At Google Play, we’re committed to helping app and game businesses of all sizes reach their full potential. That’s why we’re excited to announce we have opened submissions for the Indie Games Accelerator 2024.
If you’re an indie developer who is early in their journey - either close to launching a new game or have recently launched a title - this high-impact program is designed for you.
Selected game studios will be invited to take part in the 10-week accelerator program starting in March 2024. This is a highly-tailored program for small game developers from across 70+ eligible countries. It includes a series of online masterclasses, talks and gaming workshops, hosted by some of the best in the industry.
You’ll also get the chance to meet and connect with other passionate founders from around the world who are looking to take their games to the next level.
Learn how founder of Gambir Studio, Shafiq Hussein, and team grew their revenue by 20% with the advice from mentors at the Indie Games Accelerator.
All submissions must be completed by December 12, 2023 @ 1 pm CET and meet all eligibility requirements. Apply now to supercharge your growth on Google Play.
Posted by Anirudh Dewani, Director of Android Developer Relations
One of our favorite things to do is connect with Android developers–like you–around the world, and it’s even more fun when we’re able to do so in person. Earlier this year, we had the opportunity to meet thousands of you at Google I/O and through global Google I/O Connect events in Miami, Amsterdam, Bengaluru and China, and we’re constantly inspired by your energy, your passion to build for Android, and your dedication to improve app quality.
But there are still more opportunity for us to connect at events unfolding later this year, as we bring the Android team and our Android Google Developer Expert friends to events around the world.
Here’s a snapshot:
droidcon London
Next week, on October 26 & 27, the Android team is bringing the excitement to droidcon London with tech talk topics including app performance, screenshot testing, Compose, and more. We’ll also have a full lineup of subject matter experts to host a fireside chat and office hours, happy to answer all your development and product questions. Learn more about the content and get your tickets on droidcon's website.
DevFest Season
DevFest 2023 has just kicked off, with nearly 500 DevFests already scheduled. DevFest is a community-led technology conference series, and is proud to embrace developers from all corners of the globe and diverse backgrounds. Conference agendas are tailored to suit the needs and interests of local developer communities and include talks, hands-on demos, workshops, and codelabs on the latest Google technologies.
This year, many Android GDE will be speaking at hundreds of DevFest events around the world, with special appearances from the Android team at DevFests in New York, the Bay Area, London, and Singapore among others.
Want to join us? Just navigate to any location on the interactive DevFest map and RSVP. It's that simple!
Stay in Touch
This was just a small peek of some of the events through the end of 2023. Don’t forget to check out our YouTube channel for all the latest news, technical talks, tutorials, tips and tricks, and follow and engage with us on X (formerly known as Twitter) and LinkedIn. We can’t wait to connect with thousands of you in person!
Posted by Maru Ahues Bouza, Director, Android Developer Relations
Zoom is an all-in-one collaboration platform. Whether supporting work streams through video, chat, or the platform’s smart recordings and whiteboard tools, the team at Zoom aims to simplify personal and professional communications.
For Zoom engineers, creating the best experience for users means meeting them where they are across a variety of devices with unique form factors. Currently, there are more than 270 million large screens and foldables in use across the Android ecosystem. With this in mind, the Zoom team saw an opportunity to boost the app’s support across the Android ecosystem, helping to ensure a seamless user experience on any supported device.
Zoom users spend more time on large screens
In the last few years, the Zoom team has seen increased tablet usage among its user base. The Zoom team has seen increased tablet usage among its user base, and people who use Zoom on both their phone and tablet spend about 62% more time on their tablet. In addition, Zoom tablet users engaged about 2X more via Zoom than phone users.
Zoom engineers wanted to give users on large screens the same experience on their preferred devices as those using the app on a smartphone or computer.
“We wanted to make sure large screen users have the best experience possible when using Zoom,” said Will Chan, a product manager at Zoom. “Ensuring we could scale our mobile UI to address our user needs — regardless of their device size — was important, whether it's phones, foldables, or tablets.”
Improving multi-window support on foldables
Zoom engineers started by using the Jetpack WindowManager library, which provides developers all the resources they need to start optimizing across form factors. Using the library, Zoom engineers made the app’s tabletop UI for foldables more efficient by placing videos on the top screen and moving any controls to the bottom screen. This gave users a more hands-free experience, making it easier for them to use the app with their foldable devices.
