Posted by Diana Wong (Android Product Manager), Kseniia Shumelchyk (Developer Relations Engineer) and Sara Vickerman (Android Developer Marketing)
This week, Samsung launched the latest devices to come to the Android ecosystem at their Galaxy Unpacked event. If you haven’t already, check out their two new foldables, the Galaxy Z Fold4 and Z Flip4, and their new lineup of watches running on Wear OS, the Galaxy Watch5 series. You can learn more about their announcements here.
With the excitement around these new devices, there's never been a better time to invest in making sure your app has an amazing experience for users, on large screens or Wear OS! Here’s what you need to know to get started:
Get your apps ready for foldables, like the Galaxy Z Fold4 and Z Flip4
With their unique foldable experience, the Galaxy Z Flip4 and Z Fold4 are great examples of how Android devices come in all shapes and sizes. The Z Fold4 is the latest in large screen devices, a category that continues to see impressive growth. Active large screen users are approaching 270 million, making it a great time to optimize your apps for tablets, foldables and Chrome OS.
Last year, we launched Android 12L, a feature drop designed to make Android 12 even better on tablets and foldable devices, and Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold4 will be the first device to run 12L out of the box! Android 12L includes UI updates tailor-made for large screens, improvements to the multitasking experience, and enhancements to compatibility mode so your app looks better out of the box. Since 12L, we also launched Android 13, which includes all these large screen updates and more.
Get started building for foldables by checking out the documentation. The Z Fold4 and Z Flip4 can be used in multiple different folded states, like Samsung’s “flex mode” where you can go hands-free when doing anything from watching a show to taking a photo. To get your app looking great however it’s folded, you can use the Jetpack WindowManager library to make your app fold aware and test your app on foldables. And finally, the large screen app quality guidelines is a comprehensive set of checklists to help make your app the best it can be across an ever expanding ecosystem of large screen devices.
Developers who put in this work are starting to see results; eBay increased their app rating to 4.7 stars on Google Play after optimizing for large screens. Chrome's multitasking usage increased 18x for large screens with 12L.
Build exceptional Wear OS apps
The Wear OS platform expanded this week with the new and improved Galaxy Watch5 series. This lineup of devices builds on Samsung’s commitment to the wearable platform, which we saw last year when they launched Wear OS Powered by Samsung on the Galaxy Watch4 series.
If you’re looking to get started building for the latest Galaxy Watch 5 series, or any other Wear OS device, now is a great time to check out version 1.0 of Compose for Wear OS. This is the first stable release of our modern declarative UI toolkit designed to make building apps for Wear OS easier, faster, and more intuitive. The toolkit brings the best of Jetpack Compose to Wear OS, accelerating the development process so you can create beautiful apps with fewer lines of code.
The 1.0 release streamlines UI development by following the declarative approach and offering powerful Kotlin syntax. It also provides a rich set of UI components optimized for the watch experience and is accompanied by many powerful tools in Android Studio to streamline UI iteration. That’s why Compose for Wear OS is our recommended approach for building user interfaces for Wear OS apps.
We’ve built a set of materials to help you get started with Compose for Wear OS! Check out our curated learning pathway for a step-by-step journey, documentation including a quick start guide, the Compose for Wear OS codelab for hands-on experience, and samples available on Github.
Similarly to Compose for Wear OS, we’re building Wear OS Tile Components to make it faster and easier to build tiles. Tiles provide Wear OS users glanceable access to the information and actions they need in order to get things done quickly and they are one of the most used features on Wear OS. This update brings material components and layouts so you can create Tiles that embrace the latest Material design for Wear OS. Right now this is in beta, but keep a lookout for the launch announcement!
Another launch announcement to watch out for is Android Studio Dolphin, the latest release from Android Studio. Check out these features designed to make wearable app development easier:
Updated Wear OS emulator toolbar which now includes buttons and gestures available on Wear OS devices, such as palm and tilting and simulating two physical buttons.
Emulator pairing assistant to pair multiple Wear OS devices with a single virtual or physical phone. Android Studio remembers pairings after being closed and allows you to see Wear devices in the Device Manager.
Direct surface launch that allows you to create run/debug configurations for Wear OS tiles, watch faces, and complications, and launch them directly from Android Studio.
Between Jetpack Compose, Tile Components and Android Studio Dolphin, we are simplifying Wear OS app development. And, with the addition of the Galaxy Watch5 series to the Wear OS ecosystem, there are even more reasons to build an exceptional Wear OS app.
There’s never been a better time to start optimizing!
From the Watch5 series to the Z Fold4, Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked brought us innovations across screen sizes and types. Prepare your app so it looks great across the entire Android device ecosystem!
