Build your next iOS and Android app with Flutter

Mobile development is full of compromises. When you’re building a new app, you’re often forced into a difficult choice: do you build the same app twice—once for iOS, once for Android—so that you have a high quality experience for both platforms? Or do you create one app from a shared codebase that works across both platforms, but doesn't have the performance or user experience you were hoping for? Flutter offers a third way: enabling high-quality user experiences with excellent performance, along with letting you express your designers’ intent and share a common codebase.

The Flutter team headed to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress 2019. At MWC, we released Flutter 1.2 and Dart 2.2. In this recap, you will learn about the highlights from Flutter’s MWC sessions on business, development, and design.

Whether you're an entrepreneur with a new app idea, a developer who’s frustrated by the edit-compile-debug cycle of building an app, or a designer who wants to be able to iterate on new design concepts, here are a few reasons why you should consider creating your next app with Flutter.

Beautifully-designed apps on each platform

Creating app designs can involve trade-offs between the creative intent of a designer and the reality of what actually goes into production. Mobile designers and developers often work in different worlds, separated by a hard boundary between the different tools that they use and challenges with iterating on a design during the development process. Sometimes the designer’s vision is compromised by limitations in the APIs or framework the developer uses; sometimes, visual polish gets deferred until “later” because of other development work (and “later” often means “never” in practice).

Two mobile phone screens showing the differences between what was designed, and what was sent into production.

With Flutter, you have control over every pixel on the screen from the beginning, including a full set of widgets that deliver pixel-perfect experiences on both iOS and Android. Designers are using Flutter to create attractive experiences like Reflectly, the number one journaling app on the Apple app store:

The user interface of Reflectly, a journaling app.

There are also some design tools made for Flutter—like 2Dimensions Flare, which you can use to build animations and incorporate them into any app with a single line of code. Here’s an example of a custom animation built with Flare that interactively follows your typing at login:

A mobile log-in screen displaying a bear who follows your cursor as it moves across the screen.

You can find more details about this example here.

And Supernova, a design-to-code tool, recently announced support for exporting Sketch designs directly to Flutter, allowing users of this popular design and wire-framing tool to turn their ideas directly into code.

Fast apps on each platform

Rather than introducing a layer of abstraction between your code and the underlying operating system, Flutter apps are native apps—meaning they compile directly to both iOS and Android devices.

Flutter’s programming language, Dart, is designed around the needs of apps that are created for global audiences. It’s easy to learn, contains a comprehensive set of libraries and packages that reduce the amount of code you have to write and is built for developer performance. When you’re ready to release your app, you can compile your code directly to the ARM machine code of your phone—meaning what you write is exactly what appears on the device—so you can harness the full power of your phone, rather than using a language like JavaScript that needs a separate engine to run.

A side-by-side comparison of two mobile screens showing Flutter rendering animations on the phone in real-time.

Flutter rendering animations on the phone in real-time.

Flutter isn’t a games engine, but it brings games-level performance to your application. Every pixel in Flutter is drawn with the Skia graphics engine: the same hardware-accelerated engine that powers Android and Chrome. This combination enables fast, glitch-free performance for apps—meaning that apps can operate on a phone's screen at 60 frames per second—which will never feel sluggish, even on a slower device.

Productive app creation on each platform

If you’re a mobile app developer, you might feel like you spend more time waiting than coding. When you make a change to your code, you have to recompile it, deploy it to a mobile phone and then bring the app back into the same state it was in before you made the change to see the results. By contrast, Flutter introduces a new capability called Stateful Hot Reload, which transforms this development cycle, letting you implement changes in milliseconds—not minutes. Stateful Hot Reload also allows better collaboration between developers and designers when they want to improve the app design and immediately see the effects.

Two side-by-side screens show how an app’s user interface and logic are updated in the app without the need for recompilation.

Changes to an app’s user interface and logic are updated in the app without the need for recompilation.

