Tag Archives: android p

Android P Beta 2 and final APIs!

Posted By Dave Burke, VP of Engineering

Android P Logo

Four weeks ago at Google I/O we released the first beta version of Android P, putting AI at the core of the operating system and focusing on intelligent and simple experiences.

We talked about some of Android's newest features in the keynotes and went deep on the developer APIs during the breakouts. If you missed the livestream, make sure to check out the full playlist of Android talks.

Today we're releasing Android P Beta 2, an update that includes the final Android P APIs, the latest system images, and updated developer tools to help you get ready for the consumer release coming later in the summer.

You can get Android P Beta 2 on Pixel devices by enrolling here. If you're already enrolled and received the Android P Beta 1 on your Pixel device, you'll automatically get the update to Beta 2. Partners that are participating in the Android P Beta program will be updating their devices over the coming weeks.

Enhance your app with Android P features and APIs

Android P Beta 2 is the latest update of our upcoming Android P platform and includes the final APIs (API level 28) as well as the official SDK. You can get started building with the Android P features and APIs today. Here are a few we want you to try -- head over to the features overview for more.

Machine learning at the core

Adaptive battery image

We partnered with DeepMind on a feature we call Adaptive Battery that uses machine learning to prioritize system resources for the apps the user cares about most. If your app is optimized for Doze, App Standby, and Background Limits, Adaptive Battery should work well for you right out of the box. Make sure to check out the details in the power documentation to see how it works and where the impacts could be, and test your apps to make sure they are ready.

App Actions is a new way to help you raise the visibility of your app and help drive engagement. Actions take advantage of machine learning on Android to surface your app to the user at just the right time, based on your app's semantic intents and the user's context. Actions work on Android P and earlier versions of the platform and they'll be available soon for you to start using. Sign up here to be notified when Actions are available.

Slices are a new way to surface rich, templated content in places like Google Search and Assistant. They're interactive, and through Android Jetpack they're compatible all the way back to KitKat. Check out the Getting Started guide to learn how to build with Slices -- you can use the SliceViewer tool to see how your Slices look. Over time we plan to expand the number of places that your Slices can appear, including remote display in other apps.

Simplicity, polish

Android P adds platform support for screens with display cutouts, and we've added new APIs to let you deliver a rich, edge-to-edge experience on the latest screens. Cutout support works seamlessly for apps, with the system managing status bar height to separate your content from the cutout. If you have immersive content, you can use the display cutout APIs to check the position and shape of the cutout and request full-screen layout around it.

All developers should check out the docs to learn how to manage the cutout area and avoid common compatibility issues that can affect apps. Make sure to test your app on a device that has a display cutout, such as one of the Android P Beta devices.

Immersive content display.

Apps with immersive content can display content fullscreen on devices with a display cutout.

If your app uses messaging notifications, take advantage of the changes in MessagingStyle that make notifications even more useful and actionable. You can now show conversations, attach photos and stickers, and even suggest smart replies. You'll soon be able to use ML Kit to generate smart reply suggestions your app.

MessagingStyle notifications MessagingStyle notifications

MessagingStyle notifications with conversations and smart replies [left], images and stickers [right].

Security

Verify purchase icon

With a range of biometric sensors in use for authentication, we've made the experience more consistent across sensor types and apps. Android P introduces a system-managed dialog to prompt the user for any supported type of biometric authentication. Apps no longer need to build their own dialog -- instead they use the BiometricPrompt API to show the standard system dialog. In addition to Fingerprint (including in-display sensors), the API supports Face and Iris authentication.

If your app is drawing its own fingerprint auth dialogs, you should switch to using the BiometricPrompt API as soon as possible.

More

If your app uses the device camera, try the new multi-camera APIs that let you access streams simultaneously from two or more physical cameras. On devices with dual cameras, you can create innovative features not possible with a single camera -- such as seamless zoom, bokeh, and stereo vision. You can get started today using any of the Android P Beta devices that offers a dual camera.

Audio apps can use the Dynamics Processing API for access to a multi-stage, multi-band dynamics processing effect to modify the audio coming out of Android devices and optimize it according to the preferences of the listener or the ambient conditions. Dynamics Processing API Take a look at the Android P features overview for a complete list of the new features and APIs.

