Tag Archives: compatibility

Developer-Powered CTS (CTS-D)

Posted by Sachiyo Sugimoto, Android Partner Engineering

A strength of Android is its diverse ecosystem of devices, brought to market by more than 24K distinct devices, and used by billions of people around the world. Since the early releases of Android, we’ve invested in our Android Compatibility Program as a way to ensure that devices continue to provide a stable, consistent environment for apps.

The Compatibility Test Suite (CTS) is a key part of the program - it is a collection of more than two million test cases that check Android device implementations to ensure developer applications run on a variety of devices and enable a consistent application experience for users.

Device makers run CTS on their devices throughout the development process, and use it to identify and fix bugs early. Over the years we have constantly expanded the suite by adding new test cases, and today CTS includes more than 2 million tests. It is still growing - as Android evolves, there are new areas to cover and there are also gaps where we are constantly working to create additional tests.

While most CTS tests are written by Android engineers, we know that app developers have a unique perspective on actual device compatibility issues. So to enhance CTS with better input from app developers, we are adding a new test suite called CTS-D that is built and run by developers like you.



What is CTS-D?

CTS-D is a new CTS module that is powered by app developers with a focus on pain points that they are seeing in the field. Developers can build and contribute test cases to CTS-D to help catch those issues, and they can run the CTS-D suite to verify compatibility. Longer term, our plan is to work closely with the Android developer community to expand the CTS-D suite.

We know that many of you have already created your own tests to verify compatibility on various devices. We want to work with you to bring those tests into AOSP, and you can see the first tests contributed by the community in the initial CTS-D commit here.

So with CTS-D, we are helping to make those kinds of tests available widely, to help device manufacturers and app developers identify and share issues more effectively.

How is CTS-D used?

CTS-D is open-sourced and available on AOSP, so any app developer can use it as a verification tool. Using CTS-D helps to minimize the communication overhead among app developers, device manufacturers and Google, helping to resolve issues effectively.

If a certain device does not pass a CTS-D test, please report the problem using this issue tracker template. After we verify the issue on the reported device, we will work with our partners to resolve it. We're also strongly advising device manufacturers to use CTS-D to discover and mitigate issues.

Get Started with CTS-D!

If you have an idea for CTS-D, please file a test proposal using this issue tracker template before contributing your test code to AOSP. The Android team will review your proposal and verify your test’s eligibility. We’re currently most interested in adding more test cases in the area of Power Management.

Just like with CTS, new CTS-D test cases must meet eligibility requirements and can only enforce the following:
  1. All public API behaviors that are described in Android developer documentation.
  2. All MUST requirements that are included in Android Compatibility Definition Document (CDD).
  3. Test cases that have not been covered by existing CTS test cases in AOSP
If you are interested in learning more about CTS-D, check out tutorials here on how to contribute to and utilize CTS-D. Note that the review process for new CTS-D test cases can take some time, so thanks for your patience. We hope you will give CTS-D a try soon. Let’s collaboratively make the Android experience even better!

First preview of Android 12

Android 12 logo

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering

Every day, Android apps help billions of people work, play, communicate, and create on a wide range of devices from phones and laptops to tablets, TVs, and cars. As more people come to rely on the experiences you build, their expectations can rise just as fast. It’s one of the reasons we share Android releases with you early: your feedback helps us build a better platform for your apps and all of the people who use them. Today, we’re releasing the first Developer Preview of Android 12, the next version of Android, for your testing and feedback.

With each version, we’re working to make the OS smarter, easier to use, and better performing, with privacy and security at the core. In Android 12 we’re also working to give you new tools for building great experiences for users. Starting with things like compatible media transcoding, which helps your app to work with the latest video formats if you don’t already support them, and easier copy/paste of rich content into your apps, like images and videos. We’re also adding privacy protections and optimizing performance to keep your apps responsive.

Today’s first preview is just the start for Android 12, and we’ll have lots more to share as we move through the release. Read on for a taste of what’s new in Android 12, and visit the Android 12 developer site for details on downloads for Pixel and release timeline. As always, it’s crucial to get your feedback early, to help us incorporate it into the final product, so let us know what you think!

Alongside the work we’re doing in Android 12, later this month we’ll have more to share on another important tool that helps you create great user experiences more easily: Jetpack Compose, our modern toolkit for building native UI. Join us on #TheAndroidShow for a behind-the-scenes look at Jetpack Compose, livestreamed on February 24 at 9AM PT, and tweet your Jetpack Compose questions using #TheAndroidShow to have them answered live on the show.

Trust and safety

Privacy is at the heart of everything we do, and in Android 12 we’re continuing to focus on giving users more transparency and control while keeping their devices and data secure. In today’s release we’ve added new controls over identifiers that can be used for tracking, safer defaults for app components, and more. These changes may affect your apps, so we recommend testing as soon as possible. Watch for more privacy and security features coming in later preview releases.

