Posted by Purnima Kochikar, Vice President, Google Play Partnerships

Hello there,

Today we are kicking off Notes from Google Play, a new series where several times a year we celebrate your creativity and impact, and share key insights and best practices, to inspire you to be bolder, go further, and build even more innovative apps and games.

2021 continued to be a year of challenges and uncertainty, and you inspired us by your ability to turn obstacles into useful and joyful apps and services. Your apps helped over 2.5 billion people using Android devices learn, connect, relax, exercise, laugh, have fun, and so much more. As a result, developers making over 1M USD per month with Google Play’s billing or having 10 million monthly active users grew by 30% this year.

In this inaugural edition of Notes from Google Play we celebrate your creativity and resilience. A developer who exemplified these traits and deeply moved and inspired me and my team is Mohammed Kamara. Thank you, Mo for channeling deep personal loss to create a better world for women of color, providing affordable and customized healthcare through the app. We are humbled to play a small part in making your vision for InovCares a reality.

A special shout out also goes to the winners of the Best of Google Play Awards and the Indie Games Festival. All of you inspire us to continue to work hard to evolve Play and Android to enable you to build great apps and successful businesses.

This focus on you and your success resulted in many impactful developments in 2021, including the evolution of our business model and new product features and tools. At Google Play we are focused on two key goals - helping you build and grow sustainable global businesses and investing in Android and Play platform features, tools, and ecosystems to enable you to build innovative apps and games.

Supporting your business growth

As the mobile industry has matured, you have created app businesses that have varying needs, so we’ve designed multiple programs to support you. For example, we created the Play Media Experience Program to encourage Video, Audio, and Books developers to build great cross-device experiences, while enabling apps that support authors & musicians by discounting the service fee as low as 10%. A few months ago we announced a new fee structure to support the evolution of the subscriptions business model, allowing all subscription app developers to benefit from lower fees. Due to the innovative changes we announced this year, I’m thrilled to share that 99% of developers globally now qualify for a service fee of 15% or less. Thank you for your thoughtful feedback while we were designing these programs and your vocal support since the launch of the new fee structure.

We have also continued to invest in programs to help you reach, retain, and re-engage your users.

• Google Play Pass is now available in 90 countries with over 800 games and apps; those of you participating have on average more than doubled your revenue across participating titles in these regions.
• Google Play Points is now available in 28 countries. By interacting with and paying for your apps, consumers have earned over 20 billion points to date.

Helping you build high quality apps

We are committed to empowering you to turn your creative ideas into excellent apps and have created tools and guidelines to help ensure your apps are of high quality. I invite you to pay attention to three key features/guidelines:

• App Quality guidelines and best practices help you build and test apps across various form factors and the Android Game Development Kit helps you build higher quality games.
• The Play Console reach and devices tool enables you to successfully reach global audiences by providing insights on devices and quality guidelines.
• Personalized and relevant ratings and reviews help you analyze and respond to user feedback more effectively.

Helping you build user trust and loyalty

Trust and safety are the cornerstones of sustainable business success and key to user loyalty. This year, we continued to invest in platform features and policies that help you build safer apps and strengthen user trust. We also heard your feedback and have invested in educational tools and resources to help you anticipate and understand the new features and policies. The key highlights this year -

• Earlier this year, we shared details about the upcoming Data safety section in the Play store, which will let users know the type of data your app collects, stores, and how that data is used. By giving you a way to showcase your approach to privacy-and-security, we’re not only building user trust, we’re helping people make informed decisions about the apps they install and use.

• To help you protect your business from abuse and your users from attack we created the Play Integrity API, which lets your backend server determine whether it’s interacting with your genuine app binary, installed by Google Play, and running on a genuine Android device that’s powered by Google Play services.
• To help you build safer and more trusted apps, we have created webinars and new Google Play Console features to help you anticipate and understand policy changes, policy violations, and the process to appeal a decision. Please opt-in to receive email invites to upcoming policy webinars.

Fostering the next generation of developers

Nothing excites me more than finding and nurturing the next generation of talented developers and building local ecosystems around the world that address local needs. Earlier this year we announced a reduced service fee tier of 15% on the first $1M in annual earnings for all developers, helping us continue to foster innovation on Android/Play.