‘Google Dev Library Letters’ is curated to bring you some of the latest projects developed with Google tech submitted to Google Dev Library Platform. We hope this brings you the inspiration you need for your next project!
Over the past several months, participants have worked their way through multiple rounds of algorithmic coding challenges, and solved some of the most challenging competitive programming problems. The field has been narrowed down from tens of thousands of participants, to the top competitors who will face off at the World Finals on August 5th, 2022.
Join us 16:30 UTC for a livestream to see which one of these finalists will be crowned the Code Jam 2022 World Champion, winning the grand prize of $15,000 USD!
Here are this year's finalists sharing their favorite music genres, tips, fun facts, and more.
This year's Code Jam World Finalists are:
Antonio Molina Lovett
Handle: y0105w49
What's your favorite music to listen to while coding? “Always looping the Vicious Delicious album by Infected Mushroom.”
Yuhao Du
Handle: xll114514
Code Jam claim to fame: This is Yuhao’s second time at the Code Jam World Finals, previously competing in the 2021 World Finals.
Benjamin Qi
Handle: Benq
What's your favorite 2022 Code Jam Problem? “Qualification Round - Twisty Little Passages. First time I used importance sampling in a contest!”
Sangsoo Park
Handle: molamola
What does your handle mean? "1. I personally like sunfish :) 2. I like the way it sounds. 3. Mola is pronounced "몰라" in Korean, which means "I don't know".”
Daniel Rutschmann
Handle: dacin21
What's the best coding competition advice you've ever received? “Have fun and always try to challenge yourself by solving problems that seem too difficult at first.”
Mingyang Deng
Handle: CauchySheep
What's an interesting and fun fact about yourself? “I love random walking.”
Gennady Korotkevich
Handle: Gennady.Korotkevich
What’s your favorite 2022 Code Jam Problem? “Saving the Jellyfrom Round 2 took the most creativity to solve!”
Alexander Golovanov
Handle: Golovanov399
What's an interesting and fun fact about yourself? “I have 11 musical instruments, most of which I can only play on a level "may accompany in a song I know."
Andrew He
Handle: ecnerwala
Code Jam claim to fame: This will be Andrew’s fourth time competing in the Code Jam World Finals, having competed in 2019, 2020, and 2021 previously.
Aleksei Esin
Handle: ImBarD
What's an interesting and fun fact about yourself? “I love bungee jumping.”
Lingyu Jiang
Handle: jiangly
What's an interesting and fun fact about yourself? This is Lingyu’s first time competing in the Code Jam World Finals.
Kevin Sun
Handle: ksun48
Code Jam claim to fame: This will be Kevin’s third time competing in the Code Jam World Finals, having competed in 2019 and 2020 previously.
Lukas Michel
Handle: lumibons
What does your handle mean? “It's a combination of letters from my name and the name of the village where I grew up.”
Matvii Aslandukov
Handle: BigBag
What's an interesting and fun fact about yourself? “I enjoy playing sports such as tennis, table tennis, volleyball, football, as well as playing piano and guitar.”
Borys Minaiev
Handle: qwerty787788
What's an interesting and fun fact about yourself? “A year ago I started doing buildering and we created a chat with just 3 people in it. Now there are almost 100 participants. Who could imagine it would grow so fast?”
Yahor Dubovik
Handle: mhg
What's your favorite music to listen to while coding? “Red Hot Chilli Peppers.”
Mateusz Radecki
Handle: Radewoosh
What's the best coding competition advice you've ever received? “Becoming good isn't about creating a chance to solve a problem. It's about removing a chance to not solve a problem.”
Nikolay Kalinin
Handle: KalininN
What's an interesting and fun fact about yourself? “I'm an experimentalist in laser physics, also I love traveling and photography.”
Simon Lindholm
Handle: simonlindholm
What's an interesting and fun fact about yourself? “I've been really into the Super Mario 64 A Button Challenge recently, and N64 game decompilation. Also, mushroom hunting.”
Kento Nikaido
Handle: Snuke
What's an interesting and fun fact about yourself? “I'm a cat. My recent hobby is Sed Puzzle”
Tiancheng Lou
Handle: ACRushTC
Code Jam claim to fame: This will be Tiancheng’s eighth Code Jam World Finals, having previously competed in the World Finals in 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2019, 2021.
Aleksei Daniliuk
Handle: Um_nik
What’s your favorite 2022 Code Jam Problem? "I, O Bot from Round 2, because it was actually a competitive programming problem”
Yuta Takaya
Handle: yutaka1999
What’s your favorite 2022 Code Jam Problem? “Saving the Jelly. It is mainly because I solved it in the last five minutes of the contest.”
