Tag Archives: Android Studio

Android Studio 2.0 – Beta

Posted by Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

Android Studio 2.0 is latest release of the official Android IDE focused on build performance and emulator speed to improve the app development experience. With brand new features like Instant Run which enables you to quickly edit and view code changes, or the new & faster Android emulator, Android Studio 2.0 is the upgrade you do not want to miss. In preparation for the final release, you can download Android Studio 2.0 Beta in the Beta release channel. Overall, the Android Studio 2.0 release has a host of new features which include:

  • *Updated for Beta* Instant Run - Enables a faster code edit & app deployment cycle.
  • *Updated for Beta* Android Emulator - Brand new emulator that is faster than most real devices, and includes a brand new user interface.
  • *Updated for Beta* Google App Indexing Integration & Testing - Adding App Indexing into your app helps you re-engage your users. In the first preview of Android Studio 2.0 you could add indexing code stubs into your code. With the beta release you can now test and validate your URL links in your app all within the IDE.
  • Fast ADB - Installing and pushing files is now up to 5x faster using Android Studio 2.0 with an updated Android Debug Bridge (ADB) offered in platform-tools 23.1.0.
  • GPU Profiler Preview - For graphics intensive applications, you can now visually step through your OpenGL ES code to optimize your app or game
  • Integration of IntelliJ 15 - Android Studio is based on the efficient coding platform of Intellij. Check out the new features from IntelliJ here.

Check out the latest installment of Android Studio Tool Time video below to watch the highlights of the features.



New Features in Android Studio 2.0 Beta


Instant Run

We first previewed Instant Run in November; this latest beta release introduces a new capability called Cold Swap

Instant Run in Android Studio 2.0 allows you to quickly make changes to your app code while your app is running on an Android device or Android Emulator. Instead of waiting for your entire app to rebuild and redeploy after each code change, Android Studio 2.0 will try to incrementally build and push only the incremental code or resource change. Depending on the code changes you make, you can see the results of your change in under a second. By simply updating your app to use the latest Gradle plugin ( 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:2.0.0-beta2’ ), you can take advantage of this time saving features with no other modifications to your code. If your project is setup correctly with Instant Run, you will see a lightning bolt next to your Run button on the toolbar:


Instant Run Button

Behind the scenes, Android Studio 2.0 instruments your code during the first compilation and deployment of your app to your device in order to determine where to swap out code and resources. The Instant Run features updates your app on a best-effort basis and automatically uses one of the following swap methods to update your app:

  • Hot Swap - When only method implementations (including constructors) are changed, the changes are hot swapped. Your application keeps running and the new implementation is used the next time the method is called.
  • Warm Swap - When app resources are changed, the changes are warm swapped. This is similar to a hot swap, except that the current Activity is restarted. You will notice a slight flicker on the screen as the Activity restarts.
  • *New for Beta* Cold Swap - This will quickly restart the whole application. Typically for structural code change, including changes to the class hierarchy, method signatures, static initializers, or fields. Cold Swap is available when you deploy to targets with API level 21 or above.

We made major changes to Instant Run since the first preview of Android Studio 2.0, and now the feature works with more code and resources cases. We will continue to add more code change cases to Instant Run in future releases of Android Studio. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to send us a feature request and learn more about Instant Run here.

App Indexing

Supporting app indexing is now even easier with Android Studio 2.0. App Indexing puts your app in front of users who use Google Search. It works by indexing the URL patterns you provide in your app manifest and using API calls from your app to make content within your app available to both existing and new users. Specifically, when you support URLs for your app content, your users can go directly to those links from Google Search results on their device.

  • Code Generation Introduced in Android Studio 2.0 Preview, you can right click on AndroidManifest.xml or Activity method (or go to Code → Generate…→ App Indexing API Code) to insert HTTP URL stub codes into your manifest and app code.

  • *New for Beta* URL Testing & Validation What is new in Android Studio 2.0 Beta is that you can now validate and check the results of your URLs with the built-in validation tool (Tools → Android → Google App Indexing Test). To learn more about app indexing, click here.

