preference automatically.

Check out the Android TV OS developer site for details on even more features that come with Android 13 on TVs. The new release is now available for both ADT-3 and the Android TV emulator, and developers can choose to test on either the Google TV interface or the standard Android TV interface. As always, we are thankful to our developers for the continued support of Android TV OS. We can’t wait to see what amazing and innovative experiences you’ll continue to build for the big screen.

Source: Android Developers Blog

Google Play Coffee break with Creatrip | Setting up your business for global reach

Posted by Aditya Swamy, Director, Google Play PartnershipsI sat down for a “virtual coffee” with Haemin Yim, founder and CEO of Creatrip, from Korea to discuss starting on the web, setting up the company for global reach, and tips for startups looking to grow.

In Haemin’s words “Creatrip is an app that provides a gateway to authentic Korean trends and cultures.” Last year, they took part in the ChangGoo program, an initiative that supports Korean app startups in partnership with the South Korean government. The Creatrip team applied the learnings of the program to continue to grow and now have users from over 100 countries.Here are my key takeaways from our conversation:

illustration of three people in a rowboat at sea during a storm. The person at the helm is looking at weather related data

Expanding the app's value proposition to address challenges

Despite having a great idea for an app, Haemin shared with me that it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. After gaining significant brand awareness and with increasing travel bookings across the app, the pandemic sent the travel industry into disarray. As with many businesses, this had significant implications for Creatrip. However, Haemin and the team used their strong understanding of the people using their app to quickly expand their offering.

With the knowledge that people often wanted to visit South Korea because of their interest in K-trends and culture; Haemin adapted the business to provide K-products to those who were unfortunately unable to travel during that period. This led Haemin to grow the business beyond just a travel app and into a global e-commerce platform.

Creating new content to fuel app growth

Creatrip started as an app that provided travel content. It quickly expanded to provide people with in-app booking features, local currency exchange rates that weren’t previously digitized, and even a global e-commerce platform providing access to popular ‘K-items’. However, content is the key element that draws users into the app.

My top advice for businesses looking to continue to evolve their content is to expand their content creator pipeline. For example, by encouraging South Korean locals to contribute, Creatrip could gain a richer and more diverse range of content, showcasing Korea through the eyes of many different people. Haemin and the team are already in the process of building a new feature that allows people to create their own content on the app.

Think about short form video apps. By allowing people to become their own content creators, it enables them to have a much wider repository of content and encourages users to spend more time on the app. Now more people want to be creators and make their own content as seen on YouTube. This is fueling growth in watchtime, and adding more users.

illustration of two people receiving global information on shopping, popular items, trends, data, and people via their laptop and phone screen

Going global from the start

Something I found particularly interesting from my chat with Haemin, was how she prepared the business for global reach from the start. Haemin believes that despite requiring a bit more time and effort, preparing for global reach from the beginning can actually allow for exponential growth, as you start to target the right markets and reach a global fan base. It is wonderful to see how Haemin brings her passion for all things Korean, to people all around the world. The team’s first step towards going global was by listening to and understanding the needs of the people already using Creatrip.

The team at Creatrip have definitely brought a lot of unique ideas to the app. With 90% of their users having started on the website, the team had an ingenious idea to bring people over to mobile. They listened to their global users and saw that people were keen to find out the currency exchange rates being provided at local stores in Seoul. They created a mobile-only feature that shows local currency rates from local stores. This required the team to actually go to the stores twice a day, however it led to a large increase in people using the mobile app - all by providing information that was previously unavailable to people from outside of Seoul.

Planning for the future

It’s amazing to see how much Creatrip is flourishing; the app has grown from 100k monthly users up to 1.5 million. There are many factors that helped Creatrip grow over the past few years, but some notable takeaways from my chat with Haemin include:

Taking the time to understand the people using their apps and their needs
Launching app only features to drive people from web to the app
Using content as a means to get new users and increase engagement

For Haemin, there are still a lot of opportunities ahead. She believes that the ‘K-phenomenon’ will keep growing for the foreseeable future and this will aid more travel across South Korea. The team at Creatrip is focused on continuing to expand the cross-border shopping experience so people can buy South Korean trending products, no matter what country they live in. I can’t wait to see how Creatrip continues to bring the magic of Korea to the world.

As a final thought I couldn't let Haemin go without asking her favorite K trends. She mentioned that fusion fine dining was a top trend in Korea, NewJeans were a trending K-pop band, and South Korean blankets were a top K-product.

Do you have any questions for Creatrip? What are your own tips for other app or game businesses? Let us know on Twitter.

Source: Android Developers Blog

Google Play Coffee break with Creatrip | Setting up your business for global reach

Expanding the app's value proposition to address challenges

Creating new content to fuel app growth

Going global from the start

Planning for the future

Taking the time to understand the people using their apps and their needs
Launching app only features to drive people from web to the app
Using content as a means to get new users and increase engagement

Do you have any questions for Creatrip? What are your own tips for other app or game businesses? Let us know on Twitter.