Teams using Stateful Hot Reload report major gains to their productivity when making apps. Combining the quick turnaround on changes with the ability to ship for both iOS and Android, we’ve seen apps from brands like Abbey Road Studios, Hamilton and Reflectly go from writing their first line of code to a published app in just weeks.

Get started today

We just launched version 1.2 of Flutter at Mobile World Congress 2019. We encourage you to try Flutter by visiting flutter.dev. You’ll find all the resources you need to get started including videos, codelabs, case studies, documentation and community links.

Managed Google Play earns key certifications for security and privacy

With managed Google Play, organizations can build a customized and secure mobile application storefront for their teams, featuring public and private applications. Organizations’ employees can take advantage of the familiarity of a mobile app store to browse and download company-approved apps.

As with any enterprise-grade platform, it’s critical that the managed Google Play Store operates with the highest standards of privacy and security. Managed Google Play has been awarded three important industry designations that are marks of meeting the strict requirements for information security management practices.

Granted by the International Organization for Standardization, achieving ISO 27001 certification demonstrates that a company meets stringent privacy and security standards when operating an Information Security Management System (ISMS). Additionally, managed Google Play received SOC 2 and 3 reports, which are benchmarks of strict data management and privacy controls. These designations and auditing procedures are developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA).

Meeting a high bar of security management standards

To earn the ISO 27001 certification, auditors from Ernst & Young performed a thorough audit of managed Google Play based on established privacy principles. The entire methodology of documentation and procedures for managing other companies’ data are reviewed during an audit, and must be made available for regular compliance review. Companies that use managed Google Play are assured their data is managed in compliance with this industry standard. Additionally, ISO 27001 certification is in line with GDPR compliance.

Secure data management

With SOC 2 and SOC 3 reports, the focus is on controls relevant to data security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy, which are verified through auditing reports. In managed Google Play, the data and private applications that enter Google’s systems are administered according to strict protocols, including determinations for who can view them and under what conditions. Enterprises require and receive the assurance that their information is handled with the utmost confidentiality and that the integrity of their data is preserved. For many companies, the presence of an SOC 2 and 3 report is a requirement when selecting a specific service. These reports prove that a service company has met and is abiding by best practices set forth by AICPA to ensure data security.

Our ongoing commitment to enterprise security

With managed Google Play, companies’ private apps for internal use are protected with a set of verified information security management processes and policies to ensure intellectual property is secure. This framework includes managed Google Play accounts that are used by enterprise mobility management (EMM) partners to manage devices.

Our commitment is that Android will continue to be a leader in enterprise security. As your team works across devices and shares mission-critical data through applications hosted in managed Google Play, you have the assurance of a commitment to providing your enterprise the highest standards of security and privacy.

How El País used AI to make their comments section less toxic

At El País, our vision for the perfect comments section was a place where readers would provide input, insight and tips on an investigative story, add knowledge about niche topics, double check facts and elevate the conversation to a different level. While the internet has brought amazing benefits, it didn’t deliver the utopia we—and others—had hoped for within the comments section. Around 2015, trolls, toxic comments, spam, insults and even threats took over, causing publishers to re-evaluate investing in this section of the online paper. No one seemed able to fix this broken system and several several sites either limited the amount of articles opened to comment, or shut them down completely.

We also thought about closing down comments at El País, but ultimately let them be. That was until last year, when the Google News Initiative contacted us to talk about Perspective API,  a free tool developed by Jigsaw that uses a machine learning model trained by human-generated comments labeled as toxic by human moderators. At that point Perspective API was available in English, but the aim was to use the more than 300,000 comments our readers write every month to train the model in Spanish. Earlier this year, we  partnered with Jigsaw to analyze our vast trove of public comments to understand how to spot toxicity in Spanish. We worked closely with the Jigsaw team to test the models and provided feedback in order to improve overall accuracy of the tool.

