Admins can now upload, manage, and distribute private iOS applications to advanced managed devices.
In the Admin console, under Apps > web and mobile apps > Add app, you’ll now see the “Add Private iOS app” option, which will guide admins through uploading the app, populating information about the app, and configuring the OUs and groups they want the app to be distributed to.
In the Admin console, navigate to Apps > Web and Mobile apps and then select "Add App".
Once added, you can update, delete, and manage user access to the app.
Who’s impacted
Admins
Why you’d use it
Internally developed, private apps can be useful and relied on by users for a variety of reasons, such as increasing productivity or sharing company specific information, such as cafe menus or campus maps. By giving admins the ability to add and provision custom iOS applications through the Admin console, they can securely distribute their own in-house apps. They can also keep private apps updated easily, because when they upload a new version of the app it’s automatically updated on users’ devices.
Available to Google Workspace Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, and Cloud Identity Premium customers.
Not available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Education Fundamentals, Education Plus, Frontline, and Nonprofits, as well as G Suite Basic and Business customers
The Dev channel has been updated to 97.0.4681.0 for Mac, Windows and Linux coming soon.
A partial list of 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.
We’re updating the menus in Google Sheets to make it easier to locate the most commonly-used features.
In this update:
The menu bar and right-click menus have been shortened to better fit your screen to prevent menus from being hidden off screen
Some features were reorganized and added to more intuitive locations (for example, you can now freeze a row or column from the right-click menu)
Some descriptions of items in the menu are shorter, enabling faster recognition
Icons have been added to help you locate features more easily
Changes are across all menus, including File, Edit, View, Insert, Format, Date, Tools, Extensions, Help, and Accessibility.
Example of updated menus in Google Sheets
Who’s impacted
End users
Why it’s important
The new design improves findability of key features, making it quicker and easier to use Sheets, especially on devices with smaller screens.
Additional details
Some of your favorite menu items may have moved a little, but all existing functionality is still available. We hope that their new home will be more intuitive and make it easier and faster to navigate the product.
Getting started
Admins: There is no admin control for this feature.
End users: This feature will be ON by default and cannot be disabled. Use the menus as you would regularly and enjoy the new look and feel. Visit the Help Center to learn more about using Google Sheets
We’re less than 24 hours away from kicking off the 2021 Android Dev Summit, broadcasting live online on October 27 & 28. The summit kicks off on October 27 at 10AM PDT with a 50-minute technical keynote, The Android Show. You can tune in at developer.android.com/dev-summit, or watch on YouTube.
Over the two day event, we have a number of ways for you to tune in and hear your favorite Android development topics discussed live from the team who built Android. Got questions about Modern Android Development, Large Screens, or Material You? Ask them on Twitter now using #AskAndroid to get them answered live on the air. We’ll also host live Android Code-Alongs. 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.
For the full agenda with timings, check out the Android Dev Summit page. And of course, don’t forget: if you run into the bugs of chaos before then, let them know that together with Team Jetpack, we’re coming for them at Android Dev Summit…
Welcome to #IamaGDE - a series of spotlights presenting Google Developer Experts (GDEs) from across the globe. Discover their stories, passions, and highlights of their community work.
Bhavesh Bhatt is a data scientist and a YouTuber based in Mumbai, India. He began his career as an engineer and transitioned to machine learning and data science. Now, he trains other data scientists to be successful in their careers. Bhavesh is known for his popular YouTube videos and an open source app he created to help Indian citizens locate vaccination appointments near them in the spring of 2021. He has been a GDE since 2019.
Meet Bhavesh Bhatt, Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning and Data Science.
The Early Days
Bhavesh Bhatt has always been technical and has always enjoyed experimenting with coding circuits and creating end-to-end solutions. He earned his Bachelor of Engineering (BE) degree in 2013 from the University of Mumbai and his Master's degree in 2016 from BITS Pilani K K Birla Goa Campus in Embedded Systems. He began his career in the Engineering Development Group at MathWorks and later worked as a software developer at Cisco Systems.
Bhavesh took a course in machine learning in Mumbai to move his career toward machine learning, and he started the next phase of his career as a data scientist at FlexiLoans. There, his role involved automating processes using deep learning to decrease the TAT of loan applications. Bhavesh has worked on object detection, object classification, and OCR-related solutions and is currently a data scientist at Fractal Analytics.
“It’s been an interesting journey so far in data science and machine learning,” he says.