Konstantin Semenov
Handle: zemen
Code Jam claim to fame: This will be Konstantin’s third Code Jam World Finals, having previously competed in the World Finals in 2017 and 2018.
Watch the Code Jam World Finals Livestream
Join us on August 5 at 16:30 UTC for a livestream of the Code Jam 2022 World Finals.
Watch all the action unfold as the Code Jam team broadcasts live from Google New York. You'll have an opportunity to hear from our team, see Code Jam engineers explain the problems from the round, and watch live as we reveal the scoreboard and announce this year's winners!
At the end, one of these finalists will be crowned the Code Jam 2022 World Champion, winning the grand prize of $15,000 USD. Good luck to all the finalists and as always, happy coding!
Today we are excited to announce the first full version release of the open source quantum programming framework Cirq: Cirq 1.0. Cirq is a Python framework for writing, running, and analyzing the results of quantum computer programs. It was designed for near-term quantum computers, those with a few hundred qubits and few thousands of quantum gates. The significance of the 1.0 release is that Cirq has support for the vast majority of workflows for these systems and is considered to be a stable API that we will only update with breaking changes at major version numbers.
Getting to Cirq 1.0 is the culmination of a large amount of hard work by hundreds of contributors from Google, industry, and academia. We have been running a weekly meeting, called the “Cirq Cync”, for over four years where community members gather to discuss work on Cirq, bugs, and to generally tell terrible but amusing quantum programming jokes. We’re proud of this inclusive community, and we’ve been particularly happy to see the growth of many software developers into quantum computing experts, and quantum computing experts into solid software developers. One of our contributors, Victory Omole, won the 2021 Witteck Quantum Prize for Open Source Software. Way to go Victory!
The first commit to Cirq on GitHub (an internal version of Cirq at Google existed prior to this) was on Dec 19, 2017 by Craig Gidney, and we publicly announced Cirq in July of 2018. 3,200+ commits later to the GitHub repo, in the hands of the team at Google and the Cirq community, we’ve seen Cirq help accomplish some amazing things:
Cirq is the lingua franca that Google’s hardware team uses to write quantum programs that run on Google’s quantum computing hardware. Because of this, we have been able to post open source code in our ReCirq repo for these experiments for anyone to examine and extend. A few highlights of the past few years:
“Realizing topologically ordered states on a quantum processor”, K. J. Satzinger et al., Science 374 6572, 1237-1241 (2021) [paper] [ReCirq code]
“Information scrambling in quantum circuits”, X. Mi, P. Roushan, C. Quintana et al, Science 374, 6574 1479-1483 (2021) [paper] [ReCirq code]
“Hartree-Fock on a superconducting qubit quantum computer”, F. Arute et al., Science 369, 6507 1084--1089 (2020) [paper] [ReCirq code]
A healthy community of libraries have now been built on top of Cirq, enabling different quantum computing research areas. These libraries include:
TensorFlow Quantum: a tool for exploring quantum machine learning. Using TensorFlow Quantum researchers trained a machine learning model on 30 qubits at a rate of 1.1 petaflops per second (1.1 x 1015 operations per second).
OpenFermion: an open source tool for quantum computations involved in chemistry simulations.
Pytket (pytkey-cirq): an open source Python tool for optimizing and manipulating quantum circuits.
Mitiq: an open source library developed by the non-profit Unitary fund for error mitigation techniques developed by the non-profit Unitary fund.
Qsim: a high performance state vector simulator written using AVX/FMA vectorized instructions with optional GPU acceleration. qsimcirq is the Cirq interface one can use to access qsim from Cirq.
Numerous quantum computing cloud services from companies in the industry have also integrated/standardized Cirq. Programs written in Cirq can be used to run through AQT, IonQ, Pascal, Rigetti, and IQM vendors. In addition, Cirq can be used on Azure Quantum to run on the hardware supported by Azure Quantum. Finally, one can get realistic noise simulations of Google’s quantum computing hardware using our newly released Quantum Virtual Machine.
Cirq is not just for stuffy research. Cirq has also been used to help develop Quantum Chess, a version of chess that uses superposition and entanglement. This notebook shows you how the game of Quantum Chess can be programmed using Cirq.
Cirq moving to its first full version does not just come with new features (see 1.0 release notes), but also with more guarantees about stability. Cirq uses semantic versioning, which means that future point release of Cirq will be compatible with the full version release. For example, version 1.1 of Cirq will not introduce breaking changes to Cirq’s interfaces from version 1.0; only at major version bumps (from 1.x to 2.0, for example) will breaking changes occur.