Get started in a few simple steps

Android Virtual Device

First, make your app compatible and give your users a seamless transition to Android P. Just install your current app from Google Play on a Android P Beta device or emulator and test -- the app should run and look great, and handle Android P behavior change for all apps properly. After you've made any necessary updates, we recommend publishing to Google Play right away without changing the app's platform targeting.

If you don't have a supported device, remember that you can set up an Android Virtual Device on the Android Emulator as your test environment instead. If you haven't tried the emulator recently, you'll find that it's incredibly fast, boots in under 6 seconds, and even lets you model next-gen screens -- such as long screens and screens with display cutout.

Next, update your app's targetSdkVersion to 28 as soon as possible, so Android P users of your app can benefit from the platform's latest security, performance, and stability features. If your app is already targeting API 26+ in line with Google Play's upcoming policies, then changing to target 28 should be a small jump.

It's also important to test your apps for uses of non-SDK interfaces and reduce your reliance on them. As noted previously, in Android P we're starting a gradual process to restrict access to selected non-SDK interfaces. Watch for logcat warnings that highlight direct uses of restricted non-SDK interfaces and try the new StrictMode method detectNonSdkApiUsage() to catch accesses programmatically. Where possible, you should move to using public equivalents from the Android SDK or NDK. If there's no public API that meets your use-case, please let us know.

When you're ready, dive into Android P and learn about the new features and APIs to extend your apps. To build with the new APIs, just download the official API 28 SDK and tools into Android Studio 3.1, or use the latest version of Android Studio 3.2. Then update your project's compileSdkVersion and targetSdkVersion to API 28.

Visit the Developer Preview site for details and documentation. Also check out this video and the Google I/O Android playlist for more on what's new in Android P for developers.

Publish to Google Play alpha, beta, or production channels

Starting today you can publish your APK updates that are compiled against, or optionally targeting, API 28. Publishing an update to Google Play during the preview lets you push updates to users to test compatibility on existing devices, including devices running Android P Beta 2.

To make sure that your updated app runs well on Android P as well as older versions, a common strategy is to use Google Play's beta testing feature to get early feedback from a small group of users -- including Android P Beta 2 users — and then do a staged rollout to production.

How to get Android P Beta 2

For Pixel devices, you can enroll your device in the Android Beta program and you'll automatically receive the update to Android P Beta 2 over-the-air. If you're already enrolled and received Beta 1, watch for the update coming your way soon. Partners that are participating in the Android P Beta program will be updating their devices over the coming weeks.

You can see the full list of supported partner and Pixel devices at android.com/beta. For each device you'll find specs and links to the manufacturer's dedicated site for downloads, support, and to report issues.

Thanks for all of your feedback so far. Please continue to share feedback or requests as we work towards the consumer release later this summer. Feel free to use our hotlists for platform issues, app compatibility issues, and third-party SDK issues.

We're looking forward to seeing your apps on Android P!

Faster Adoption with Project Treble

Posted by Iliyan Malchev, Project Treble Architect

Android P Beta available at android.com/beta

As Android continues to evolve, each new release of the OS brings new features, new user experiences, and better security. It is important that these new releases find their way to mobile devices as fast as possible.

Yesterday, we announced that the following devices, in addition to Pixel and Pixel 2, now support Android P Beta: Sony Xperia XZ2, Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, Nokia 7 Plus, Oppo R15 Pro, Vivo X21, OnePlus 6 and Essential PH‑1. Android P Beta provides an opportunity for developers and early adopters around the world to try the latest Android release, test their apps, and provide feedback.

In this post, we provide an update to Project Treble and the technology that allowed us to bring Android Beta to more phones this year.

Building the Foundation

Bringing the new Android release quickly to the hands of users takes a combined effort between Google, silicon manufacturers (SM), device manufacturers (OEMs), and carriers. This process is technically challenging and requires aligning the schedules between our industry partners.

To reduce the technical difficulties, we launched Project Treble as part of Android Oreo.

The Silicon Manufacturers

Next, to capitalize on the foundation we built, we collaborated closely with the silicon manufacturers, where the journey of making an Android device always begins.

Any device with the latest version of Android must be based on an SoC with the proper software support for it. This software, commonly referred to as the Board Support Package (BSP), contains not only the chip-specific vendor implementation, but also all of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and pieces of the framework that are missing from AOSP itself (e.g., carrier-specific telephony functionality).

These BSPs are the starting point for all device launches. OEMs adapt the vendor implementation to their hardware and add their own custom framework components.