Insert App Indexing API Code into your app

App Indexing Testing

App Indexing Test Results

Android Emulator

*Updated for Beta* The new and faster Android emulator also includes fixes and small enhancements for this beta release. Notably, we updated the rotation controls on the emulator toolbar and added multi-touch support to help test apps that use pinch & zoom gestures. To use the multi-touch feature, hold down the Alt key on your keyboard and right-click your mouse to center the point of reference or click & drag the left mouse button to zoom.


Pinch & Zoom Gesture with Multi-Touch

What's Next

Android Studio 2.0 is a big release, and now is good time to check out the beta release to incorporate the new features into your workflow. The beta release is near stable release quality, and should be relatively bug free. But as with any beta release, bugs may still exist, so, if you do find an issue, let us know so we can work to fix it. If you’re already using Android Studio, you can check for updates on the Beta channel from the navigation menu (Help → Check for Update [Windows/Linux] , Android Studio → Check for Updates [OS X]). When you update to beta, you will get access to the new version of Android Studio and Android Emulator.

Connect with us, the Android Studio development team, on Google+.

Android Developer Story: Travel app Wego, increases monthly user retention by 300% with material design

Posted by Lily Sheringham, Google Play team

Headquartered in Singapore, Wego is a popular online travel marketplace for flights and hotels for users in South East Asia and the Middle East. They launched their Android app in early 2014, and today, more than 62 percent of Wego app users are on Android. Wego recently redesigned their app using material design principles to provide their users a more native Android experience for consistency and easier navigation.

Watch Ross Veitch, co-founder and CEO, and the Wego team talk about how they increased monthly user retention by 300 percent and reduced uninstall rates by up to 25 percent with material design.


Learn more about Material Design, how to use Android Studio, and how to find success on Google Play with the new guide ‘Secrets to App Success on Google Play.’

The Learning Continues! New lessons for Advanced Android course

Posted by Joanna Smith, Developer Advocate

Magic moments happen when your app does something very useful with minimal effort from your users -- like figuring out their location for them automatically. The new Places lesson in the Advanced Android App Development course teaches you how to add a Place Picker to your app so that users can pick a nearby location without having to type anything.

The Advanced Android App Development course, built by Udacity in conjunction with Google, is a follow-up course to Developing Android apps. The advanced course is for Android Developers who are ready to learn how to polish, productionize and publish their app, and even distribute it through Google Play.



Updates to the course also include an explanation of the new GCM Receiver, as well as an entirely new lesson on publishing your app, which explains how to build and sign an APK so you you can distribute your app on Google Play.

After all, why build an app if you can’t get it to your users?
Get started now, because it's going to be awesome!

Leveraging product flavors in Android Studio for hermetic testing

Posted by Jose Alcérreca, Developer Programs Engineer and Wojtek Kaliciński, Developer Advocate



During our recent talk at Android Dev Summit, we discuss the state of testing on Android on the example of a simple Notes application that we created as part of our testing codelab. In one section of the talk, we discuss the problem of test flakiness and introduce a simple solution for setting up a hermetic testing environment.

Combatting flaky tests

UI tests with frameworks like Espresso or UI Automator can easily get flaky if the application has external dependencies that can sometimes fail or take long to respond. In short, flaky tests are tests that are not reliable (they can pass or fail randomly) which defeats the whole purpose of having tests in the first place.

A common solution to this problem is hermetic testing or, in other words, making sure that your tests are isolated from dependencies. Using fake implementations or fake servers that just return predefined data is a common way of dealing with this problem. Here are some good examples:

  • Network calls can be made via a fake API client or fake server that immediately returns data from files stored on disk instead of hitting the network. This bypasses the network's latency and flakiness as well as any errors originating on the real server.
  • Interactions with low-level framework APIs (especially those for accessing hardware, like camera or storage) can be passed through an intermediate interface. A fake implementation of this interface could return immediately, providing a reference to preloaded data, such as an image, without relying on the hardware.
  • Any sensors can be replaced with fakes too: GPS, microphone, accelerometer etc., giving you a chance to test on data that would be difficult to provide for the test in real life, like a preset location or a set of inputs simulating a gesture.