When we began working on Cirq, quantum computers consisted of only a few qubits and a few quantum gates on these qubits. Building Cirq and the supporting software for these custom systems and having them start to scale to hundreds of qubits over the past (nearly) five years has taught us many lessons. One key takeaway from these lessons is that: As quantum computing hardware continues to grow in scale and complexity, we expect that making software to support this growth will be essential to continue meaningful research and progress. In the next five years, with hardware expected to reach hundreds or even thousands of qubits, the software that is developed for quantum computing will need to have a careful eye set on supporting these bigger and bigger systems. Going forward we will need an ever wider set of frameworks, programming languages, and libraries to achieve quantum computing’s promise.
Acknowledgements
We are indebted to all 169 contributors to the Cirq github repo, and the many more who have filed issues and used Cirq in their own software. A particular shout out to the original lead of Cirq, Craig Gidney, to Cirq’s second lead, Bálint Pató who guided Cirq through its middle ages, and to Alan Ho and Catherine Vollgraff Heidweiller for product wisdom. A special thanks to the core Cirq contributors including Doug Strain, Matthew Neely, Tanuj Khatter, Dax Fohl, Adam Zalcman, Kevin Sung, Matt Harrigan, Casey Duckering, Orion Martin, Smit Sanghavi, Bryan O'Gorman, Wojciech Mruczkiewicz, Ryan LaRose, Tony Bruguier, Victory Omole, and Cheng Xing, and our documentarians Auguste Hirth and Abe Asfaw.
By Dave Bacon and Michael Broughton – Quantum AI Team
Posted by Maru Ahues Bouza, Director, Android Developer Relations
We’re just a few weeks away from the official release of Android 13! As we put the finishing touches on the next version of Android, today we’re bringing you Beta 4, a final update for your testing and development. Now is the time to make sure your apps are ready!
There’s a lot to explore in Android 13, from privacy features like the new notification permission and photo picker, to productivity features like themed app icons and per-app language support, as well as modern standards like HDR video, Bluetooth LE Audio, and MIDI 2.0 over USB. We’ve also extended the updates we made in 12L, giving you better tools to take advantage of tablet and large screen devices.
You can try Beta 4 today on your Pixel device by enrolling here for over-the-air updates. If you previously enrolled, you’ll automatically get today’s update. You can also get Android 13 Beta on select devices from several of our partners. Visit the Android 13 developer site for details.
Watch for more information on the official Android 13 release coming soon!
What’s in Beta 4?
Today’s update includes a release candidate build of Android 13 for Pixel devices and the Android Emulator. We reached Platform Stability at Beta 3, so all app-facing surfaces are final, including SDK and NDK APIs, app-facing system behaviors, and restrictions on non-SDK interfaces. With these and the latest fixes and optimizations, Beta 4 gives you everything you need to complete your testing.
Get your apps ready!
With the official Android 13 release just ahead, we’re asking all app and game developers to complete your final compatibility testing and publish your compatibility updates ahead of the final release. For SDK, library, tools, and game engine developers, it’s important to release your compatible updates as soon as possible -- your downstream app and game developers may be blocked until they receive your updates.
To test your app for compatibility, just install it on a device running Android 13 Beta 4 and work through the app flows, looking for any functional or UI issues. Review the Android 13 behavior changes for all apps to focus on areas where your app could be affected. Here are some of the top changes to test:
Runtime permission for notifications - Android 13 introduces a new runtime permission for sending notifications from an app. Make sure you understand how the new permission works, and plan on targeting Android 13 (API 33) as soon as possible. More here.
Clipboard preview - Make sure your app hides sensitive data in Android 13’s new clipboard preview, such as passwords or credit card information. More here.
JobScheduler prefetch - JobScheduler now tries to anticipate the next time your app will be launched and will run any associated prefetch jobs ahead of that time. If you use prefetch jobs, test that they are working as expected. More here.
Remember to test the libraries and SDKs in your app for compatibility. If you find any SDK issues, try updating to the latest version of the SDK or reaching out to the developer for help.
Android 13 builds on the tablet optimizations introduced in 12L, so as part of your testing, make sure your apps look their best on tablets and other large-screen devices. You can test large-screen features by setting up an Android emulator in Android Studio, or you can use a large screen device from our Android 13 Beta partners. Here are some areas to watch for:
Taskbar interaction - Check how your app responds when viewed with the new taskbar on large screens. Make sure your app's UI isn't cut off or blocked by the taskbar. More here.
Multi-window mode - Multi-window mode is now enabled by default for all apps, regardless of app configuration, so make sure the app handles split-screen appropriately. You can test by dragging and dropping your app into split-screen mode and adjusting the window size. More here.