In 2017, he started creating videos on machine learning and data science, as a way to contribute what he had learned to the developer community. He enjoyed creating end-to-end videos and sharing them for free on YouTube, and his subscriber base kept growing. He now has about 33,000 subscribers to his channel and hundreds of videos posted there.
In August 2018, he became an instructor at Greyatom and has helped aspiring data scientists make a successful career transition ever since. He has worked with several EdTech startups to develop their machine learning course curriculum and has reviewed multiple machine learning books.
Becoming a GDE
Bhavesh has been a GDE since October 2019.
“I have had an exponential learning curve, all thanks to the Google developer expert group,” he says. “The Google developer expert program has helped me grow in terms of understanding different technologies, like Tensorflow, and Google Cloud.”
He appreciates having access to Google’s cutting-edge work on machine learning as a GDE.
“Google is in the forefront in driving research and natural language processing,” he says. “We get to interact with Googlers and get insights on research.”
Building a Vaccination Availability Dashboard
India’s dire second wave of COVID-19 infections took place in April and May of 2021. At the same time, the country had rolled out its vaccination program, and demand for vaccination appointments was high. People were trying to book appointments through a single portal that Bhavesh felt could be optimized to handle the high volume of traffic it was receiving.
“While exploring the vaccination website, I found that there was an API that developers could access,” says Bhavesh.
He played around with the API to understand its structure and how to extract data from it, as well as what types of data he could extract. He explored the different end points that were in the API. Then, he created an early version of a dashboard that pulled data from the server and displayed it in real time, allowing people to track the available vaccination slots near them.
“I created the first version of this application using a very popular programming language called S-Python,” Bhavesh says. “I used Google software called Google Colaboratory in order to create the initial solution.”
Google Colaboratory, or Colab for short, allows developers to write and execute Python in the browser, requiring no configuration and providing free access to GPUs and easy sharing. Data scientists can use Colab to analyze and visualize data using popular Python libraries. Colab is also useful for machine learning: Developers can import an image dataset, train an image classifier on it, and evaluate the model in a few lines of code. Bhavesh used it extensively for his project..
“I don’t code on a local machine; I prefer Google Colab because of the flexibility of reading and understanding one cell at a time,” he says. “I added a layer of protection to only add IP addresses from India, and then I had to move the dashboard to my local machine.”
Bhavesh tried scaling his solution in a local script that could run on his machine, but he knew that to roll it out to a larger audience, he’d have to deploy it elsewhere. He had limited knowledge of Google Cloud, so he reached out to the India GDE ecosystem and got connected to a Cloud GDE who hosted the web application on an Indian server, so people could use it. Once the prototype was deployed on Google Cloud, Bhavesh created a YouTube video to reach out as many developers and users as possible, so people could start utilizing it.
“People used it to its fullest potential,” Bhavesh says. “Lots of people used it to book slots and get vaccinated.”
Other developers created enhanced versions of Bhavesh’s script.
“I was just displaying the slots available at the nearest vaccination center, but others created solutions based on mine, where they’d send availability notifications on Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram,” he says. “Overall, the application was received really well by the community, and a lot of people reached out to me and thanked me for creating it.”
Bhavesh’s advice to fellow developers
Bhavesh recommends that developers explore as many technologies as possible, including software, engineering, data science, and machine learning. He also encourages developers to teach others, by writing blogs and tutorials or by posting videos.
“If you have learned something new, share it with the community,” he advises. “It will help the community and is a good opportunity for individual growth, as well.”
As a gamer (a new gamer, but a gamer nonetheless), I know how having a strong internet connection matters to every aspect of gaming. From waiting for an update to download, to playing in a battle royale with friends, to live streaming gameplay, even the seemingly smallest details of your internet connection are critical to playing your best. So, when I got a chance to talk to some Google Fiber customers for our latest campaign, I knew we could trust gamers to highlight what matters with their internet.
We reached out to gamers, streamers, and game developers on social media who were already using Google Fiber 1 Gig. Then, we hooked them up with Google Fiber 2 Gig and a year free of service to share their insights and experiences gaming over our fastest internet plan.
That’s how we met Jordan, a gamer, streamer, and professional goofball (his words) who lives in Kansas City, MO. And Morgan, a gamer, streamer, makeup artist, and plant mom who lives in Charlotte, NC. And Pathra, a gamer, streamer, and dog mom who lives in Atlanta, GA. And Kartik, a game developer, gamer, and home cook who lives in Atlanta, GA. (And a bunch of other fantastic gamers in all of our cities that we wish we could ALSO have a camera crew follow around.)