Dependency Injection (DI) is a software design pattern that facilitates testing, reusing modules and making them interchangeable. DI frameworks can help you deal with the boilerplate associated with this pattern but it can take a considerable amount of time to set them up and understand how they work. Before you are ready to commit to one of those frameworks for your app, you might want to explore an easier way, especially if your project requirements are simple.

Managing dependencies with product flavors

Product flavors is a powerful feature of Android Studio and our Android Gradle plugin that lets you swap Java classes at compile time and doesn't require additional libraries. Some typical examples of flavor dimensions are:

  • free/paid flavors to generate two different APKs that will be released on your distribution channels
  • stable/experimental to keep experiments in a different source set and generate beta versions quickly

We can leverage the same mechanism to create two separate versions of our app to help with hermetic testing:

  • prod - uses real implementation of services and components, using real data and resources
  • mock - for a version that contains fake implementations of dependencies that are hard to test

The procedure is very simple:

  1. Create the flavors in your app/build.gradle file. 
     android {  
      productFlavors {  
           mock {   
                applicationIdSuffix = ".mock"  
           }  
           prod  
      }  
 }
  2. Create two directories: app/src/prod and app/src/mock
  3. Create the class that you want to use for production code in the prod/java folder or move it from main/java. Make sure the main/java folder does not contain this class.
  4. Create the same class (with the exact same class and file name) in the mock/java folder, but providing a different (fake) implementation that will be used for tests.
  5. In the Build Variants window in Android Studio, choose the variant that you want to install or run tests against. A variant is the combination of a flavor and a build type.

Note: In gradle, the task names change when you add flavors. Instead of installDebug, you will now have to choose installProdDebug or installMockDebug.

Running your tests

With the prod and mock flavors configured and your mock implementation in place, you can now use the following gradle tasks to choose how your tests should run:

  • connectedMockDebugAndroidTest will merge the androidTest and androidTestMock directories and run every test found in the resulting source set. As these tests are run in a hermetic way, they will be faster and less flaky. This is ideal for a pre-submit check.
  • connectedProdDebugAndroidTest will use the real APIs and sensors so they might fail from time to time. If you have a Continuous Integration system, this task could be executed every night or used manually as a acceptance end-to-end test. Note that this task will run the tests in androidTest even if androidTestProd doesn't exist.

You can refer to our Android Testing Codelab to see how we used this method to provide different Injection class implementations, the one in prod providing real data and the other (mock) serving fake dependencies that use fake data for isolated test execution.

When you’re happy with your hermetic setup, you might want to give more flexibility to your build process and add even more dimensions to be able to interchange different components in your app. While the method discussed above is suitable for simple projects, for more complex situations it would be much better to invest some time to learn about and add a Dependency Injection framework to your project.

Android Studio 2.0 Preview: Android Emulator

Posted by, Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

An early preview of the new Android Emulator is now available to try out. As a part of Android Studio 2.0, the latest version of the Android Emulator can help you test your app on a wide range of screens size and configurations beyond the physical Android hardware you use to test.Moreover, using the official Android emulator enables you to test with latest Android versions. Building on this foundation, the top two benefits of new Android emulator are:
  • Speed & Performance: When emulating the latest Android 6.0 release (Marshmallow), we now support Symmetric Multi-Processing and have made significant I/O improvements in both the emulator and ADB. This means you will have faster performance when you are testing your app.
  • Usability & User Interface: The new Android Emulator includes a brand new user interface to make the emulator easy to use. You no longer have to rely on command-line parameters to use the Android emulator. Common tasks and emulator features are now just a mouse click or a keyboard shortcut away.

We previewed the user interface at the Android Dev Summit. You can try it out today along with the new version of ADB for faster APK installation and file transfers to the emulator. Check out the video for a demonstration of the new Android Emulator.



Android Dev Summit 2015: Emulator Demo

We are seeking early feedback to continue to deliver the experience and features that will make you more productive.