It has been truly humbling to see key influencers, stakeholders, and industry and government leaders co-invest with us in this effort. Our most successful developers invested personal time and energy to mentor, coach, and grow Indies through the Indie Games Accelerator. Government leaders partnered with us to support startup ecosystems in countries like Korea and India - the ChangGoo program in Korea has been created in partnership with Ministry of SMEs and Startups (MSS) and the Korea Institute of Startup & Entrepreneurship Development (KISED), whereas the Appscale Academy in India was established in partnership with the MeitY Startup Hub, an initiative of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). Thank you all for your commitment to innovation and the app ecosystem.

Staying connected

I have missed seeing you in person over the last two years. The challenges imposed by COVID-19 helped us find new ways to stay connected. Many of you participated in virtual sessions to learn about new market opportunities and engaged in thoughtful online discussions on topics as diverse as Future of Work, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and Growth and Global expansion strategies. Some of you also told us that you are feeling some online event fatigue, so this year we also invested in content that you can consume at your own pace including thought leadership and best practices, and e-learning courses on Play Academy. We even launched our first certificate to help you get the most out of our store listing tools and features.

Until the next edition, from my team to yours, best wishes for the upcoming year. We hope you will always see Google Play as a partner to help you delight your users, expand your audience, and grow your business.

Happy Holidays.

Purnima Kochikar,

Vice President, Google Play Partnerships

Make sure you don’t miss future editions by following me / us on Twitter or signing up to our monthly newsletter.

Posted by Florina Muntenescu, Developer Relations Engineer

From updates to Jetpack libraries, more guidance on using Kotlin coroutines and Flow in your android app and new versions of Android Studio, here are the top 3 things you should know:

#1 Jetpack feature updates

We’ve been working to add the features you’ve been asking us for in a lot of Jetpack libraries, here are a few highlights:

• Navigation brings multiple backstacks support—no code update needed, just make sure you use the latest version.
• WorkManager, our recommended solution for persistent work, makes it easier to handle Android 12 background restrictions, adding support for expedited jobs
• Room adds auto-migration and multi-map relations.
• DataStore, our coroutines based replacement for SharedPreferences, has reached 1.0.
• Macrobenchmark, a tool to measure and improve startup and frame performance, added simplified and more accurate frame timing, and compatibility back to Android M

But if you want to deep dive, you should really check out: WorkManager - back to the foreground - where you’ll learn all about the latest APIs and features.

#2 Kotlin and Flow usage

Coroutines are the recommended solution for asynchronous work and Kotlin Flow is the obvious choice for managing streams of data in Android apps. To learn how to use Flows in practice, check out this Android Dev Summit session:

The talk also covers important things like how to stop collecting from the UI when it’s not needed, using the newly stable lifecycle-aware coroutines APIs: repeatOnLifecycle and flowWithLifecycle.

#3 Android Studio and LiveEdit for Jetpack Compose

In the Android Studio world, Arctic Fox is stable, Bumblebee is in Beta and Chipmunk is in Canary, all of them bringing a bunch of new features for Jetpack Compose and Material You, developer productivity and 12L and large screens.

The What’s new in Android Studio talk is a must see, especially the sneak peek demo of LiveEdit. LiveEdit is a generalization of live editing of literals, where you get to edit more general scenarios than just constants and strings: you can comment out parts of the UI, reorder composable calls and see the result on the phone in milliseconds. But, we want to make sure that this feature is really right before we include it in Android Studio, so stay tuned for it in the next releases.

You want more? Then sit back, relax and watch the full Modern Android Development playlist.

Posted by Clara Bayarri, Engineering Manager

This year’s Android Dev Summit brought a lot of updates related to Large Screen development for Android, the 12L feature drop on foldables and tablets - a set of features optimising Android 12 for large screens, better developer tools and updates to Google Play purpose-built for large screens. Here are the top 3 things you should know:

#1: The 12L feature drop for large screens

12L makes Android 12 even better on Large Screen devices, with a bunch of new refined UI across surfaces such as notifications and the lock screen. The most important announcements for developers included

• A renewed emphasis on multitasking. This means all apps can now enter split screen mode, regardless of whether they are resizeable or not.
• New improvements to compatibility mode
• New Activity Embedding APIs that allow you to show multiple activities side by side, making it easier to build large screen optimized layouts in existing apps

To find out more about what’s new, check out the What’s new for large screens and foldables video and developer.android.com/12L .

#2: Making it easier to build for Large Screens

Android has supported Large Screens for a long time, but we announced several new tools to help you scale up your app’s UI to larger form factors.