All of them were excited to share their experience having Google Fiber as their internet company — because having fast, reliable internet makes a tangible difference in their professional and personal lives. So yes, gamers are internet connoisseurs. But they’re also diverse, multi-faceted, and have incredible stories to tell, even beyond gaming. We hope you’ll enjoy hearing from them as much as we did.
Jordan and Kartik’s stories are now live on YouTube, and keep an eye out over the next few weeks to learn more about Morgan and Pathra. Follow us on social media (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) for updates on when these go live.
Posted by Talia Bootz, Google Fiber Creative and Social Content Manager
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author: Talia Bootz
title: Google Fiber Creative and Social Content Manager
Open Cloud enables you to develop software faster, innovate more easily, and scale more efficiently—while also reducing technology risk. Google has a long history of leadership in open source, and today, I want to look back at our activities around open source projects, for databases, over the past year.
Give developers the best tools to be efficient
Developers choose to build applications with managed database services on Google Cloud to benefit from velocity, scalability, security, and performance. To enable you to be most efficient and deliver your best possible work, we deliver tools and frameworks that work with your preferred development environments, no matter if you develop in the cloud or on premises. To make local testing, building and continuous integration easier for our cloud-native databases, we released emulators for Cloud Spanner, Firestore, and Cloud Bigtable so that you can test your code wherever you develop it - without the need to create or re-create cloud infrastructure with every test run.
Another area where we are helping developers is with instrumentation of Cloud SQL for easier debugging and performance tuning. With Cloud SQL Insights it is easier than ever to pinpoint underperforming SQL statements. That said, without additional instrumentation, it can be cumbersome to identify the source code or microservice that issued that SQL - let alone tying a SQL statement to a client session and its context. So we released Sqlcommenter as an open source library that will automatically add this instrumentation as SQL comments in queries that are generated by popular ORMs like Hibernate, Django, Sqlalchemy, and others (repoblog). We didn’t stop there, but merged Sqlcommenter with OpenTelemetry (blog) to add SQL insights from instrumented queries back to OpenTelemetry traces.
Lastly, we want to broaden access to our differentiated offerings, like Spanner. The recently announced Spanner PostgreSQL interface allows organizations to access Spanner’s industry-leading consistency and availability at scale using tools and skills from the popular PostgreSQL ecosystem. This new way of working with Spanner provides familiarity for developers and portability for administrators. (blog) Learn more in the documentation or sign up for the preview today.
Provide connectivity that is simple and secure
Connecting to APIs and databases from an application running in the cloud should be simple and secure. That’s why we recommend using IAM and Application Default Credentials when authenticating to other services. The Cloud SQL Proxy (repo) has been doing this and also setting up firewalls for you for a while. It works by running a local client either inside your VM or a GKE cluster. This year, we added libraries for Java (repo) and Python (repo) that can provide similar functionality without the overhead of running an extra client such as the proxy.
Cloud Spanner also offers an open source adapter for its new PostgreSQL interface (repo). This local proxy allows tools, starting with psql, to connect to a Spanner database using the PostgreSQL wire protocol.
Manage cloud infrastructure with the tools of your choice
When it comes to provisioning, monitoring, and managing your cloud database services, flexibility and choice are important. We provide you with our cloud console, gcloud cli, and APIs as well as our own Deployment Manager. That said, you may prefer different ways to manage cloud infrastructure - whether through interactive tools or scripts or embedded into CI/CD pipelines that support GitOps or other controls, checks, and balances. Terraform is one of those open tools that is very popular - and we ensure that our cloud databases can be managed from it as documented in this blog about creating Spanner instances with Terraform.
If you manage the majority of your resources with Kubernetes either directly or through package managers like Helm, then our Kubernetes Config Connector (KCC) might be for you. In a nutshell, KCC exposes Google Cloud services such as Cloud SQL, Spanner, and others as Custom Resources in Kubernetes. This allows you to create and reconcile cloud resources outside of Kubernetes just like K8s native objects.
Once you are managing cloud infrastructure with CI/CD, the next step is to extend that same mechanism to manage objects within your databases such as tables, indexes, and views. To that extent we have released a Liquibase extension for Cloud Spanner.
Help you to move data with confidence
Cloud journeys often involve moving data either in a lift and shift process or sometimes replatforming to a different database. Whatever your journey, we want to simplify the process and give you the confidence that your migration is successful.
For enterprise users with Oracle databases, we have several open source projects. First, we have the Optimus Prime database assessment tool (repo) that queries your database and collects information about schemas and historic performance to be analyzed for migration complexity and consolidation potential. Our own professional services teams have been using this toolset to plan migrations to Bare Metal Solution for Oracle.