New Features in Android Emulator Preview


Performance Improvements

  • CPU Performance


    Android Studio now uses CPU acceleration on x86 emulator system images by default. Combined with new Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) support in Android 6.0 Marshmallow system images, the Android emulators can perform even faster than many physical Android devices. Multi-core support not only makes your apps and the emulator run faster but it provides the added advantage of speeding up common developer tasks such as installing APKs. Also, with SMP you can test apps that specifically target multi-processor Android devices.

  • Faster ADB


    In addition to faster CPU speeds in the emulator, there are a number of under-the-hood improvements that will make the experience faster. One of the bottlenecks in the development process that we worked on is the speed of pushing data between Android Studio and your device using ADB (Android Debug Bridge). When you use Android 6.0 Marshmallow and higher system images with the new Android Emulator, you can now push files across ADB up to five times faster than a real device. This will help you if you push large APK or files during your app development cycle.

User Interface


  • Toolbar
    The new interface exposes some of the most common emulator actions in a new toolbar and control panel instead of solely relying on command line options. For the preview, the Android Emulator toolbar enables actions, such as volume control, screen rotation, and screen-shots of the emulator window.

  • Window Zooming & Scaling

    Now you can resize your window simply by dragging a corner. You can also zoom and scroll to get a closer look at a portion of your screen.
Left: Zooming
Right: Window Scaling

  • Drag & Drop

    With the new emulator, you can not only drag and drop APKs for quick installation, but you can also drag and drop any file to your emulator’s internal SD card to help in testing.

Drag and Drop Files

  • Extended UI Controls

    In the extended controls window, additional options help you validate and test features in your app. As shown below, you can initiate a range of emulator actions such as making a virtual call, sending a virtual SMS, or controlling the power level of the emulator. You can additionally send a single GPS location point to the emulator or play back a custom set of KML or GPX points as well.

Phone Controls

Battery Controls

We are continuing to add more functionality and we will keep you up to date as we add more features.

What's Next & Setup

This is just the beginning of developments on the Android Emulator, so expect more features such as support more APIs levels, and adding more sensors with future versions of Android Studio. The new emulator along with Android Studio are available today on the Android Studio canary channel and tools preview channel.

Click here for details on how to setup the preview of the new Android Emulator.

We appreciate your feedback. Connect with us, the Android Studio development team, on Google+.

Android Studio 1.5

Posted by, Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android


Android Studio 1.5 is now available in the stable release channel. The latest release is focused on delivering more stability, with most of the enhancements being made under the hood (along with addressing several bugs).



Some of the specific bug fixes, include the ability to use short names when code-completing custom views.

In addition to the stability improvements and bug fixes, we’ve added a new feature to the memory profiler. It can now assist you in detecting some of the most commonly known causes of leaked activities.

There are also several new lint checks. Here's one below which warns you if you are attempting to override resources referenced from the manifest.

If you’re already using Android Studio, you can check for updates from the navigation menu (Help → Check for Update [Windows/Linux] , Android Studio → Check for Updates [OS X]). For new users, you can learn more about Android Studio, or download the stable version from the Android Studio site.

As always, we welcome your feedback on how we can help you. You can also connect with the Android developer tools team via Google+. And don’t worry about what’s in the box from the video. It’s nothing. Really. Forget I mentioned it.

Android Studio 1.4

Posted by, Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

Today we are releasing the 1.4 update to the Android Studio stable release channel. Most of the work and enhancements for Android Studio 1.4 are under the hood. However we have a handful of new features that we hope you enjoy and integrate into your workflow.

New Features in Android Studio 1.4


Design Tools
  • Vector Assets

    Starting with API 21, you can use Vector Drawables for image assets. For most apps, using VectorDrawables decreases the amount of density dependent drawables you need to maintain, and will also give you sharp image assets regardless of the screen device densities your app supports.

    With Android Studio 1.4, we are making the process of importing SVG images or Material icons much easier. If you update your gradle android plugin to 1.4.0-beta3 (or higher) in the project structure dialogue or your project build.gradle file ( 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:1.4.0-beta3' ), you can now use the new Vector Asset Studio by right-clicking the res/drawable folder in your project and selecting New → Vector Asset from the content menu.