While silicon manufacturers always want the latest version of Android in their BSPs, the costs have been prohibitive. By making it possible for newer AOSP frameworks to run on older, already-released vendor implementations, Project Treble dramatically reduces the need for continuous investment in older silicon to support each Android release. Silicon manufacturers have to do all this work just once, rather than every time there is a new release of Android.

Solving the Timing Problem

However, that first time still has to happen. Below is a chart, which illustrates the effort the various actors expend over time as they go through each release. You can think of it as code churn or bug count over time.

The chart shows how there is very little time in the year for Google, silicon manufacturers, and the OEMs to all this work. Any overlap between phases causes code churn and introduces significant schedule risk. For OEMs who target the holiday season, it is often safer to launch on an older BSP with a year-old or even older Android version. This dynamic has been at the heart of the slow uptake of the latest Android release, even on flagship devices.

To solve this, we've worked closely with Qualcomm, MediaTek and Samsung SLSI to co-develop their BSPs, starting with Android P. Their BSPs are now ready for Android P on a much-accelerated schedule, reducing the overall effort significantly. These silicon manufacturers are now able to provide a stable and high-quality release much earlier than before, allowing OEMs to bring the latest innovations of Android to their customers across the globe.

This is an important step in accelerating the adoption of Android releases that bring numerous benefits to our partners, users, and Android developers. We look forward to seeing many more partners launch or upgrade devices to Android P.

DNS over TLS support in Android P Developer Preview

Posted by Erik Kline, Android software engineer, and Ben Schwartz, Jigsaw software engineer

The first step of almost every connection on the internet is a DNS query. A client, such as a smartphone, typically uses a DNS server provided by the Wi-Fi or cellular network. The client asks this DNS server to convert a domain name, like www.google.com, into an IP address, like 2607:f8b0:4006:80e::2004. Once the client has the IP address, it can connect to its intended destination.

When the DNS protocol was designed in the 1980s, the internet was a much smaller, simpler place. For the past few years, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has worked to define a new DNS protocol that provides users with the latest protections for security and privacy. The protocol is called "DNS over TLS" (standardized as RFC 7858).

Like HTTPS, DNS over TLS uses the TLS protocol to establish a secure channel to the server. Once the secure channel is established, DNS queries and responses can't be read or modified by anyone else who might be monitoring the connection. (The secure channel only applies to DNS, so it can't protect users from other kinds of security and privacy violations.)

DNS over TLS in P

The Android P Developer Preview includes built-in support for DNS over TLS. We added a Private DNS mode to the Network & internet settings.

By default, devices automatically upgrade to DNS over TLS if a network's DNS server supports it. But users who don't want to use DNS over TLS can turn it off.

Users can enter a hostname if they want to use a private DNS provider. Android then sends all DNS queries over a secure channel to this server or marks the network as "No internet access" if it can't reach the server. (For testing purposes, see this community-maintained list of compatible servers.)

DNS over TLS mode automatically secures the DNS queries from all apps on the system. However, apps that perform their own DNS queries, instead of using the system's APIs, must ensure that they do not send insecure DNS queries when the system has a secure connection. Apps can get this information using a new API: LinkProperties.isPrivateDnsActive().

With the Android P Developer Preview, we're proud to present built-in support for DNS over TLS. In the future, we hope that all operating systems will include secure transports for DNS, to provide better protection and privacy for all users on every new connection.

Protecting users with TLS by default in Android P

Posted by Chad Brubaker, Senior Software Engineer Android Security

Android is committed to keeping users, their devices, and their data safe. One of the ways that we keep data safe is by protecting all data that enters or leaves an Android device with Transport Layer Security (TLS) in transit. As we announced in our Android P developer preview, we're further improving these protections by preventing apps that target Android P from allowing unencrypted connections by default.

This follows a variety of changes we've made over the years to better protect Android users.To prevent accidental unencrypted connections, we introduced the android:usesCleartextTraffic manifest attribute in Android Marshmallow. In Android Nougat, we extended that attribute by creating the Network Security Config feature, which allows apps to indicate that they do not intend to send network traffic without encryption. In Android Nougat and Oreo, we still allowed cleartext connections.

How do I update my app?

If your app uses TLS for all connections then you have nothing to do. If not, update your app to use TLS to encrypt all connections. If you still need to make cleartext connections, keep reading for some best practices.