Some Oracle users are looking for opportunities to transform their workloads to fit with their bigger strategy of modernizing applications with Kubernetes. For this group we developed and open sourced the El Carro Kubernetes operator for Oracle. This not only automates database lifecycle tasks for systems running on Kubernetes, but also exposes declarative APIs for these operations.
If your application supports replatforming from Oracle to PostgreSQL, then we have a toolset for schema conversion along with dataflow pipelines that will read the output of a change data capture job and load it into a PostgreSQL database. What a great use-case for Datastream - our new serverless change data capture service.
Another case of heterogeneous database migration is to move MySQL or PostgreSQL databases to Cloud Spanner. HarbourBridge helps with the evaluation and data migration, and our latest contribution was adding support for DynamoDB as a source database. Part of every heterogeneous migration should be to validate that the source and target data are matching - we have released the Data Validation Toolkit for that use-case. DVT can connect to a number of source and target databases and compare the data on each side - giving you the confidence that your migration did not miss or change any records.
Conclusion
Whether you are migrating existing databases or you are building your next application in the cloud - we want to make your journey as comfortable and seamless as possible. Open source projects play a big role in meeting you where you are and providing you with the connectivity options, language support, and tools you want for management and migrations.
By Bjoern Rost, Product Manager, Google Cloud Databases
For many creators, YouTube is a go-to learning resource. That’s why we’ve created a series of entertaining and educational videos for the Google for Creators YouTube channel. Through interviews, hosted shows, tutorials and roundups, you’ll hear from successful creators sharing useful tips, strategies and best practices for making and monetizing content.
Here’s a little about each of our video series to help you get acquainted with the Google for Creators YouTube channel.
On an episode of “Creator Insights,” holistic wellness blogger Andi Eaton stresses the importance of finding work-life balance.
Creator Insights
Creator Insights taps into the expertise of successful content makers sharing their top insights and advice. Featured creators host a series of episodes, each one diving into a specific topic. Whether you’re interested in the value of evergreen content or the importance of setting boundaries to achieve work-life balance, you’ll get advice and easy-to-follow strategies to help you on your own creative journey. Recent Creator Insights contributors include lifestyle and beauty blogger Keiko Lynn, holistic wellness influencer Andi Eaton, and Black food and culture digital content makers Eden Hagos and Elle Asiedu — with many more to follow.
Google for Creators’ Raunak Mahesh interviews fashion blogger Tokes on an episode of "Creator Spotlight."
Shishir Malani hosts an episode of “Storytime” about using metrics to measure the impact of your Web Story.
Storytime
Follow along with Storytime, a weekly video series with guides for making and sharing compelling Web Stories — Google’s tappable visual stories format. Storytime gives step-by-step tutorials on Web Stories tools and features, including layout, design and monetization, to help you become a Web Stories master.
Google for Creators’ Paul Bakaus hosts the debut episode of “The Creator Update,” a rundown of the latest trends in the creator industry.
The Creator Update
If you’re having trouble keeping up with the latest trends in the creator economy, you’re not alone. Google for Creators recently launched its weekly video series, The Creator Update, to help with just that. This hosted show shares trending topics in a bite-sized format, with a quick rundown of the latest tools, websites and people making a buzz in the creator community.
This November at COP26, global leaders will meet in Glasgow to discuss how to jointly address the challenge of climate change. Recent research has found that more than 70% of the global population is concerned or fearful about climate change. So we’re focused on making this year’s conference accessible to everyone. In partnership with the COP26 Presidency, we’ll livestream the activities through YouTube and Google Arts and Culture, helping COP26 expand the reach of its digital channels. YouTube creators at the conference will create content to share with their global audiences, and we’ll publish video, imagery and artworks from “the green zone” — the center of COP26 activity — via a new page on Google Arts and Culture, inviting people everywhere to learn about the discussions and activities taking place.
"I'm delighted COP26 is partnering with Google to help bring the Green Zone of COP26 to the world in a few days’ time,” COP President-Designate Alok Sharma said. “With more than 200 captivating and diverse events on offer we want everyone to have the opportunity to learn more about climate action and help protect our planet."
Our work at COP26 is part of our larger third decade of climate action strategy. We’re not only committed to be more sustainable in how Google operates as a business, but we’re also focused on building new technologies to make sure that partners, enterprise customers and the billions of people who use Google products every day can be more sustainable as well.
