Announcing v11_1 of the Google Ads API

Today we’re announcing the v11_1 release of the Google Ads API. To use some of the v11_1 features, you will need to upgrade your client libraries and client code. The updated client libraries and code examples will be published next week. This version has no breaking changes.

Here are the highlights: Where can I learn more?
The following resources can help you get started: If you have any questions or need additional help, contact us through the forum.
Thanet Knack Praneenararat, on behalf of the Google Ads API Team

#WeArePlay | Meet George from the UK. More stories from Croatia, USA and Kenya.

Posted by Leticia Lago, Developer Marketing

Our celebration of app and game businesses continues with more #WeArePlay stories. Today, we’re starting with George from Bristol, UK - a young entrepreneur taking the streetwear industry by storm.

After spending hours and hours searching for the latest styles in sneakers and streetwear, George realised there’s a market in helping fellow enthusiasts find the latest drops. At just 16 years old, he took it upon himself to learn to code and created his app, Droplist. It points people to upcoming special collections from major labels around the world. Find out more about his story.

Today we also spotlight few more stories from around the world:
  • Anica and Kristijan from an island in Croatia - founders of Dub Studio Productions to help music lovers around the global turn up the bass or lower the treble on their favourite songs.


  • Robert from Wyoming, founder of Bluebird Languages - language learning apps with over 6 million hours of audio lessons spanning 164 languages, from Hungarian to Haitian Creole.

  • And one more new story - because why not! This time, featuring Annabel from Kenya. After struggling to find a mechanic when stuck on the roadside in Nairobi, she and her co-founder created Ziada to help people find local service providers.

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

How useful did you find this blog post?

#WeArePlay | Meet George from the UK. More stories from Croatia, USA and Kenya.

Posted by Leticia Lago, Developer Marketing

Our celebration of app and game businesses continues with more #WeArePlay stories. Today, we’re starting with George from Bristol, UK - a young entrepreneur taking the streetwear industry by storm.

After spending hours and hours searching for the latest styles in sneakers and streetwear, George realised there’s a market in helping fellow enthusiasts find the latest drops. At just 16 years old, he took it upon himself to learn to code and created his app, Droplist. It points people to upcoming special collections from major labels around the world. Find out more about his story.


Today we also spotlight few more stories from around the world:
  • Anica and Kristijan from an island in Croatia - founders of Dub Studio Productions to help music lovers around the global turn up the bass or lower the treble on their favourite songs.


  • Robert from Wyoming, founder of Bluebird Languages - language learning apps with over 6 million hours of audio lessons spanning 164 languages, from Hungarian to Haitian Creole.


  • And one more new story - because why not! This time, featuring Annabel from Kenya. After struggling to find a mechanic when stuck on the roadside in Nairobi, she and her co-founder created Ziada to help people find local service providers.


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

How useful did you find this blog post?

Easily assign Tasks from Google Docs

Quick summary

In Google Docs, you can now assign a checklist item to yourself or a colleague that will then show up in the assignee’s Tasks list. When edits are made to an assigned item in Tasks, such as a change to the title, due date or completion state, those updates will show in the Doc, and vice versa.


Getting started 

Rollout pace 

Availability 

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers 
  • Not available to users with personal Google Accounts 

Resources 

Chrome for Android Update

Hi, everyone! We've just released Chrome 104 (104.0.5112.97) for Android: it'll become available on Google Play over the next few days.

This release includes stability and performance improvements. You can see a full list of the changes in the Git log. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug.

Android releases contain the same security fixes as their corresponding desktop release, unless otherwise noted.



Erhu Akpobaro
Google Chrome

Watch With Me on Google TV: Kerry Washington’s watchlist

Movies and TV can make us laugh, cry and even shape who we are. Our watchlists can be surprisingly revealing. We’re teaming up with entertainers, artists and cultural icons on our Watch With Meseries on Google TV to share their top picks and give you a behind-the-scenes look at the TV and movies that inspired them.

Actress, producer and director Kerry Washington believes movies and TV have the power to influence us as individuals, and ultimately change the world. “When you step into a story and see yourself immersed in a part of the world that you’ve never been exposed to,” Kerry says, “that’s a magical experience.”

Kerry’s love for movies started when she was a young “latchkey kid” in the Bronx. Movies and TV helped connect her with others and feel a sense of belonging. “When you can connect to a story, you can connect more deeply to your humanity,” Kerry says. “ That’s why we watch, to be human and to connect to ourselves and each other.”

Google TV showing the Watch With Me page with Kerry Washington’s watchlist.