Why should I use TLS?

Android considers all networks potentially hostile and so encrypting traffic should be used at all times, for all connections. Mobile devices are especially at risk because they regularly connect to many different networks, such as the Wi-Fi at a coffee shop.

All traffic should be encrypted, regardless of content, as any unencrypted connections can be used to inject content, increase attack surface for potentially vulnerable client code, or track the user. For more information, see our past blog post and Developer Summit talk.

Isn't TLS slow?

No, it's not.

How do I use TLS in my app?

Once your server supports TLS, simply change the URLs in your app and server responses from http:// to https://. Your HTTP stack handles the TLS handshake without any more work.

If you are making sockets yourself, use an SSLSocketFactory instead of a SocketFactory. Take extra care to use the socket correctly as SSLSocket doesn't perform hostname verification. Your app needs to do its own hostname verification, preferably by calling getDefaultHostnameVerifier() with the expected hostname. Further, beware that HostnameVerifier.verify() doesn't throw an exception on error but instead returns a boolean result that you must explicitly check.

I need to use cleartext traffic to...

While you should use TLS for all connections, it's possibly that you need to use cleartext traffic for legacy reasons, such as connecting to some servers. To do this, change your app's network security config to allow those connections.

We've included a couple example configurations. See the network security config documentation for a bit more help.

Allow cleartext connections to a specific domain

If you need to allow connections to a specific domain or set of domains, you can use the following config as a guide: 

<network-security-config>
    <domain-config cleartextTrafficPermitted="true">
        <domain includeSubdomains="true">insecure.example.com</domain>
        <domain includeSubdomains="true">insecure.cdn.example.com</domain>
    </domain-config>
</network-security-config>

Allow connections to arbitrary insecure domains

If your app supports opening arbitrary content from URLs over insecure connections, you should disable cleartext connections to your own services while supporting cleartext connections to arbitrary hosts. Keep in mind that you should be cautious about the data received over insecure connections as it could have been tampered with in transit. 

<network-security-config>
    <domain-config cleartextTrafficPermitted="false">
        <domain includeSubdomains="true">example.com</domain>
        <domain includeSubdomains="true">cdn.example2.com</domain>
    </domain-config>
    <base-config cleartextTrafficPermitted="true" />
</network-security-config>

How do I update my library?

If your library directly creates secure/insecure connections, make sure that it honors the app's cleartext settings by checking isCleartextTrafficPermitted before opening any cleartext connection.

Cryptography Changes in Android P

Posted by Adam Vartanian, Software Engineer

We hope you're enjoying the first developer preview of Android P. We wanted to specifically call out some backward-incompatible changes we plan to make to the cryptographic capabilities in Android P, which you can see in the developer preview.

Changes to providers

Starting in Android P, we plan to deprecate some functionality from the BC provider that's duplicated by the AndroidOpenSSL (also known as Conscrypt) provider. This will only affect applications that specify the BC provider explicitly when calling getInstance() methods. To be clear, we aren't doing this because we are concerned about the security of the implementations from the BC provider, rather because having duplicated functionality imposes additional costs and risks while not providing much benefit.

If you don't specify a provider in your getInstance() calls, no changes are required.

If you specify the provider by name or by instance—for example, Cipher.getInstance("AES/CBC/PKCS7PADDING", "BC") or Cipher.getInstance("AES/CBC/PKCS7PADDING", Security.getProvider("BC"))—the behavior you get in Android P will depend on what API level your application targets. For apps targeting an API level before P, the call will return the BC implementation and log a warning in the application log. For apps targeting Android P or later, the call will throw NoSuchAlgorithmException.

To resolve this, you should stop specifying a provider and use the default implementation.

In a later Android release, we plan to remove the deprecated functionality from the BC provider entirely. Once removed, any call that requests that functionality from the BC provider (whether by name or instance) will throw NoSuchAlgorithmException.

Removal of the Crypto provider

In a previous post, we announced that the Crypto provider was deprecated beginning in Android Nougat. Since then, any request for the Crypto provider by an application targeting API 23 (Marshmallow) or before would succeed, but requests by applications targeting API 24 (Nougat) or later would fail. In Android P, we plan to remove the Crypto provider entirely. Once removed, any call to SecureRandom.getInstance("SHA1PRNG", "Crypto") will throw NoSuchProviderException. Please ensure your apps have been updated.