Now, when someone tries to post a toxic comment on our site we’ll show them a message in real time suggesting they make changes or rewrite it so that it’ll pass our moderation system. Since we put this system in place, the average toxicity of the comments has gone down seven percent and the number of comments has gone up 19%—leading us to suspect that the comments section is a nicer place and one our readers want to engage in. We’ve also improved the moderation process by sending the more toxic comments to experienced moderators and the less toxic to the less experienced ones.

A message on El Pais' site popping up in response to a toxic comment.

When someone posts a comment that may be perceived as toxic on El País’ site, we show a message in real time suggesting they make changes or re-write it.

Additionally, we’re including the toxicity of the articles in our data warehouse (a system we use for data analysis).Alongside the sentiment of the articles, we can now check if certain authors are associated with toxic comments, if the sentiment of the articles influences toxicity, or if some commenters always have high toxicity across all their comments. With this data, we aim to improve the conversation by not running certain articles we know won’t generate positive comments, developing a new badges system, highlighting top comments of the week in new products like a newsletter and even having journalists engage in certain conversations to help raise the level of debate.

Perspective API has rekindled our faith in the comments section and demonstrated a real value to our publication and our readers. This initial Spanish version of Perspective is available to anyone today and will continue to be developed so that any Spanish publisher can use Perspective in Spanish, for free.


Structured Data Files v4.2 now available in the DoubleClick Bid Manager API

Today we're announcing the general availability of Structured Data Files (SDF) v4.2 in the DoubleClick Bid Manager API. Highlights of this release include:
  • Support for TrueView connected TV bid adjustments
  • Ability to inherit Insertion Order start and end dates at the Line Item level
  • Renaming changes to better align SDF with the Display & Video 360 UI
All SDF users are encouraged to begin requesting v4.2 files to take advantage of these new features. To do so, simply pass 4.2 as the value of version when calling Sdf.download. For users with workflows that are dependent on older SDF formats, details of the file format changes between versions can be found in the release notes.


 - , DBM API Team

Digital News Innovation Fund: three years in, and 662 total projects supported

In 2015, Google launched the DNI Fund, an initiative open to publishers of all sizes in Europe that financially supports high-quality journalism through technology and innovation. After three years and six successful rounds of funding, we’re taking a look at the impact the Fund has had on the European news scene. Today, we’re announcing the results of the last round: 103 projects selected in 23 countries and more than 25 million Euros offered. This brings the total to 662 projects supported in more than 30 countries across six funding rounds.

Graphic depicting DNI’s total funding across Europe since its launch.

DNI’s total funding across Europe since its launch.

Welcoming newcomers to the DNI Fund

As with the previous rounds, we were impressed by the diversity and the quality of the projects that have been submitted. 162 of the applications came from collaborations between publishers, startups and academics. It was also heartening to see that 52 percent of applicants of the applicants (351 total, about 52 percent of applicants) were newcomers to the DNI Fund.

A graphic depicting round 6 of the DNI Fund, with results broken down by country.

Round 6 projects, broken down by country.

Once again, we asked large (up to €1 million) and medium (up to €300,000) applicants to focus on one of the most pressing issues identified by the news ecosystem: the diversification of revenue streams. We were excited to see such a wide variety of approaches from some of the biggest names in the industry alongside relative newcomers. Artificial intelligence and machine learning projects continued to be a top technology focus, and Round 6 applications demonstrated clear interest in exploring opportunities around driving subscriptions, creating new payment models and finding ways to minimize churn.

Across the prototype track (up to €50,000 awards), applicants offered plenty of stimulating new thinking, with individuals, organizations and companies looking at everything from fact checking to augmented reality.

Here’s a small selection of the projects that were offered funding in this round:

Single Sign-On, SSO Geste, France

The largest collaboration of publishers ever seen in France has formed a consortium and will receive €750,000 to create a Single Sign-On platform for more than 22 major media groups.