• New Material Design Guidance targeted at large screens, including a definition of common layout patterns prevalent in the ecosystem to help inspire your app’s design
• Window Size Classes, a new framework of breakpoints designed to represent the most common form factors in the ecosystem you should design and develop for
• Updates to SlidingPaneLayout, the View component for 2 pane layouts, to support Navigation
• New Compose APIs that make developing adaptive and responsive UI very simple, including Navigation Rail support
• Android Studio reference devices, a new set of device profiles that represent the widest range possible of devices in the ecosystem to test for
• Visual Lint brought to Android Studio Layout Validation to detect issues with large screen layouts
• A brand new Resizeable Emulator that can quickly toggle between the reference devices

Learn more about all these items in the Building Android UIs for Any Screen Size and Design beautiful apps on foldables and large screens talks, and check out the latest Large Screen guide and Build adaptive layouts in Compose guide for more. You can also check out Best practices for video apps on foldable devices and Spotify Across Screens for examples on how apps are making this journey.

#3: Google Play updates for Large Screens

To help users find the best apps on tablets, foldables and ChromeOS devices, we’ve got new changes in Play to recommend apps optimized for the large screen. This includes new checks to assess app quality, so we can feature large screen optimized apps and update search rankings to show the best possible apps for these devices. We will also be introducing large screen specific app ratings, so users will be able to rate how your app works on their large screen devices.

You can find all of this year’s Android Dev Summit talks related to Large Screens in this playlist, and the full list of announcements for Large Screens in our blog post.

Posted by Nick Butcher Developer Relations Engineer

The Android Dev Summit last month brought a number of exciting updates to Jetpack Compose, including that Material You, Google's new design language, is now available in Compose. In case you missed it, here's a recap of all the announcements.

New Releases: Jetpack Compose 1.1 beta and compose-material3

We released Jetpack Compose 1.1 beta. This means that new APIs in 1.1 are now stable, offering new functionality and performance improvements. 1.1 includes new features like improved focus handling & touch target sizing or `ImageVector` caching and support for Android 12 stretch overscroll. Compose 1.1 also graduates a number of previously experimental APIs to stable and supports newer versions of Kotlin. We've already updated our samples, codelabs and Accompanist library to work with Compose 1.1.

We released compose-material3. This is a brand new artifact for building Material You UIs with Jetpack Compose. It offers updated components and color system, including support for dynamic color, creating a personalized color palette from a user's wallpaper. This is our first alpha so we welcome your feedback as we continue to add features and iterate on the APIs. Check out the new m3.material.io website to learn more about Material Design 3 and find tools to help you design & build with dynamic color, like the Material Theme Builder.

More Guidance & Documentation for Jetpack Compose

We released a ton of talks about Jetpack Compose, providing deep dives into layout, animation and state, showed how to use Compose across Wear OS, homescreen widgets and Large Screens and held 3 code-alongs; live coding your first Compose app, migrating an existing app or using compose on Wear OS. Finally we held a panel discussion, answering your burning questions about Jetpack Compose and Material.

We also expanded the Compose documentation, including new guides on the Phases of Jetpack Compose, Building Adaptive Layouts and expanded theming guidance including guidance for Material 3.

Tooling updates in Android Studio Bumblebee

At ADS, Android Studio Bumblebee entered Beta, bringing richer support for Jetpack Compose including:

• Interactive preview is enabled by default
• Layout Inspector support for Jetpack Compose or hybrid UIs, including inspecting Semantics.

Android Studio Chipmunk canaries also introduced a new template for Compose (and View based) Material 3 applications.

Handoff

Lastly, we gave a sneak peak of some new tooling for design handoff, enabling you to export components designed in Figma to generate idiomatic Jetpack Compose code. You can iterate on the designs and pull in new changes, and safely edit the generated code. We're looking for a small group of teams to work directly with, so go sign up.

Jetpack Compose is stable and ready for production. We’ve been thrilled to see tens of thousands of apps start using Jetpack Compose in production and we continue to build our roadmap of features to enable you to use Compose to create excellent apps, across devices.

Sagar Kamdar, VP of Product Management

The app experiences that you as developers build help people around the world in ways we couldn’t have imagined, and at Android Dev Summit, happening over the next two days, we’ll talk about that spirit - focusing on the user, understanding their needs, and then building experiences to delight them. We just wrapped up the keynote, and over the next two days, we’ll focus on an important theme for Android: helping you build excellent apps, across devices. First on updates to our modern Android development offering to help you stay more productive so you can focus on building great applications, and then helping you extend those apps across devices to all form factors. And as a big part of this, we’re introducing the 12L feature drop on foldables and tablets - a set of features optimising Android 12 for large screens - read on to learn more!