    We are also excited to offer backwards compatibility for your vector assets in Android Studio 1.4. Once you have a vectorDrawable image in your res/drawable, Android Studio will automatically generate raster PNG images for API level 20 and below during build time. This means you only need to update and maintain your vector asset for your app project and Android Studio can take care of image conversion process. Note, it is still best practice to create density dependent launcher icons in your res/mipmap folder. Learn more by watching the DevByte video on the new Vector Asset Studio tool.


  • Theme Editor

    We understand that managing your app theme and style can be a bit complex. With Android Studio 1.4, we are releasing a preview of the Theme Editor to help with this task. This first version of the Theme Editor is focused on editing and updating the material theme colors (colors.xml) in your app project. In future releases, we will cover more attributes of your app theme and styles files. To access the editor, navigate from top level menu Tools → Android → Theme Editor.

  • Project Templates

    We know many of you use the New Project Wizard app templates to start a new app project or to quickly add an activity to an existing app. To help with the visual design of your apps, we updated the app templates to include the Android Design Support Library alongside the AppCompat Support library.

    From the template wizard you can start projects with a basic blank template with a floating action button or start from a range of user interface components such as the navigation drawer, or AppBar with scrolling view. We also re-introduced the empty app template for those who want minimum code generation when adding an activity to your project.

    With Android Studio 1.4, you can also validate your apps on the new Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P screen sizes.

Performance Monitors

  • GPU Rendering Monitor

    Now it is possible to quickly inspect the GPU rendering performance of your app. To enable GPU monitoring, make sure you turn on monitoring for your Android hardware device or emulator under Setting → Developer Options → Profile GPU rendering → In adb shell dumpsys gfxinfo . To learn more about the GPU rendering results, check out the developer documentation.

  • Network Monitor

    With Android Studio 1.4, you can also monitor the network usage of your app. With the monitor you can track the transmit and receive rates of your app over time.

Developer Services

  • Firebase

    It is now even easier to add a Firebase mobile backend to your Android app. Firebase includes data storage, user authentication, static hosting, and more. To access the feature, navigate from the top level menu and select File → Project Structure → Cloud. Learn more about Firebase in this tutorial.

Whats Next

For current developers on Android Studio, you can check for updates from the navigation menu (Help → Check for Update [Windows/Linux] , Android Studio → Check for Updates [OS X]) . For new users, you can learn more about Android Studio on the product overview page or download the stable version from the Android Studio download site.

We welcome feedback on how we can help you. Connect with the Android developer tools team on Google+.

New Android Marshmallow sample apps

Posted by Rich Hyndman, Developer Advocate

Three new Android Marshmallow sample applications have gone live this week. As usual they are available directly from the Google Samples repository on GitHub or through the Android Studio samples browser.

Android Direct Share Sample



Direct Share is a new feature in Android Marshmallow that provides APIs to make sharing more intuitive and quick for users. Direct Share allows users to share content to targets, such as contacts, within other apps. For example, the direct share target might launch an activity in a social network app, which lets the user share content directly to a specific friend in that app.

This sample is a dummy messaging app, and just like any other messaging apps, it receives intents for sharing a plain text. It demonstrates how to show some options directly in the list of share intent candidates. When a user shares some text from another app, this sample app will be listed as an option. Using the Direct Share feature, this app also shows some of contacts directly in the chooser dialog.

To enable Direct Share, apps need to implement a Service extending ChooserTargetService. Override the method onGetChooserTargets() and return a list of Direct Share options.

In your AndroidManifest.xml, add a meta-data tag in your Activity that receives the Intent. Specify android:name as android.service.chooser.chooser_target_service, and point the android:value to the Service.

Android MidiSynth Sample

Android 6.0 introduces new support for MIDI. This sample demonstrates how to use the MIDI API to receive and play MIDI messages coming from an attached input device (MIDI keyboard).

The Android MIDI API (android.media.midi) allows developers to connect a MIDI device to an Android device and process MIDI messages coming from it.