For foldables, Zoom engineers also optimized the app’s Team Chat. After overhauling this feature, Zoom’s Team Chat worked seamlessly in split-screen mode. When in portrait mode, the app would now show a chat preview on the left side of the screen and the chat details on the right. Small changes like this make better use of on-screen space so that users can more easily manage the tasks at hand.
Adding more features can lead to greater complexity. To avoid complicating the app’s UI on foldables, Zoom engineers used ConstraintLayouts. These help simplify the app’s interface, reducing a lot of the complexity that comes with creating multiple layouts on a device. As a bonus, ConstraintLayouts also improve the app’s performance while switching between layouts, improving useability overall for users.
Making the most of larger screens
Large screen devices give users considerably more onscreen real estate to work with. And with so much available space on these form factors, Zoom engineers wanted to up the app’s multi-window support by allowing users to go into picture-in-picture mode. Just as with optimizing for split-screen modes on foldables, picture-in-picture allows users to better multitask while they’re in meetings or taking a phone call.
Zoom engineers also tweaked the app’s UI to scale accordingly when large screen users resized their windows. To do this, the Zoom team used the resizeable emulator in Android studios. Together, these tools let the engineering team preview how the new experiences would look across many different devices, allowing developers to test their optimization before putting it into production.
“Resizable emulators and Android Studios made testing and developing a lot easier, ensuring the user experience is great on multiple large screen devices,” said Will.
Easy optimization across Android
The suite of tools and resources provided by Android made it easier than ever for Zoom engineers to improve its app across form factors. Considering there are so many users on large screens and foldable devices today, Zoom developers were glad that they could create a more cohesive UX without having to exhaust all their resources.
The Zoom team is excited by the global reach of the Android platform and looks forward to seeing what Android will add to its already-large pool of developer resources and tools.
“Our engineering team appreciates all the investments being made in the Jetpack libraries. It’s made their lives much easier while developing for Android,” said Will.
Posted by Anirudh Dewani, Director of Android Developer Relations
We just wrapped another episode of #TheAndroidShow; in the show, we covered the latest in Android development, including a look at the new Pixel watch and the world of wearables, gathered the team to demo tools and libraries to build for foldables, large screen devices, with Compose, Android 14, Studio Bot, and more. Take a look, and here’s a recap of some of the ways we’re helping make it faster and easier to build excellent apps, across devices:
Studio Bot: improving your productivity, through Generative AI
At Google I/O we gave you a preview of Studio Bot, an AI powered coding assistant that is tightly integrated into Android Studio, designed to make Android development faster and easier. Last month, Studio Bot expanded into over 170 countries, and today we’re adding even more functionality in the latest canary release to help you be more productive. AI code completion enables you to receive suggestions for more complex code completions, such as multiline code or even entire functions. You can also now add comments to your code, and document code with just a click using Studio Bot. We caught up with Jamal Eason to learn about the investments the team is working on, including our improvements in quality.
Faster and easier to build, with Jetpack Compose
Jetpack Compose gives you powerful and intuitive APIs, which make it faster and easier to build UIs. Since Google I/O, we’ve been working on improving performance across Compose to make it even more helpful. Developers around the world are taking advantage of Compose to help them rewrite screens, build new screens, or create new apps. For example, The Reddit team adopted Compose for their design system, which improved their code flexibility and reduced code duplication. They rewrote several features in Compose and their new tech stack, one of them being Reddit Recap, with beautiful animations. They were able to achieve feature parity with 44% less code when they rewrote it using Compose, saving engineering resources and time.
Build across devices, with large screens
Foldables and tablets are an important space - and the market for large screens is growing with Samsung announcing that half of their users are thinking of making a foldable their next phone. We’re continuing to build tools and libraries to make it easier to build for different device types, including device streaming and new drag and drop APIs in Compose. See how Zoom saw 2x higher user engagement and optimized their app for large screens, and get started with making your app work better across screen sizes and form factors.
The latest in wearables, with Wear OS 4 and Pixel Watch 2
Earlier this month, we saw the launch of Google Pixel Watch 2 - the first Google watch with all the capabilities of Wear OS 4! The latest version of Wear OS offers several capabilities that make it easier to develop exceptional wearable experiences, from Watch Face Format to enhanced tiles and more. Read more to discover the latest updates to Wear OS and how you can get started!