The ThinkIn Organised Listening Platform, Tortoise, UK

This start-up company is developing a new type of participation tool for users of its “slow journalism” enterprise, which will be the digital equivalent of giving members a seat at the newsroom table. It was awarded €553,000.

Readers club, DuMont.next, Germany

Digital unit of German publisher Dumont Mediengruppe will receive €475,000 to launch a gamified local rewards program. It will increase engagement and e-commerce on its local Hamburger Morgenpost site by rewarding all registered users on their sites with a virtual currency that can be used for products on their other platforms.

SAC (Subscription Accelerator Content), Diario de Navarra, Spain

The SAC is a collaborative project between this regional Spanish publisher and Hiberius Media Lab to develop a tool using AI and machine learning. The tool will provide real-time data-driven insights on which pieces of their published content successfully converts readers into subscribers and which retains them as engaged readers. It will receive €206,150.

PressHub Market, Freedom House, Romania

This Romanian journalism platform will receive €49,700 to develop revenue opportunities for its small independent member publications by building an advertisement marketplace for them to access and profit from.

Launching the Google News Innovation Challenge in Europe to support local news

Stimulating innovation within the news industry takes time. We’re in it for the long haul. That’s why we launched the Google News Initiative one year ago, a $300 million commitment to help journalism thrive. As part of these efforts—and after a pilot in Asia—the GNI Innovation Challenge will roll out in Europe. For this first round, we’ll specifically look for ideas around “local” journalism, since we know that building a sustainable business model for local news is a challenge here in Europe, similar to other parts of the world. The application window for this first European GNI Challenge will open this spring. In the meantime, I invite all applicants to check our website for more information, specific dates and eligibility requirements, which will be announced soon. We look forward to receiving GNI Challenge applications, as well as continuing to learn from the news ecosystem and participating publishers.

Honoring J.S. Bach with our first AI-powered Doodle

Ever wondered what Johann Sebastian Bach would sound like if he rocked out? You can find out by exploring today’s AI-powered Google Doodle, which honors Bach’s birthday and legacy as one of the greatest composers of all time. A musician and composer during the Baroque period of the 18th century, Bach produced hundreds of compositions including cantatas, concertos, suites and chorales. In today’s Doodle, you can create your own melody, and through the magic of machine learning, the Doodle will harmonize your melody in Bach’s style. You can also explore inside the Doodle to see how the model Bach-ifys familiar tunes, or how your new collaboration might sound in a more modern rock style.

Made in partnership with the Google Magenta and Google PAIR teams, the Doodle is an interactive experience encouraging players to compose a two measure melody of their choice. With the press of a button, the Doodle then uses machine learning to harmonize the custom melody into Bach’s signature music style.

Today’s Doodle is the result of a collaboration between the Doodle, Magenta and PAIR teams at Google. The Magenta team aims to help people make music and art using machine learning, and PAIR produces tools or experiences to make machine learning enjoyable for everyone.

The first step in creating an AI-powered Doodle was building a machine learning model to power it. Machine learning is the process of teaching a computer to come up with its own answers by showing it a lot of examples, instead of giving it a set of rules to follow (as is done in traditional computer programming). Anna Huang, an AI Resident on Magenta, developed Coconet, a model that can be used in a wide range of musical tasks—such as harmonizing melodies, creating smooth transitions between disconnected fragments of music and composing from scratch (check out more of these technical details in today’s Magenta blog post).

Next, we personalized the model to match Bach’s musical style. To do this, we trained Coconet on 306 of Bach’s chorale harmonizations. His chorales always have four voices: each carries their own melodic line, creating a rich harmonic progression when played together. This concise structure makes the melodic lines good training data for a machine learning model. So when you create a melody of your own on the model in the Doodle, it harmonizes that melody in Bach's specific style.

Beyond the artistic and machine learning elements of the Doodle, we needed a lot of servers in order to make sure people around the world could use the Doodle. Historically, machine learning has been run on servers, which means that info is sent from a person’s computer to data centers, and then the results are sent back to the computer. Using this same approach for the Bach Doodle would have generated a lot of back-and-forth traffic.