This sample demonstrates some basic features of the MIDI API, such as:

  • Enumeration of currently available devices (including name, vendor, capabilities, etc)
  • Notification when MIDI devices are plugged in or unplugged
  • Receiving and processing MIDI messages

It also contains a simple implementation of an oscillator and note playback.

Android MidiScope Sample

A sample demonstrating how to use the MIDI API to receive and process MIDI signals coming from an attached device.

The Android MIDI API (android.media.midi) allows developers to connect a MIDI device to Android and process MIDI signals coming from it. This sample demonstrates some basic features of the MIDI API, such as enumeration of currently available devices (Information includes name, vendor, capabilities, etc), notification when MIDI devices are plugged in or unplugged, and receiving MIDI signals. This sample simply shows all the received MIDI signals to the screen log and does not play any sound for them.

Check out a sample today and jumpstart your Android Marshmallow development.

Get your hands on Android Studio 1.3

Posted by Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

Previewed earlier this summer at Google I/O, Android Studio 1.3 is now available on the stable release channel. We appreciated the early feedback from those developers on our canary and beta channels to help ship a great product.

Android Studio 1.3 is our biggest feature release for the year so far, which includes a new memory profiler, improved testing support, and full editing and debugging support for C++. Let’s take a closer look.

New Features in Android Studio 1.3

Performance & Testing Tools

  • Android Memory (HPROF) Viewer

    Android Studio now allows you to capture and analyze memory snapshots in the native Android HPROF format.

  • Allocation Tracker

    In addition to displaying a table of memory allocations that your app uses, the updated allocation tracker now includes a visual way to view the your app allocations.

  • APK Tests in Modules

    For more flexibility in app testing, you now have the option to place your code tests in a separate module and use the new test plugin (‘com.android.test’) instead of keeping your tests right next to your app code. This feature does require your app project to use the Gradle Plugin 1.3.

Code and SDK Management

  • App permission annotations

    Android Studio now has inline code annotation support to help you manage the new app permissions model in the M release of Android. Learn more about code annotations.

  • Data Binding Support

    New data brinding features allow you to create declarative layouts in order to minimize boilerplate code by binding your application logic into your layouts. Learn more about data binding.

  • SDK Auto Update & SDK Manager

    Managing Android SDK updates is now a part of the Android Studio. By default, Android Studio will now prompt you about new SDK & Tool updates. You can still adjust your preferences with the new & integrated Android SDK Manager.

  • C++ Support

    As a part of the Android 1.3 stable release, we included an Early Access Preview of the C++ editor & debugger support paired with an experimental build plugin. See the Android C++ Preview page for information on how to get started. Support for more complex projects and build configurations is in development, but let us know your feedback.

Time to Update

An important thing to remember is that an update to Android Studio does not require you to change your Android app projects. With updating, you get the latest features but still have control of which build tools and app dependency versions you want to use for your Android app.

For current developers on Android Studio, you can check for updates from the navigation menu. For new users, you can learn more about Android Studio on the product overview page or download the stable version from the Android Studio download site.

We are excited to launch this set of features in Android Studio and we are hard at work developing the next set of tools to make develop Android development easier on Android Studio. As always we welcome feedback on how we can help you. Connect with the Android developer tools team on Google+.

Android M Developer Preview & Tools

By Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

Today at Google I/O, we announced a developer preview of the next version of Android, the M release. Last year’s developer preview was a first for Android and we received great feedback. We want to continue to give you developers early access to Android so you have time to get your apps ready for the next version of Android. This time with the M Developer Preview, we will provide a clear timeline for testing and feedback plus more updates to the preview build.

Visit the M Developer Preview for downloads and documentation

The Android M release: improving the fundamentals

For the M release, we focused on improving the core user experience of Android, from fixing thousands of bugs, to making some big changes to the fundamentals of the platform:

  • Permissions - We are giving users control of app permissions in the M release. Apps can trigger requests for permissions at runtime, in the right context, and users can choose whether to grant the permission. Making permission requests right when they’re needed means users can get up and running in your app faster. Also, users have easy access to manage all their app permissions in settings. On M, as a developer, you should design your app to prompt for permissions in context and account for permissions that don’t get granted. As more devices upgrade to M, app permission behavior will be a critical development flow to test.