Source: Android Developers Blog

App Bundles for Google TV and Android TV

Posted by Josh Wentz, Product Management, Google TV

TLDR: Google TV and Android TV will be requiring Android App Bundles that are archivable starting in May 2023 to save storage for users.

Over the past few decades, TV has transformed from linear channel surfing to on-demand content with multi-app experiences. Today, over 10,000 apps are available on Android TV OS. While software has grown exponentially, TV hardware has remained limited in capacity compared to its phone counterparts. In 2022, smartphones often have a minimum storage size of 64GB, but smart TVs have an average of just 8GB. Less storage results in users having to uninstall apps, hindering their overall TV experience. To help with this problem and others, Android introduced App Bundles in Nov 2020.

What are Android App Bundles?

“Android App Bundles” (AABs) are the standard publishing format on Google Play (phones, tablets, TVs, etc) that have replaced “Android Package Kits” (APKs). App Bundles are smaller, faster, fresher, and better than its precursor. Key benefits include:

Smaller Download/Storage Size - App Bundles create an average of 20% total size savings compared to its equivalent APK counterpart by optimizing for each device.
Less Likely to Uninstall - Since App Bundles enables users with the option to archive (which reclaims ~60% of app storage), users can keep these and more apps on their TV despite limited storage. A quick archive/unarchive user interface is built-in to the TV. Developers can also maintain state for a frictionless later return.
Applicable to All Android Surfaces - App Bundles are helpful for all Android surfaces using the Google Play store including TV, phone, tablet, watch, auto, & more.
Streamlined Delivery & Security - For easier delivery, a single artifact with all of your app's code & resources allows Play store to dynamically serve an optimized app for each device configuration. For greater security, developers can also reset the upload key if it’s lost or compromised.

What is new for TV?

With TV storage confined and users having an increasing appetite for more apps, Google TV and Android TV will be requiring App Bundles starting in May 2023. While this provides about 6-months to transition, we estimate that in most cases it will take one engineer about 3-days to migrate an existing TV app from Android Package Kit (APK) to Android App Bundle (AAB). While developers can configure archiving for their mobile apps, TV apps are required to be archivable so that all users and developers can benefit on storage-constrained TVs.

For TV apps not transitioned in time, Google may hide such apps from the TV surface. If you’re working on a brand new TV app, be sure to use Android App Bundles from the start!

How can TV apps transition?

Visit our Developer Guide to learn more about how to migrate to an Android App Bundle (AAB).

Explore the AAB format, find steps to build & test an AAB, and see FAQ. This example and video may help as well.
App Bundles are fully supported for Android 5.0 (API Level 21) and above. Certain App Bundle features are not compatible for Android versions before Android 5.0 (Lollipop).
Many TV apps have been developed with Android 5.0 (API Level 21) or higher. For context, Google TV launched on Android 10 (API Level 29) in 2020.

All told, App Bundles bring a delightful experience to both you as developers and your users, especially in the living room. Thank you for your partnership in creating immersive content and entertainment experiences for the future of TV.

Source: Android Developers Blog

Introducing Camera Viewfinder

Posted by Francesco Romano, Developer Relations Engineer, AndroidOver the years, Android devices have evolved to include a variety of sizes, shapes, and displays, among other features. Since the beginning, however, taking pictures with your phone has been one of the most important use cases. Today, camera capabilities are still one of the top reasons consumers purchase a phone.

As a developer, you want to leverage camera capabilities in your app, so you decide to adopt the Android Camera Framework. The first use case you want to implement is the Preview use case, which shows the output of the camera sensor on the screen.

So you go ahead and create a CaptureSession using a surface as big as the screen size. As long as the screen has the same aspect ratio as the camera sensor output and the device stays in its natural portrait orientation, everything should be fine.

But what happens when you resize the window, unfold your device, or change the display or orientation? Well, in most cases, the preview may appear stretched, upside down, or incorrectly rotated. And if you are in a multi-window environment, your app may even crash.

Why does this happen? Because of the implicit assumptions you made while creating the CaptureSession.

Historically, your app could live in the same window for its whole life cycle, but with the availability of new form factors such as foldable devices, and new display modes such as multi-window and multi-display, you can't assume this will be true anymore.

In particular, let's see some of the most important considerations when developing an app targeting various form factors:

Let's examine some common pitfalls to avoid when developing an app targeting various form factors:

Don't assume your app will live in a portrait-shaped window. Requesting a fixed orientation is still supported in Android 13, but now device manufacturers may have the option of overriding an app request for a preferred orientation.
Don't assume any fixed dimension or aspect ratio for your app. Even if you set resizableActivity = "false", your app could still be used in multi-window mode on large screens (>=600dp).
Don't assume a fixed relationship between the orientation of the screen and the camera. The Android Compatibility Definition Document specifies that a camera image sensor "MUST be oriented so that the long dimension of the camera aligns with the screen's long dimension." Starting with API level 32, camera clients that query the orientation on foldable devices can receive a value that dynamically changes depending on the device/fold state.
Don't assume the size of the inset can't change. The new taskbar is reported to applications as an inset, and when used with gesture navigation, the taskbar can be hidden and shown dynamically.
Don't assume your app has exclusive access to the camera. While your app is in a multi-window state, other apps can obtain access to shared resources like camera and microphone.