Making excellent, premium apps
Earlier this month, Android 14 started rolling out to users around the world. So there’s no better time to start optimizing your apps for the release and taking advantage of new features in Android 14 to help you build excellent experiences for your users using the best of Android, such as improved camera functionality with UltraHDR, seamless authentication with Credential Manager and enhanced widget development with Jetpack Glance. In the show, we saw how Snapchat used Camera2 Extension API to build camera features such as night mode, zoom, and tap-to-focus, enhancing their user’s experience capturing high-quality Snaps on Android devices, and also had a conversation with Dave Burke about Android 14 and more. Take a look!
Connecting with you at events around the world
This year, we're excited to bring the Android team and our Android Google Developer Expert friends to events around the world, you can learn more about it here. Later this month, the Android team will be at Droidcon London (October 26-27), bringing talks and hosting office hours around many exciting topics, and a panel of subject matter experts. Android GDEs will be speaking at 100+ DevFest events around the world, with special appearances from the Android team at DevFests in New York, the Bay Area, London, and Singapore among others. We look forward to connecting with thousands of you in person!
Missed the show? You can watch it here, or check out the full playlist here. This is your conversation with the broader Android community, and if you’ve got an idea for the next show, we’d love to hear it - send us a Tweet, or share a message in the comments. We can’t wait to hear from you!
Passkeys are a safer and simpler alternative to passwords that works on all modern browsers and platforms. They enable signing into online accounts by using a device screen lock–with a fingerprint, facial recognition, PIN or a pattern.
More and more online services are adding passkey support every day. On 10 October, 2023, Google accounts made passkeys the default sign in method for all devices that support it.
To accelerate our way into a passwordless future, from 23-27 October we are hosting Passkeys Week–an online event where you can learn everything you need to know to successfully implement passkeys. Use #PasskeysWeek to participate in the conversation and spread the word about your products that support passkeys.
Keep an eye on @ChromiumDev and @AndroidDev, where we'll share new learning materials, including blog posts, case studies and pathways to earn passkeys badges on your Google Developer Profile.
On 25 October at 10 AM PDT, we’ll host a live Q&A session on Google for Developers YouTube channel where you can get all your questions about passkeys answered by passkeys engineers from Google. Bookmark this link or click "Notify me" to get alerted when the livestream is about to start:
The recording will also be available on the channel after the event — we hope you will tune in.
With over a billion downloads on Google Play, Google’s Contacts app is many Android users’ primary tool for viewing and organizing their personal contact information. Contacts developers aim to make the app an easy way for users to connect with the people who matter most to them. To make connecting even simpler, the Contacts engineering team built an entirely new widget from scratch using Jetpack Glance, Android’s latest framework for designing and developing widgets.
Contacts users enjoy connecting through widgets
Widgets make it easy for users to quickly access their favorite app features. Instead of having to navigate to and through an application, widgets can be added directly to a device’s home screen to create a shortcut to the information users need. With this in mind, Contacts engineers developed a new widget for users’ favorite contacts that allows them to reach friends and family faster.
“With the increasing popularity of home screen widgets,” said Phil Groman, product manager at Contacts, “we wanted to make our widget as useful as possible so that users can more easily connect with their most important contacts.”
A Google Opinion Rewards survey of Contacts widget users showed that about 80% of users with the Favorites widget on their home screen found it helpful for finding and connecting with their contacts. The survey used a 5-point scale, with 1 signifying “Not at all helpful” and 5 signifying “Extremely helpful.” Roughly 80% of the polled users selected options 4 or 5.
Faster development using Jetpack Glance
Previously, the Contacts team built the app’s widgets using RemoteViews, but the team switched to Jetpack Glance for its familiar APIs, concise Compose syntax, and out-of-the-box support of Material You dynamic theming. Jetpack Glance is also built on top of the Jetpack Compose Runtime, which makes development simple thanks to its modern declarative approach to UI and Kotlin APIs.
Contacts engineers also liked Jetpack Glance because the toolkit is backward compatible with RemoteViews code. Using Jetpack Glance, they could create the new Favorites widget with support as far back as API 23 of RemoteViews. Currently, the Favorites widget supports back to API 31. Jetpack Glance also offers a WorkManager-backed update mechanism, making it easier for developers to load a widget’s display data.
Android has additional documentation available on the Jetpack Glance landing page to help guide the development and implementation of widgets, which Contacts engineers used to build the Favorites widget. These resources helped Contacts engineers learn how to build responsive dynamic layouts for resizing, incorporate material themes, add UIs for empty and error states, and verify accessibility features like content descriptions.