How we’re leading at Google
At Google, our goal is to achieve net zero emissions across all of our operations and value chain by 2030. We aim to reduce the majority of our emissions (versus our 2019 baseline) before 2030, and plan to invest in nature-based and technology-based carbon removal solutions to neutralize our remaining emissions.
We were the first major company to operate as carbon neutral in 2007, and have matched our energy use with 100 percent renewable energy for four years in a row. Last year we set a moonshot goal to operate on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030 for all of our data centers and campuses. That means that by the end of the decade, we aim to deliver every search, every email, and every YouTube video without emitting carbon. We’re making strong progress — in 2020 we achieved 67% carbon-free energy on an hourly basis across our data centers, up from 61% in 2019. Five of our data centers, including those in Denmark and Finland, are at or near 90% carbon-free energy.
On our campuses we’re investing in sustainable energy innovations, like dragonscale solar and geothermal pilings, to get us closer to our goal to be carbon-free by 2030. We hope these new technologies will inspire similar projects from others that advance sustainability without compromising design and aesthetics.
How we’re enabling our partners
Urban areas are currently responsible for 70% of the world’s carbon emissions. Last year we pledged to help more than 500 cities reduce one gigaton of carbon emissions per year by 2030 via Google’s Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE). EIE is helping major cities, including Amsterdam, Birmingham UK and Copenhagen, map their emissions data, solar potential, and air quality for their remediation plans.
Technology can also help cities decarbonize in more direct ways. We recently shared an early research project that is deploying AI to help cities make their traffic lights more efficient, and we have a pilot program in Israel accomplishing this. So far, we have seen a 10-20% reduction in fuel consumption and delay time at intersections. We’re excited to expand this pilot to Rio de Janeiro and beyond.
Finally, we’re helping business customers like Whirlpool, Etsy, HSBC, Unilever and Salesforce develop solutions for the specific climate change challenges they face. Unilever is working with the power of Google Cloud and satellite imagery through Google Earth Engine to help avoid deforestation in their supply chain. At Cloud Next, we launched Carbon Footprint, a tool that helps large and small businesses understand their gross carbon emissions associated with the electricity of their Google Cloud Platform usage. This new information will help companies track progress toward their own climate targets.
How we’re aiming to empower everyone
In addition to businesses, increasingly individuals are focused on what more they can do to help the planet. That’s why we committed to help 1 billion people make more sustainable choices by 2022 through Google’s products and services. Recently, we shared several new ways people can use Google’s products to make sustainable choices — from choosing eco-friendly routes and searching for greener flights, hotels, and appliances to supporting clean energy from home with Nest and surfacing authoritative information on climate change from sources like the United Nations.
Google’s goal is to make the sustainable choice an easier choice — for governments, businesses, and individuals. We look forward to a carbon-free future and are excited to continue the conversation at COP26.
Switching to a new phone can be a daunting experience, especially if you are moving to a completely different operating system. We want to make this process easier, so with the recent Android 12 release, we added the ability to transfer all your essentials by connecting your iPhone with your new Android phone using a cable. With your permission, Android automatically matches and installs the same apps from Google Play, and lets you easily bring your SMS and iMessage history with you, along with photos, videos, contacts, calendars and more.
But we can do more, too. Historically, certain types of data were impossible to bring across when switching from an iPhone to Android. Things like your WhatsApp chat history – those cherished memories, photos, voice messages and conversations with friends and family — can be really tough to leave behind, and that's something we wanted to fix. So starting today, you can safely transfer your chat history and memories from your WhatsApp account on iPhone to Android. We worked closely with the WhatsApp team to build a new set of capabilities, all designed to make it easier to switch from iPhone to Android and take your WhatsApp history with you.
Simply connect and transfer your WhatsApp data
All you need is a USB-C to Lightning cable to get started. Simply connect your phones, and when prompted while setting up your new Android device, scan a QR code on your iPhone to launch WhatsApp and move all your conversations, media and more over to your new device.
Your WhatsApp data securely travels between two phones
Our team has worked hand-in-hand with WhatsApp to ensure your data remains protected throughout the transfer process, so no one else can ever access your WhatsApp information and files. Your WhatsApp chat history will simply be copied from your iPhone to your new Android phone, and we’ll automatically make sure you don’t receive new messages on the old device while the transfer is in progress.
This transfer capability is available on Samsung Galaxy devices and now on all Pixel phones, and will become available on new smartphones that launch with Android 12, so you’ll never lose what’s most important to you when making the switch. There’s never been a better time to switch to Android.