While CameraX already handles most of the cases above, implementing a preview that works in different scenarios with Camera2 APIs can be complex, as we describe in the Support resizable surfaces in your camera app Codelab.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a simple component that takes care of those details and lets you focus on your specific app logic?

Say no more…

Introducing CameraViewfinder

CameraViewfinder is a new artifact from the Jetpack library that allows you to quickly implement camera previews with minimal effort. It internally uses either a TextureView or SurfaceView to display the camera feed, and applies the required transformations on them to correctly display the viewfinder. This involves correcting their aspect ratio, scale, and rotation. It is fully compatible with your existing Camera2 codebase and continuously tested on several devices.

Let’s see how to use it.

First, add the dependency in your app-level build.gradle file:

implementation "androidx.camera:camera-viewfinder:1.3.0-alpha01"

Sync your project. Now you should be able to directly use the CameraViewfinder as any other View. For example, you can add it to your layout file:

<androidx.camera.viewfinder.CameraViewfinder
android:id="@+id/view_finder"
app:scaleType="fitCenter"
app:implementationMode="performance"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent"/>

As you can see, CameraViewfinder has the same controls available on PreviewView, so you can choose different Implementation modes and scaling types.

Now that the component is part of the layout, you can still create a CameraCaptureSession, but instead of providing a TextureView or SurfaceView as target surfaces, use the result of requestSurfaceAsync().

fun startCamera(){
val previewResolution = Size(width, height)
val viewfinderSurfaceRequest =
ViewfinderSurfaceRequest(previewResolution, characteristics)
val surfaceListenableFuture =
cameraViewfinder.requestSurfaceAsync(viewfinderSurfaceRequest)

Futures.addCallback(surfaceListenableFuture, object : FutureCallback<Surface> {
override fun onSuccess(surface: Surface) {
//create a CaptureSession using this surface as usual
}
override fun onFailure(t: Throwable) { /* something went wrong */}
}, ContextCompat.getMainExecutor(context))
}

Bonus: optimized layouts for foldable devices

CameraViewFinder is ready-to-use across resizable surfaces, configuration changes, rotations, and multi-window modes, and it has been tested on many foldable devices.

But if you want to implement optimized layouts for foldable and dual screen devices, you can combine CameraViewFinder with the Jetpack WindowManager library to provide unique experiences for your users.

For example, you can choose to avoid showing full screen preview if there is a hinge in the middle of the screen, or if the device is in “book” or “tabletop” mode. In those scenarios, you can have the viewfinder in one portion of the screen and the controls on the other side, or you can use part of the screen to show the last pictures taken. Imagination is the limit!

The sample app is already optimized for foldable devices and you can find the code to handle posture changes here. Have a look!

Source: Android Developers Blog

#WeArePlay | Discover what inspired 4 game creators around the world

Posted by Leticia Lago, Developer Marketing

From exploring the great outdoors to getting your first computer - a seemingly random moment in your life might one day be the very thing which inspires you to go out there and follow your dreams. That’s what happened to four game studio founders featured in our latest release of #WeArePlay stories. Find out what inspired them to create games which are entertaining millions around the globe.

Born and raised in Salvador, Brazil, Filipe was so inspired by the city’s cultural heritage that he studied History before becoming a teacher. One day, he realised games could be a powerful medium to share Brazilian history and culture with the world. So he founded Aoca Game Lab, and their first title, ÁRIDA: Backland’s Awakening, is a survival game based in the historic town of Canudos. Aoca Game Lab took part in the Indie Games Accelerator and have also been selected to receive the Indie Games Fund. With the help from these Google Play programs, they will take the game and studio to the next level.

Next, Marko from Serbia. As a chemistry student, he was never really interested in tech - then he received his first computer and everything changed. He quit his degree to focus on his new passion and now owns his successful studio Peaksel with over 480 million downloads. One of their most popular titles is 100 Doors Games: School Escape, with over 100 levels to challenge the minds of even the most experienced players.

And now onto Liene from Latvia. She often braves the big outdoors and discovers what nature has to offer - so much so that she organizes team-building, orienteering based games for the team at work. Seeing their joy as they explore the world around them inspired her to create Roadgames. It guides players through adventurous scavenger hunts, discovering new terrain.

#WeArePlay Xin Savy Soda Melbourne, Australia

And lastly, Xin from Australia. After years working in corporate tech, he gave it all up to pursue his dream of making mobile games inspired by the 90’s video games he played as a child. Now he owns his studio, Pixel Starships, and despite all his success with millions of downloads, his five-year-old child gives him plenty of feedback.

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

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#WeArePlay Xin Savy Soda Melbourne, Australia Google Play g.co/play/weareplay