    • Runtime App Permissions

  • App links - We are making it even easier to link between apps. Android has always allowed apps to register to natively handle URLs. Now you can add an autoVerify attribute to your app manifest so that users can be linked deep into your native app without any disambiguation prompt. App links, along with App Indexing for Google search, make it easier for users to discover and re-engage with your app.
  • Battery - We’re making Android devices smarter about managing power through a new feature called Doze. With M, Android uses significant motion detection to learn if a device has been left unattended for a while. In this state, Android will exponentially back off background activity, trading off a little bit of app freshness for longer battery life. Consider how this may affect your app; for instance, if you’re building a chat app, you may want to make use of high priority messages to wake your app when the device is dozing.

The Android M release: advancing assistance and payments

We are also delighted to announce a couple of big new features:

  • Now on tap - We are making it even easier for Android users to get assistance with Now on tap -- whenever they need it, wherever they are on their device. For example, if your friend texts you about dinner at a new restaurant, without leaving the app, you can ask Google Now for help. Using just that context, Google can find menus, reviews, help you book a table, navigate there, and deep link you into relevant apps. As a developer, you can implement App Indexing for Google search to let users discover and re-engage with your app through Now on tap.

    • Now on tap

  • Android Pay & Fingerprint - We’ve built on our work with Near Field Communications (NFC) in Gingerbread and Host Card Emulation in Kitkat to develop Android Pay. Android Pay will enable Android users to simply and securely use their Android phone to pay in stores or in thousands of Android Pay partner apps. With M, native fingerprint support enhances Android Pay by allowing users to confirm a purchase with their fingerprint. Moreover, fingerprint on M can be used to unlock devices and make purchases on Google Play. With new APIs in M, it’s easy for you to add fingerprint authorization to your app and have it work consistently across a range of devices and sensors.

These are just a few highlights from the M Developer Preview that we announced today. The M preview will be available for download right after the keynote.

Android Developer Tools

In addition to the developer preview, we are launching new tools to help you in the development of your Android App:

  • Android Studio v1.3 Preview - To help take advantage of the M Developer Preview features, we are releasing a new version of Android Studio. Most notable is a much requested feature from our Android NDK & game developers: code editing and debugging for C/C++ code. Based on JetBrains Clion platform, the Android Studio NDK plugin provides features such as refactoring and code completion for C/C++ code alongside your Java code. Java and C/C++ code support is integrated into one development experience free of charge for Android app developers. Update to Android Studio v1.3 via the Canary channel and let us know what you think.

    • Android Studio 1.3 with Android NDK Support

  • Android Design Support Library - Making Material design apps gets even easier with the new Android Design support library. We have packaged a set a key design components (e.g floating action button, snackbar, navigation view, motion enabled Toolbars) that are backward compatible to API 7 and can be added to your app to create a modern, great looking Android app without building everything from scratch.
  • Google Play Services - Today we also are releasing v7.5 of Google Play services which includes new features ranging from Smart Lock for Passwords, new APIs for Google Cloud Messaging and Google Cast, to Google Maps API on Android Wear devices.

Get Started

The M Developer Preview includes an updated SDK with tools, system images for testing on the official Android emulator, and system images for testing on Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 9, and Nexus Player devices. We are excited to expand the program and give you more time to ensure your apps support M when it launches this fall. Based on your feedback, we plan to update the M Developer preview system images often during the developer preview program. The sooner we hear from you, the more feedback we can integrate, so let us know!

To get started with the M Developer Preview and prepare your apps for the full release, just follow these steps:

  1. Update to Android Studio v1.3+ Preview
  2. Visit the M Developer Preview site for downloads and documentation.
  3. Explore the new APIs & App Permissions changes
  4. Explore the Android Design Support Library & Google Play Services APIs
  5. Get the emulator system images through the SDK Manager or download the Nexus device system images.
  6. Test your app with your supported Nexus device or emulator
  7. Give us feedback