Excellent apps: bringing Material You to Jetpack Compose

When it comes to helping you build excellent apps, our expanding collection of development tools, APIs, language, and distribution technologies–Modern Android Development, MAD for short–are your partners to help you stay more productive. And we’ve got a number of new features across MAD to help you be productive and create better apps, starting with one of our biggest announcements: the introduction of Material You and its radical new design vision into Jetpack Compose, Android's modern toolkit for building native UI.

Material You, introduced in Android 12 earlier this year at Google I/O, focuses on delivering experiences that are personal for every style, accessible for every need, and adaptive for every screen. We’re releasing the first alpha of Compose Material 3, which offers Material Design 3 styled components and theme, enabling Material You personalization features like dynamic color. We’re also releasing the first beta version of Jetpack Compose 1.1 with features like stretch overscroll for Android 12, improved touch-target sizing, experimental lazy layout animations, and more. Jetpack Compose is stable and ready for use in production and we continue to add the features you need to make it fast and easy to build Android UI across all form factors, with new support for Wear OS and for building homescreen widgets.

Jetpack: more features to help you create excellent apps

Beyond Compose, Jetpack continues to add the features you’ve been asking us for. Navigation adds multiple backstacks support. WorkManager, our recommended solution for persistent work, makes it easier to handle Android 12 background restrictions, adding support for expedited jobs. Room adds auto-migration and multi-map relations. DataStore, our recommended replacement for SharedPreferences, has reached 1.0 and Macrobenchmark, a tool to measure and improve startup and frame performance, added simplified and more accurate frame timing, and compatibility back to Android M.

Building across devices

We also have updates to help you build across Android form factors. Learn more about how being available across different Android devices and form factors is helping Spotify achieve their mission of connecting billions of fans with millions of creators.

Introducing 12L, an OS designed for large screens, together with new tools

Large screens have seen some incredible momentum: a 92% Year-over-Year growth in Chrome OS, making it the fastest growing desktop OS in the world, a 20% growth in tablet sales in the last year and a 2.5x growth in foldables sales, the newest and most innovate form factor…altogether those represent over 250M active large screen Android devices - and Android is giving you an OS to match. And we’ve got some… *large* news to *unfold* here: a developer preview of an upcoming feature drop for Android 12, with updates added JUST for large screens; we call it 12L. With 12L we’ve optimised and polished the system UI for large screens, made multitasking more powerful and intuitive, and improved our compatibility support for apps so they look better right out of the box. You can try the new large-screen features today as part of the 12L developer preview. Check out what is in 12L and how we’re making it easier to build for large screens here.

Watch out for Wear OS

Many developers have created helpful experiences for the latest version of Wear OS which launched earlier this year, and we're looking forward to richer, more immersive app experiences like what we’re seeing from Strava, Spotify, and Calm. Jetpack Compose makes building UIs so much faster and easier - so we’re bringing Compose support to Wear OS. Compose for Wear OS is now in developer preview, with new samples and documentation to help you get started. The ​​Tiles API, now in Beta, provides predictable, glanceable access to information and quick actions. We’ve also partnered with Samsung to make it easier to design watch faces. Watch Face Studio, created by Samsung, allows you to produce your own watch faces without any coding, so watch you see..is watch you get. You can read more about all of the Wear OS news here.

Google Play: More features and investments to help you grow your business

We’ve invested in more ways to power your business growth on Google Play. To strengthen user trust, we’ve introduced the Data safety section to highlight your privacy practices and the Play Integrity API to make sure your app installs are always genuine. We’ve also invested in more tools and features to help boost your app quality and recently updated our programs so that 99% of developers qualify for a service fee of 15% or less. To learn more, check out our blog post or watch the full session.

#AndroidDevSummit kicks off now!

We just dropped over 30 technical sessions, which you can watch here at your own pace. And over the next two days, we have a lot more live content for you to enjoy - including your opportunity to get your burning #AskAndroid questions answered by the team who built Android on topics like Modern Android Development, Large Screens, or Compose with Material You. Plus, we’ll also be hosting live Android Code-Alongs, where you can tune in to watch Android experts as they code, tackle programming challenges, and answer your questions live across Jetpack Compose and Compose for Wear OS. You can check out the full agenda with timings here. While we can’t wait for the opportunity to connect with you in person soon, we’re excited to engage with you remotely over the next two days. Enjoy your #AndroidDevSummit!