To make this work, we used PAIR’s TensorFlow.js, which allows machine learning to happen entirely within an internet browser. However, for cases where someone’s computer or device might not be fast enough to run the Doodle using TensorFlow.js, the machine learning model is run on Google’s new Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), a way of quickly handling machine learning tasks in data centers. Today’s Doodle is the first one ever to use TPUs in this way.

Head over to today’s Doodle and find out what your collaboration with the famous composer sounds like!

Update on the Google Groups Settings API

Posted by Zerzar Bukhari, Product Manager, G Suite

In February 2019, we announced upcoming changes to the Google Groups Settings API. Based on your feedback, we're making improvements to the Groups API to make it easier for you to assess the impact and take action. For the full list of changes, see this help center article.

When will API changes take effect?

The new features will be available starting March 25, 2019. It may take up to 72 hours for the features to rollout to everyone

What's changing?

  • Property 'membersCanPostAsTheGroup' will not be merged into 'whoCanModerateContent'
  • Property 'messageModerationLevel' will continue to support MODERATE_NEW_MEMBERS (it will not be deprecated)
  • New property 'customRoleUsedInMergedSetting'
    • This will indicate if a group uses custom roles in one of the merged settings. If a group uses a custom role, review the permissions in the Groups interface. The Groups API doesn't support custom roles and may report incorrect values for permissions.
  • New properties representing all to-be-merged settings, as well as the new settings, will be added
  • New property 'whoCanDiscoverGroup' to indicate the upcoming behavior for 'showInGroupDirectory'

For complete detail on Groups Settings API behavior changes, please reference this table.

Stable Channel Update for Desktop

The stable channel has been updated to 73.0.3683.86 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, which will roll out over the coming days/weeks.

A list of all changes is available in the log. Interested in switching release channels? Find out how. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.

Abdul Syed
Google Chrome



Beta Channel Update for Chrome OS

The Beta channel has been updated to Chrome Version: 73.0.3683.84 (Platform version: 11647.101.0) for most Chrome OS devices. This build contains a number of bug fixes, security updates and feature enhancements. A list of changes can be found here

If you find new issues, please let us know by visiting our forum or filing a bug. Interested in switching channels? Find out how. You can submit feedback using 'Report an issue...' in the Chrome menu (3 vertical dots in the upper right corner of the browser).

Cindy Bayless
Google Chrome

New Drive file suggestions in Chrome launching in beta

What’s changing 

We’re launching a beta program for a new feature that allows users to search for Google Drive files that they have access to when using the Chrome Omnibox (search/URL box). Users in the beta can now search for files in Drive by owner or type, where previously they could only search for a title or URL of a webpage. This feature is similar to what users see when searching for files in Google Drive.

Admins for G Suite Business, Enterprise, Education, Enterprise for Education, and Nonprofits can learn more and apply for the beta here.


Who’s impacted 

Admins only

Why you’d use it 

This feature will give users faster access to the files and data they need while searching in Google Chrome. Users will now be able to see Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, PDFs, and other file type suggestions from both “My Drive” and “Shared with Me” when searching in Chrome browser. This will help people get work done faster.

How to get started 

  • Admins: For more details and how to apply for the beta, see this form. 
  • End Users: No action required. 

Additional details 

This feature will be available to users signed into a Chrome profile on any operating system: Chromebook, Mac, Windows, etc.

Helpful links 

For more details and how to apply for the beta, see this form. 
Learn what sync settings users can manage and how they are managed. 
How to enable or disable chrome Sync. 

Availability 

G Suite editions 
  • Available to G Suite Business, G Suite Enterprise, G Suite for Education, G Suite Enterprise for Education, and G Suite for Nonprofits 
  • Not available to G Suite Basic. 

On/off by default? 
  • This feature will be ON by default for beta participants and can be controlled at the OU level.

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