Improved compatibility experience - if your app isn’t optimized for tablets yet, such as using a fixed orientation or not being resizable, check how your app responds to compatibility mode adjustments such as letterboxing. More here.
Media projection - If your app uses media projection, check how your app responds while playing back, streaming, or casting media on large screens. Be sure to account for device posture changes on foldable devices as well. More here.
Camera preview - For camera apps, check how your camera preview UI responds on large screens when your app is constrained to a portion of the screen in multi-window or split-screen mode. Also check how your app responds when a foldable device's posture changes. More here.
You can read more about the tablet features in Android 13 and what to test here.
Get started with Android 13
Today’s Beta 4 release has everything you need to test your app and try the Android 13 features. Just enroll your Pixel device to get the update over-the-air. To get started, set up the Android 13 SDK.
You can also test your app with Android 13 Beta on devices from several of our partners. Visit android.com/beta to see the full list of partners, with links to their sites for details on their supported devices and Beta builds, starting with Beta 1. Each partner will handle their own enrollments and support, and provide the Beta updates to you directly. For even broader testing, you can try Beta 4 on Android GSI images, and if you don’t have a device, you can test on the Android Emulator. For complete details on Android 13, visit the Android 13 developer site.
A huge thank you to our developer community for helping shape the Android 13 release! You’ve given us thousands of bug reports and shared insights that have helped us optimize APIs, improve features, fix significant bugs, and in general make the platform better for users and developers.
We’re looking forward to seeing your apps on Android 13!
Posted by Meirav Shaul, Dvir Kalev, Roy Sela, Omri Levy, Tal Rimon Edelstein, Elad Ben-David, and Tzhahi Zilberstein, Team Lead
A while ago Google released “Account Anomaly Detector” which you know.
A few clients approached the gTech team at Google, asking to add some monitoring capabilities.
That’s why we created an unofficial, open-source evolved version of it. We named it “Campaign Anomaly Detector”. It has recently been published on github, ready for advertisers to deploy and use it for defining and detecting metrics anomalies.
Hosted on github, everyone is more than welcome to contribute more code to this ever-growing project. Happy monitoring!
Solution Requirements
Key Features
Entity to Monitor - option to select all/some child accounts under an MCC/specific campaigns.
Period selection - option to select both current and past periods for comparison
Metrics Selection & Anomaly Definition- option to select key metrics to be monitored, and the threshold values which will be considered as anomalies.
Dashboard - Data studio dashboard that presents identified anomalies
Email alerts -option to define the emails to notify once anomaly is identified
Key Components
The solution includes the following components:
Configuration Sheet (“input”) - Google Sheet for setting the monitoring parameters (entities for monitoring, period selection, metrics & thresholds, email alerts)
Simulator to support the period calculation and settings
Dashboard Sheet (“results”) - dedicated tab in the configuration sheet, that presents the identified anomalies
Data Studio Dashboard that presents the identified anomalies
Copyright 2022 Google LLC. This solution, including any related sample code or data, is made available on an “as is,” “as available,” and “with all faults” basis, solely for illustrative purposes, and without warranty or representation of any kind. This solution is experimental, unsupported and provided solely for your convenience. Your use of it is subject to your agreements with Google, as applicable, and may constitute a beta feature as defined under those agreements. To the extent that you make any data available to Google in connection with your use of the solution, you represent and warrant that you have all necessary and appropriate rights, consents and permissions to permit Google to use and process that data. By using any portion of this solution, you acknowledge, assume and accept all risks, known and unknown, associated with its usage, including with respect to your deployment of any portion of this solution in your systems, or usage in connection with your business, if at all.
Posted by Erica Hanson, Global Program Manager, Google Developer Student Clubs
With every new challenge ahead comes a new opportunity for finding a solution. Today’s challenges, and those we will continue to face, remind us all of how vital it remains to protect our planet and the people living on it. Enter the Solution Challenge, Google’s annual contest inviting the global Google Developer Student Clubs (GDSC) community to develop solutions to real world problems utilizing Google technologies.
This year’s Solution Challenge asks participants to solve for one or more of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals, intended to promote employment for all, economic growth, and climate action.
The top 50 semi-finalists and the top 10 finalists were announced earlier this month. Now, it all comes down to Demo Day on July 28th, where the finalists will present their solutions to Google and developers all around the world, live on YouTube.
At Demo Day, our judges will review the projects, ask questions, and choose the top 3 grand prize winners! You can RSVP here to be a part of Demo Day, vote for the People’s Choice Award, and watch all the action as it unfolds live.
