Tag Archives: Android TV

Your Chance to be on TV!

By Tarjei Vassbotn and Dan Galpin, Developer Advocates, Android TV

We’re excited to see the launch of Nexus Player, the first consumer streaming media player running Android TV. Android TV delivers an entertainment experience tailored for users, including movies, shows, games and more.
Now is a great time to develop apps for Android TV that reach a whole new audience.

Starting today, you can publish your apps for Android TV on Google Play, the largest digital store for apps and games. We’ve provided guidance on how to get started building great apps for Android TV in this post.

"Google has done an insanely good job to ease the developer’s task of creating a TV application, mainly thanks to the Leanback support library. It literally takes 2 hours to create a fully working and possibly fancy app, which is awesome."

- Sebastiano Gottardo

A high bar for quality experiences

We want to offer the best possible experience for users to enjoy your apps and games. To make this possible, your Android TV app must meet the basic requirements for usability. When your app meets these requirements, users will be able to discover and download it directly on their Android TV devices.

Even if you have already uploaded your app to the Google Play Developer Console, you will need to add TV graphics and screenshots, and opt-in to distribution on TV on the Pricing & Distribution page. For complete information about the requirements and process of publishing your Android TV app for Google Play, make sure to check out the publishing documentation.

Get started!

With our Leanback Library we’ve made it easy for you to extend your existing app to the TV screen or even build a completely new app for Android TV. For a quick look at the Leanback Library, check out this DevBytes video.

We’ve only begun scratching the surface of what’s possible with this new form factor, and we are very excited to see what you will build, start developing today!

Cast Away with Android TV and Google Cast

By Dave Burke and Majd Bakar, Engineering Directors and TV Junkies

Last summer, we launched Chromecast, a small, affordable device that lets you cast online video, music and anything from the web to your TV. Today at Google I/O, we announced Android TV, the newest form factor to the Android platform, and a way to extend the reach of Google Cast to more devices, like televisions, set-top boxes and consoles.

Check out Coming to a Screen Near You for some details on everything we’re doing to make your TV the place to be.

For developers though--sorry, you don’t get to unwind in front of the TV. We need you to get to work and help us create the best possible TV experience, with all of the new features announced at I/O today.

Get started with Android TV

In addition to Google Cast apps that send content to the TV, you can now build immersive native apps and console-style games on Android TV devices. These native apps work with TV remotes and gamepads, even if you don’t have your phone handy. The Android L Developer Preview SDK includes the new Leanback support library that allows you to design smoother, simpler, living room apps.

And this is just the beginning. In the fall, new APIs will allow you to cast directly to these apps, so users can control the app with the phone, the remote, or even their Android Wear watch. You’ll also start seeing Android TV set-top boxes, consoles and televisions from Sony, TP Vision, Sharp, Asus, Razer and more.

Help more users find your Google Cast app

We want to help users more easily find your content, so we’ve improved the Google Cast SDK developer console to let you upload your app icon, app name, and app category for Android, iOS and Chrome. These changes will help your app get discovered on chromecast.com/apps and on Google Play.

Additional capabilities have also been added to the Google Cast SDK. These include: Media Player Library enhancements, bringing easier integration with MPEG-DASH Smooth Streaming, and HLS. We’ve also added WebAudio & WebGL support, made the Cast Companion Library available, and added enhanced Closed Caption support. And coming soon, we will add support for queuing and ID delegation.

Ready to get started? Visit developer.android.com/tv and developers.google.com/cast for the SDKs, style guides, tutorials, sample code, and the API references. You can also request an ADT-1 devkit to bootstrap your Android TV development.

Explore the conference with the Google I/O 2014 Android app:

Get it on Google Play