We sat down with Kerry to dig in more on her favorite movie and TV picks.

What do you think your watchlist says about you?

Kerry Washington: A lot of the films I love are about compassion, belonging and finding your way.

Are there specific moments where you used movies or TV to escape?

Washington: I am an only child and spent a lot of time alone. The people in shows? They were my friends.

What inspired you to create your YouTube series Street You Grew Up On?

Washington: I was so excited when we started our series, Street You Grew Up On. It was really fun because the whole point is that we are each the center of our own story. It’s really fun to talk to people we admire about the “once upon a time” in their life.

What new frontiers and environments interest you in movies and TV?

Washington: There’s all this attention on sci-fi and space travel, but [I think] there’s more real estate in the ocean that’s unexplored than in space. I think there’s magic to discover down below.

Your watchlist features many movies with mermaids. Do you believe in mermaids?

Washington: As a child, I really did think that maybe I was part mermaid. To this day, I keep trying to convince my kids that my DNA breakdown includes a percentage of mermaid.

Can movies or TV shows make any change in the world?

Washington: One of the things that I love about being a storyteller is that you really do see that hearts and minds are transformed by the best narratives.

Is it a crime to text during a movie?

Washington: I try to silence notifications so that when I’m watching, I can have as sacred an experience as possible.

Do you watch credits all the way through?

Washington: In my house, we watch the credits all the way through out of respect for the people I work with. The credits that matter the most are not just ones at the beginning of the show. It’s the folks at the end of the show that also make it happen.

Check out Kerry’s watchlist to see the incredible movies and shows that inspired this aspiring mermaid turned storyteller onGoogle TV, rolling out over the next few days. Share your favorites as well using #WatchWithMe.

A climate and clean energy renaissance in the U.S.

The climate and energy provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 represent the most comprehensive investments to combat climate change in U.S. history. These investments offer the opportunity to bring about a renaissance of American-made clean energy and renewed energy security, putting the country on a path to historic emissions reductions by the end of this decade.

At Google, we’ve set a goal to achieve net zero emissions across all of our operations and value chain by 2030. Our net zero goal also includes a moonshot to operate on 24/7 carbon-free energy for all of our data centers and campuses. The climate and energy provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 will provide the glide path to the clean electricity resources needed to decarbonize U.S. grids and reach these goals. We’re founding members of the 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy Compact, a coalition of over 70 companies united in this pursuit, and I’m confident that with the tailwinds on climate and energy provided by these policy measures, that number will grow.

We’ve also integrated sustainability into our core products, like helping drivers and air passengers find fuel-efficient routes in Google Maps and Google Flights or giving homeowners the tools to efficiently heat and cool their house with a Nest Thermostat. It’s our goal to make the sustainable choice the easier choice. The clean energy and climate provisions in this bill will help amplify those small daily choices by making it easier for citizens to adopt clean electric vehicles and upgrade their homes to be more energy efficient.

Climate change is the most urgent challenge of our time. This historic climate legislation will help the country tackle that challenge, build energy resilience and power the industries of tomorrow.

Celebrating 5 years of Kotlin on Android

Posted by Márton Braun, Developer Relations Engineer

Five years ago, at the 2017 Google I/O Keynote, we did something we had never done before: we announced official support for a new programming language to build Android apps with: Kotlin. It was great to see how excited the Android developer community was about this announcement.


Since then, JetBrains and Google have been collaborating around the development of Kotlin, and the Kotlin Foundation was co-founded by the two companies.

As highlighted in those initial I/O announcements, Kotlin is interoperable, mature, production-ready, and open source. It also has outstanding IDE support, as JetBrains develops both the language and its tooling.

Now, five years have passed since the original announcement. To celebrate the amazing language that now powers modern Android app development, we’re taking a quick look at the journey of Kotlin on Android. This post includes quotes from a handful of people who were involved in making Kotlin on Android a success, who are joining us for this celebration.

Early years

The Kotlin adoption story started before official support from Google, within the Android developer community. The excitement in the community was one of the main reasons to invest in official support.
“The decision by Google to add support for Kotlin, I think we underestimate how wild of a notion that was at the time. The odds of another company that size making a similar decision based on community support and enthusiasm is very low.“ (Christina Lee, Android engineer at Pinterest, Kotlin and Android GDE)

After the 2017 announcement, Android Studio started shipping with built-in support for Kotlin. Lots of documentation and samples were updated to use Kotlin.