Ahead of the event, let’s get to know the top 10 finalists and their incredible solutions below.
The Top 10 Projects
. . .
BloodCall - Greece, Harokopio University of Athens
UN Sustainable Goals Addressed: #3: Good Health & Wellbeing
BloodCall aims to make blood donation an easier task for everyone involved by leveraging Android, Firebase, and the Google Maps SDK. It was built by Athanasios Bimpas, Georgios Kitsakis and Stefanos Togias.
“Our main inspiration was based on two specific findings, we noticed that especially in Greece the willingness to donate blood is significantly high but information is not readily available. We also have noticed lots of individuals trying to reach as many people as possible through sharing their (or a loved one's) need of blood on social media, so we concluded that there exists a major need for blood especially in periods of heightened activity like summertime.”
Blossom - Canada, University of Waterloo
UN Sustainable Goals Addressed: #3: Good Health & Wellbeing, #4: Quality Education, #5: Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, #10: Reduced Inequalities
Blossom provides an integrated solution for young girls to get access to accurate and reliable menstrual education and resources and uses Android, Firebase, Flutter, Google Cloud Platform. It was built by Aditi Sandhu, Het Patel, Mehak Dhaliwal, and Jinal Rajawat.
“As all group members of this project are of South Asian descent, we know firsthand how difficult it is to talk about the female reproductive system within our families. We wanted to develop an application that would target youth so they can begin this conversation at an earlier age. Blossom allows users to learn from the safety of their own devices. Simply by knowing more about their bodies, individuals are more confident with them, thereby solving Goal 5: to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.”
Gateway - Vietnam, Hoa Sen University
UN Sustainable Goals Addressed: #3: Good Health & Wellbeing, #11: Sustainable Cities, #17: Partnerships
Gateway creates an open covid-19 digital check-in system. Through an open-source, IoT solution that pairs with an application on a mobile device and communicates with an embedded system over Bluetooth connection protocol. It uses Angular, Firebase, Flutter, Google Cloud Platform, TensorFlow, Progressive Web Apps and connects users with a COVID-19 digital check-in system.It was built by: Cao Nguyen Vo Dang, Duy Truong Hoang, Khuong Nguyen Dang, and Nguyễn Mạnh Hùng.
“Problems are still happening in our community where the support of technology is still lacking when it comes to covid. Vaccination in our country is still continuing. We still have to manually (paper) when it comes to registering for vaccination results. And "back to school/office" are now the biggest challenges for business, community. Contact tracing solutions are fully overloaded with crowded areas. We're focused on improving the crowded situation by creating an open-source automatic checking gateway, allowing users to interact with the system more intuitively.”
GetWage - India, G.H. Raisoni College of Engineering, Nagpur
UN Sustainable Goals Addressed: #1: No Poverty, #4: Quality Education, #8: Decent Work & Economic Growth
GetWage provides a tool to help those impacted by unemployment and unfilled positions in the local economy find and post daily wage work with ease. It uses Firebase, Flutter, Google Cloud Platform, TensorFlow. It was built by Aaliya Ali, Aniket Singh, Neenad Sahasrabuddhe, and Shivam.
“When COVID struck the world, daily wage laborers were hit the hardest. Data from Lucknow shows how the average working days pre-Covid for most workers were around 21 days a month, which fell to nine days a month post the lockdown. In the city of Pune, average working days in a month came down from 12 to two days. All of this inspired us to do something in order to help the needy by connecting them with those looking to hire laborers and educating them.“
Isak - South Korea, Soonchunhyang University
UN Sustainable Goals Addressed: #3: Good Health & Wellbeing, #12: Responsible Consumption & Production
Isak is an application that combines the activity of jogging and trash collection to make picking up trash more impactful. It uses Firebase, Flutter, Google Cloud Platform, TensorFlow. It was built by Choo Chang Woo, Jang Hyeon Wook, Jeong Hyeong Lee, and JeongWoo Han.
“COVID-19 has increased people's time to stay at home, and disposable garbage generated by the increase in packaging and delivery orders has been increasing exponentially and people are home more as a result. Our team decided to solve both garbage reduction and exercise. We thought that if we picked up trash while jogging, we could take care of our health and environment at the same time, and if we added additional functions, we could arouse interest from users and encourage them to participate.”
SaveONE life - Kenya, Taita Taveta University
UN Sustainable Goals Addressed: #1: No Poverty, #2: Zero Hunger, #4:Quality Education, #10: Reduced Inequality
SaveONE life helps donors locate and donate goods to home orphanages in Kenya that are in need of basic items, food, clothing, and other educational resources. It's built with Android, Assistant / Actions on Google, Firebase, Google Cloud Platform, and Google Maps. It was built by David Kinyanjui, Nasubo Imelda, and Wycliff Njenga.