After the Contacts team built the new Favorites widget, engineers estimated end-to-end development using Jetpack Glance to be 25% faster compared to another Contacts widget built using RemoteViews.
Doing more with Jetpack Glance
Thanks to Jetpack Glance, the Contacts team greatly reduced the time it took to produce a widget. Jetpack Glance’s Compose-based framework and intuitive Kotlin APIs made development easier, allowing engineers to quickly get a new widget off the ground and out to users.
“Jetpack Glance helped a lot during development,” said Zhen Fan, a software engineer at Contacts. “It increased development speed and made developers happier overall.”
Right now, the Contacts team is beginning to migrate another one of its widgets from RemoteViews to Jetpack Glance. The team hopes to incorporate more complex UI versions by making the switch, allowing engineers to develop richer features for users to enjoy.
Get started
Learn more about developing engaging widgets with Jetpack Glance.
Posted by Aurimas Liutikas, Software Engineer on AndroidX
AndroidX libraries are moving to a default minimum supported Android API level 19 (previously 14) starting with releases in October, 2023. According to Play Store check-in data, nearly all Android users have devices on API 19 or newer, so it’s no longer necessary to support legacy versions. This change will help AndroidX libraries maximize the potential number of users for app developers and aligns with Google Play Services and Android NDK.
If you are currently supporting a lower minSdkVersion, we recommend increasing that value to 19 and cleaning up any code to support prior versions or if you are unable to do so for business reasons you should stay on the previous versions of AndroidX.
In just a few days, on Thursday, October 19 at 10AM PT, we’ll be kicking off another episode of #TheAndroidShow, live on YouTube and on developer.android.com! In this episode, we’ll be showing how we’re making it faster and easier to build excellent apps across devices with live technical demos and more, plus a live fireside Q&A with the Android team!
Across the show, we’ll be covering the latest in Android development, including a look at the new Pixel watch and the world of wearables, gathering the Android team to demo tools and libraries to build for foldables, large screen devices, with Compose, Android 14, Studio Bot, and more.
You'll hear the latest from the developers and engineers who build Android, including a conversation with Android’s Dave Burke.
Send us your burning questions using #AskAndroid
In this episode of #TheAndroidShow, we’ll also be hosting a live Q&A from the Googleplex in California, where we've assembled a team of experts ready to answer your questions live. Then, tune in on October 19 to see if your question is answered live, on the air!
#TheAndroidShow is your conversation with the Android developer community, this time hosted by Nick Butcher and Annyce Davis. You'll hear the latest from the developers and engineers who build Android. Don’t forget to tune in live on October 19 at 10AM PT, live on YouTube and on developer.android.com!
We continue to be inspired by the amazing #WeArePlay stories of app and game creators on Google Play, from all corners of the Earth. This month, hear about a game changing financial app for women in Nigeria to an early learning platform that uses augmented reality.
First up, we’re in Nigeria where two former colleagues at an investment bank, Solape and Yomi, channeled their economic expertise into improving women’s accessibility to finance. HerVest is an app exclusively designed for farmers and small business owners, with saving and investment tips, financial education and credit options. Intent on improving gender equality in the financial sphere, the pair plan to reach a million women by the end of 2024 and “become the go-to financial platform for the financially underserved in Africa”.
Now we’re crossing the ocean into maritime Singapore, where native Brazilian Juliana launched her baby-led weaning app, BLW Meals. When her firstborn was 6 months old, she struggled to transition her onto solid foods. Unable to find adequate resources in her mother language, Portuguese, she decided to make her own platform, sharing everything she’d learned. Today, she’s overjoyed by how much the app - also offered in Spanish and English - has supported other moms through their weaning journey. Soon, she’s launching a new feature for chatting directly with nutritionists, ensuring parents always have an expert on hand to guide them.
Next, we’re heading over to the UK to meet mechanical engineer Harry, who’s on a mission to revolutionize perceptions around energy-limiting health conditions. When he got sick with long Covid after a mild infection in 2020, his ability to do the wild, athletic activities he once enjoyed – like cycling across Iceland – was no longer on the cards. Disappointed by the lack of treatment options, he decided to create a health monitoring app, partnering up with friend and tech lawyer Luke to make it happen. On Visible, patients are empowered to track and monitor their symptoms and activity levels. The anonymized data is also used by medical researchers to improve understanding and treatment options, feeding into Harry’s larger goal of “working to change health policy laws to recognize these conditions”.