In 2018, we launched the Android KTX libraries, which provide Kotlin-friendly extensions wrapping the APIs of the Android framework and several AndroidX libraries. Tooling improved further, too, with Kotlin-specific live templates, lint checks, and optimizations in R8 and ART. The reference documentation for Android was also published in Kotlin for the first time.


Going Kotlin-first

At Google I/O 2019, we committed to Kotlin-first Android development, further increasing our investments in the language.
“If you look at a Kotlin new users graph, you immediately notice the two most significant spikes – one in May 2017 and another in May 2019. We have an inside joke about it: ‘Marketing a programming language is easy. All you have to do is make the largest operating system in the world call it an official language during the annual keynote’” (Egor Tolstoy, Kotlin Product Lead at JetBrains)

Being Kotlin-first means that we now design our documentation, samples, training content, new libraries and tools for the Kotlin language first, while still supporting users of the Java programming language.

”Now when we want to start a Jetpack Library, we are writing it in Kotlin unless we have a very, very, very good reason not to do that. It’s clear that Kotlin is the first-class language.” (Yigit Boyar, early proponent of Kotlin within Google, currently leading the development of a handful of Jetpack libraries)


Some examples of Kotlin-first Jetpack libraries are Paging 3 and DataStore, which are both powered by coroutines and Flows for asynchronous operations.


Jetpack Compose, Android’s modern UI toolkit is our greatest commitment to Kotlin so far, as it’s Kotlin-only. It’s powered by a Kotlin compiler plugin, and it makes extensive use of advanced language features like coroutines, top-level functions, and trailing lambdas.

“Kotlin is here to stay and Compose is our bet for the future. Right now, for developers that are starting to learn Android, we’re already recommending the Android Basics with Compose course.” (Florina Muntenescu, Jetpack Compose developer relations lead)


Kotlin beyond Android

Even though Kotlin is a great fit for Android, it’s a general-purpose language and not solely for use on Android. For teams within Google, Kotlin is now generally available to use for both Android and server-side projects. Thousands of Google engineers are writing Kotlin code, and our internal codebase contains more than 8.5 million lines of Kotlin code to date. This number has been increasing rapidly as well, doubling year over year.
“We’ve been working to bring Kotlin to Google engineers for the last few years by adding Kotlin support to all the tools they use. This includes the build system, static analysis tools, libraries and APIs. We’ve talked a lot about encouraging developers to use Kotlin for Android app development, and we strongly encourage using Kotlin for server-side development as well.” (Kevin Bierhoff, lead of the Kotlin at Google team, which supports Google engineers writing Kotlin code)

gRPC Kotlin and Kotlin for protocol buffers are examples of Kotlin projects Google uses both in Android apps and on servers that have been open sourced and are now receiving community adoption and contributions. Kotlin is also supported on Google Cloud.


Collaboration with JetBrains

There is close collaboration between JetBrains and Google around the development of Kotlin. The Kotlin Foundation was co-founded by the two companies, and it ensures that the language and ecosystem age well.

Google engineers have also been working on improving the compiler and on creating important tooling for the language.
“My team is helping JetBrains with rewriting the Kotlin compiler right now, and we also work on Kotlin Symbol Processing, which is the first compiler-related Kotlin project that’s been completely done at Google. We work more closely with JetBrains than some other parts of Google." (Jeffrey van Gogh, member of the Kotlin Foundation, lead of the Kotlin engineering team at Google)

JetBrains and Google also coordinate new releases of the language and the accompanying tooling so that developers are able to use the latest releases as smoothly as possible.
“The collaboration gets stronger over time, and I’m really excited to see its impact on Kotlin’s future. Our coordinated pre-release checks are getting better and better." (Liliia Abdulina, Kotlin QA team lead at JetBrains)


Learn more and share your own stories

You can read more stories about Kotlin from our interviewees in the accompanying Medium post. We’d also love to hear your stories of learning and adopting Kotlin for Android development! Share them on social media using the hashtag #Hi5KotlinOnAndroid!

Finally, let’s appreciate these kind words about Kotlin’s accomplishments to conclude our story.

“Technology can really change people's lives and it can really make people happier at work. We normally focus on ‘there's null safety’ or ‘there's type inference’ or all these other technical parts. But when you take a step back, there's a whole story in there about all of the people who had their passion for coding ignited or reignited because Kotlin is such a wonderful language. It's just so impressive that the team is able to do what they're able to do and that the community is as good as it is." (Christina Lee, Android engineer at Pinterest, GDE for Android and Kotlin)

Have a nice Kotlin on Android!

*Java is a trademark or registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.