“We visited one of the orphanage homes near our campus and we talked to the Orphanage Manager and his feedback he told us that their challenge is food. Some of the kids are suffering from malnutrition because they are not getting enough food, water, clothing and educational materials including school fees for the kids. The major inspiration for use is helping donors around our campus better know where the home orphanage is, when, and how orphans can get donations.
SIGNify - Canada, University of Toronto, Mississauga
UN Sustainable Goals Addressed: #10: Reduced Inequalities, #4: Quality Education
SIGNify provides an interface where deaf and non-deaf people can easily understand sign language through a graphical context. It leverages Android, Firebase, Flutter, Google Cloud Platform, and TensorFlow. It was built by Kavya Mehta, Milind Vishnoi, Mitesh Ghimire, and Wentao Zhou.
“Approximately 70 million deaf people around the world use sign language for communication. These are all people that have great ideas, thoughts, and opinions that need to be heard. However, their talent and skills will be of no use if people are not able to understand what they have to say; this has lead to 1 in 4 deaf people leaving a job due to discrimination. If we fail to learn sign language, we are depriving ourselves of the knowledge resources that deaf people have to provide. By learning sign language and hiring deaf people in the workspace, we are promoting equal rights and increasing employment opportunities for disabled people.”
Starvelp - Turkey, İzmir University of Economics
UN Sustainable Goals Addressed: #2: Zero Hunger
Starvelp aims to tackle the problems of food waste and hunger by enabling more ways to share local resources with those in need. It leverages Firebase, Flutter, and Google Cloud Platform. It was built by Akash Srivastava and Selin Doğa Orhan.
"We found that the prevalence of undernourishment is impacting a huge population. Prevalence of food insecurity and not being able to feed themselves and their families are related to poor financial conditions. We were inspired to build this, because in many countries, there are a large number of slum areas and many people who are in the farming sector are not able to get sufficient food. It is really shocking for us to see news about how people are getting impacted each year and have different diseases due to improper nutrition. In fact, they have to skip many meals which ultimately leads to undernourishment, and this is a big problem."
Xtrinsic - Germany, Faculty of Engineering Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
UN Sustainable Goals Addressed: #3: Good Health & Wellbeing
Xtrinsic is an application for mental health research and therapy - it adapts your environment to your personal habits and needs. Using a wearable device and TensorFlow, the team aims to detect and help users get through their struggles throughout the day and at night with behavioral suggestions. It’s built using Android, Assistant / Actions on Google, Firebase, Flutter, Google Cloud Platform, TensorFlow, WearOS, DialogFlow, and Google Health Services. It was built by Alexander Monneret, Chikordili Fabian Okeke, Emma Rein, and Vandysh Kateryna.
“Our inspiration comes from our own experience with mental health issues. Two of our team members were directly impacted by the recently waged wars in Syria and Ukraine. And all of us have experienced mental health conditions during the pandemic. We learned through our hardships how to overcome these tough situations and stay strong and positive. We believe that with our know-how and Google technologies we can make a difference and help make the world a better place.”
Zero-zone - South Korea, Sookmyung Women's University
UN Sustainable Goals Addressed: #4: Quality Education, #10: Reduced Inequalities
Zero-zone supports active communication for, and with, the hearing impaired and helps individuals with hearing impairments practice lip reading. The tool leverages Android, Assistant / Actions on Google, Flutter, Google Cloud Platform, and TensorFlow. It was built by DoEun Kim, Hwi Min, Hyemin Song, and Hyomin Kim.
“About 39% of Korean hearing impaired people find it difficult to learn lip-reading, even if they have enrolled in special schools. The project aims to refine lip-reading so that hearing impaired can learn lip-reading anytime, anywhere and communicate actively. Our tool provides equal educational opportunities for deaf users who want to practice oral speech. In addition, the active communication of the hearing impaired, will give them confidence and develop a power to overcome inequality due to difficulties in communication.”
Feeling inspired and ready to learn more about Google Developer Student Clubs? Find a club near you here, and be sure to RSVP here and tune in for the livestream of the upcoming Solution Challenge Demo Day on July 28th.
Posted by Julia DeLorenzo, Program Manager, Coding Competitions
Kick Start is one of Google’s online coding competitions offering programmers of all skill levels the opportunity to hone your skills through a series of online rounds hosted throughout the year.