Finally, we’re heading to Chile, South America, to meet brothers Ilan and Edison and their friend Nastassja. A veritable dream team, the trio began their tech careers running an augmented reality advertisement agency in their native Venezuela. But when they saw how much kids loved their commercials, they decided to instead use their AR skills to develop an education platform for children. After being offered a place on an accelerator program, they moved to Chile to launch PleIQ – an immersive, early learning app for kids aged 3-8. Next, they’re expanding across Latin America with the goal of “improving education quality to create a more equal society”.
Google Pixel Watch 2 is here and brings the capabilities of Wear OS 4 to users; get your app ready for the latest software and devices!
We're excited to bring Wear OS 4 and new user experiences to more devices, including the new Google Pixel Watch 2! We’re also providing updated developer tools for you to prepare your apps for Wear OS 4.
Pixel Watch 2, announced at Made by Google, will support Wear OS 4 upon its release this month. Wear OS 4 brings features and improvements to help you deliver more engaging and delightful experiences in your app.
Later this year, Pixel Watches will receive a system update to Wear OS 4, further expanding the set of users who can enjoy your app’s capabilities on the latest software.
Developers can also continue to use Samsung Galaxy Watches to test their apps on Wear OS 4.
The latest version of Wear OS offers several capabilities that make it easier to develop dependable, helpful wearable experiences:
Watch Face Format
Created in partnership with Samsung, the Watch Face Format is a declarative XML format that lets you design the appearance and behavior of watch faces. There is no executable code involved in creating a watch face using the Watch Face Format, and there will be no code embedded in your watch face APK.
The Wear OS platform takes care of the logic needed to render the watch face that uses the Watch Face Format. This means that you don’t have to worry about code optimizations or battery performance. We recommend that you create your watch face using the Watch Face Format.
Watch faces created using the Watch Face Format
More seamless data transfer
On devices that support cloud backup—including Pixel Watch 2 and Pixel Watch—users can transfer data from one Wear OS watch to another using a cloud backup and restore process. You can customize the set of files in your app that the system should include in a cloud backup, so that users only restore app data that’s meaningful to them.
Additionally, Wear OS 4 allows users to transfer their watch to a new phone without needing to perform a factory reset on the watch. They complete this process when setting up the new phone, as shown in the following flow below.
If your app stores user configuration data for the watch on the old phone, you can allow the system to transfer this app data onto the new phone too. The guide on how to transfer Wear OS data to a new mobile device has more details.
The user-facing process for transferring watch data onto a new phone, when the user first connects the new phone to the watch. This example shows the experience when the user initiates the data transfer from the old phone.
Enhanced Tiles
Wear OS 4 offers enhanced capabilities for your app’s tiles. Version 1.2 of the Jetpack Tiles library introduces support for platform data bindings and animations, so you can provide even more responsive experiences to your users.
Watch faces created using the Watch Face FormatExamples of animated tile (on the left) and a tile using data binding (on the right)
Get your app ready for Wear OS 4
Wear OS 4 is based on Android 13, which is several versions newer than the current Wear OS version, so your app will need to handle the system behavior changes that take effect in Android 12 and Android 13.
Read the developer documentation to discover key behavior changes and learn how to interact with new features. We recommend you start by testing your app and releasing a compatible update, so that you’re ready when the first devices get upgraded to Wear OS 4. This gives your app a basic but critical level of quality that provides a good experience for users.
The new Wear OS 4 emulator doesn’t support native 32-bit code, so if your app uses native code, make sure that it includes both 32-bit and 64-bit native libraries. This will also prepare your app for upcoming 64-bit only hardware.
Discover even more! View the Wear OS session from Google I/O, and read about the latest Jetpack releases for Wear OS.
There’s never been a better time to get your app ready for Wear OS 4 and all the latest Wear OS watches. We can’t wait to see your apps on Wear OS 4 and what experiences you’ll build!
Posted by Leticia Lago, Developer Marketing
Posted by Anirudh Dewani, Director of Android Developer Relations
Posted by Maru Ahues Bouza, Director, Android Developer Relations
Posted by Anirudh Dewani, Director of Android Developer Relations
Posted by Milica Mihajlija, Technical Writer
Posted by Andre Labonte, the Glance API.
Posted by Aurimas Liutikas, Software Engineer on AndroidX
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