If you’re new to coding competitions and not sure where to start, then join us for Coding Practice with Kick Start! Offering developers of all skills the chance to practice competitive programming problems on your own time without the pressure of a scoreboard or timed round. These practice sessions are not official Kick Start rounds, but are a great way for you to hone your coding skills, connect with a global community, prepare for an interview, and most importantly have fun!
Work your way through fun algorithmic and mathematical problems on the Kick Start platform in four-day practice sessions throughout the 2022 Kick Start season (see full schedule here).
There are two more Coding Practice with Kick Start sessions this year:
Coding Practice Session #2: June 27, 2022 (16:00 UTC) - July 1, 2022 (3:00 UTC)
Coding Practice Session #3: August 29, 2022 (16:00 UTC) - September 2, 2022 (3:00 UTC)
Here’s what our team of Googlers working behind the scenes to create the problems and walk-throughs have to say about the program, including advice for this year’s participants:
Sarah Young, Software Engineer
What advice would you give to beginning coders?
When first thinking about how to solve a problem, forget about the coding and try to think about it as if you only needed to explain how to do it to someone. Go back and reread the problem to make sure you covered everything. Then you can start breaking it down into logical pieces, and it'll make everything a lot easier!
Why is Coding Practice with Kick Start/the Kick Start competition such an excellent tool for growing your skills and practicing coding?
Kickstart is a great way to challenge yourself to do fun problems in a competitive but not stressful environment, whether you're a beginner or have done competitive programming in the past!
Federico Brubacher, Software Engineer
What advice would you give to beginning coders?
My advice to new coders comes in two parts:
First one is to embrace the learning process. Learning a new skill is hard. It's a rollercoaster process in which one day you are extremely productive/happy and the next you are stuck and bored. If you embrace that there will be bad days and stick with it then you will start making progress doing more difficult programming tasks.
Second is to try to pattern recognize. When we are learning incrementally difficult things, it is good to start by trying to associate the thing you are trying to learn/solve with stuff you have seen in the past. This makes the learning process easier because you are free now to focus on the new parts of the problem you are currently facing and not start from scratch. The hard part is doing the work to distill what you learned every day into patterns.
Why is Coding Practice with Kick Start/the Kick Start competition such an excellent tool for learning and practicing coding?
If you look at my previous answer you can see that pattern recognition is huge when learning coding. Practicing coding on Kick Start is all about pattern matching and thinking about a problem thoroughly armed only with your previous experience.
As you go through the problems you will see the arsenal of tools (patterns) you have to solve problems expand. Then you will use these patterns to solve new problems and continue learning and improving. It is addicting, but the good kind!
Kata Brányiné Sulák, Software Engineer
What advice would you give to beginning coders?
Coding is about solving problems - assembling the general algorithm and data structure pieces so that it results in a working solution. Don't try to learn the fine details of a specific programming language before jumping in, just use the language syntax to describe/document the steps you want to take. Making the code technically running is the easier part (even if initially you have to google for error messages or unexpected behaviors a lot).
Why is Coding Practice with Kick Start/the Kick Start competition such an excellent tool for growing your skills and practicing coding?
Kick Start's problem sets are diverse, to make coders encounter wide range of algos and data structures (giving high learning and also fun factors); mostly formulated in real life scenario descriptions to enforce the contestants to transform them into IT concepts (which is a core part of the developers' work); the input is simplified and is guaranteed to be correct so coders can concentrate on the abstract problem itself and not on writing boilerplate on error handling; and analysis is actually formulated as list of hints giving a second chance to create a solution in practice mode and still get the accomplishment.
Posted by Janelle Kuhlman, Developer Relations Program Manager
Click above to meet our community of Experts
The Google Developer Experts program is a global network of highly experienced technology experts, developers and thought leaders. GDEs share their expertise with other developers and tech communities through a variety of ways such as speaking engagements, mentorship and content writing. The community has access to an exclusive network of experts that span across different Google technologies including Android, Cloud, Machine Learning and more.
We hope you will join us as we bring together our startup & VC communities. Join us to dive into topics relevant to startups and enjoy sessions such as:
The future of web3
Hear from Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian and Dapper Labs Co-founder and CEO, Roham Gharegozlou, as they discuss web3 and how startups can prepare for the paradigm changes it brings.
VC AMA: Startup Summit Edition
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What’s new for the Google for Startups Cloud Program
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Technical leaders & business sessions
Growth insights from top startups Discord, Swit, and Streak on how their tech stack helped propel their growth.
Additionally, startups will have an opportunity to join ‘Ask me Anything’ live sessions after the event to interact with Google Cloud startup experts and technical teams to discuss questions that may come up throughout the event.
You can see the full agenda here to get more details on the sessions.
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