Modern SameSite cookie behaviors in WebView - In line with changes to Chrome and other browsers, WebView includes new SameSite cookie behaviors to provide additional security and privacy and give users more transparency and control over how cookies can be used across sites. More here.

Restricted Netlink MAC - We’re continuing to help developers migrate to privacy-protecting resettable identifiers. In a multi-release effort to ease migration of device-scoped Netlink MAC, in Android 11 we restricted access to it based on API level 30, and in Android 12 we’re applying the restriction for all apps - regardless of targetSDK level. More here.

Safer exporting of components - To prevent apps from inadvertently exporting activities, services, and receivers, we’re changing the default handling of the android:exported attribute to be more explicit. With this change, components that declare one or more intent filters must now explicitly declare an android:exported attribute. You should inspect your components in the manifest in order to avoid installation errors related to this change. More here.

Safer handling of Intents - To make handling PendingIntents more secure, Android 12 requires apps to explicitly declare a mutability flag, either FLAG_MUTABLE or the new FLAG_IMMUTABLE, for each PendingIntent. More here.

You can read more about these and other privacy and security changes here.

Better user experience tools

In Android 12 we’re investing in key areas to help deliver a polished experience and better performance for users. Here are some of the updates so far.

Compatible media transcoding - With the prevalence of HEVC hardware encoders on mobile devices, camera apps are increasingly capturing in HEVC format, which offers significant improvements in quality and compression over older codecs. Most apps should support HEVC, but for apps that can’t, we’re introducing compatible media transcoding.

With this feature, an app that doesn’t support HEVC can have the platform automatically transcode the file into AVC, a format that is widely compatible. The transcoding process takes time, depending on the video and hardware properties of the device. As an example, a one minute 1080p video at 30fps takes around 9 seconds to transcode on a Pixel 4. You can opt-in to use the transcoding service by just declaring the media formats that your apps don't support. For developers, we strongly recommend that your apps support HEVC, and if that’s not possible, enable compatible media transcoding. The feature will be active on all devices using HEVC format for video capture. We'd love to hear your feedback on this feature. More here.

AVIF image support - To give you higher image quality with more efficient compression, Android 12 introduces platform support for AV1 Image File Format (AVIF). AVIF is a container format for images and sequences of images encoded using AV1. Like other modern image formats, AVIF takes advantage of the intra-frame encoded content from video compression. This dramatically improves image quality for the same file size when compared to older image formats, such as JPEG.

AVIF (18.2kB)

JPEG (20.7kB)

race car photo in AVIF (18.2kB)
race car photo in JPEG (20.7kB)

Credit: Image comparison from AVIF has landed by Jake Archibald

Foreground service optimizations - Foreground services are an important way for apps to manage certain types of user-facing tasks, but when overused they can affect performance and even lead to app kills. To ensure a better experience for users, we will be blocking foreground service starts from the background for apps that are targeting the new platform. To make it easier to transition away from this pattern, we’re introducing a new expedited job in JobScheduler that gets elevated process priority, network access, and runs immediately regardless of power constraints like Battery Saver or Doze. For back-compatibility, we’ve also built expedited jobs into the latest release of Jetpack WorkManager library. Also, to reduce distraction for users, we’re now delaying the display of some foreground service notifications by up to 10 seconds. This gives short-lived tasks a chance to complete before their notifications are shown. More here.

Rich content insertion - Users love images, videos and other expressive content, but inserting and moving this content in apps is not always easy. To make it simple for your apps to receive rich content, we’re introducing a new unified API that lets you accept content from any source: clipboard, keyboard, or drag and drop. You can attach a new interface, OnReceiveContentListener, to UI components and get a callback when content is inserted through any mechanism. This callback becomes the single place for your code to handle insertion of all content, from plain and styled text to markup, images, videos, audio files, and more. For back-compatibility, we’ve added the unified API to AndroidX. More here.

Haptic-coupled audio effect - In Android 12 apps can provide audio-coupled haptic feedback through the phone's vibrator. The vibration strength and frequency are derived from an audio session, allowing you to create more immersive game and audio experiences. For example, a video calling app could use custom ringtones to identify the caller through haptic feedback, or you could simulate rough terrain in a racing game. More here.

Multi-channel audio - Android 12 includes several enhancements for audio with spatial information. It adds support for MPEG-H playback in passthrough and offload mode, and the audio mixers, resamplers and effects have been optimized for up to 24 channels (the previous maximum was 8).

Immersive mode API improvements for gesture nav - We’ve simplified immersive mode so that gesture navigation is easier and more consistent, for example when watching a video, reading a book, or playing a game. We’re still protecting apps from accidental gestures when in full-screen experiences related to gaming, but in all other full-screen or immersive experiences (e.g. video viewers, reading, photo gallery), for apps targeting the new platform, we’re changing the default to allow users to navigate their phone with one swipe. More here.

Notification UI updates - We’re refreshing notification designs to make them more modern, easier to use, and more functional. In this first preview you’ll notice changes from the drawer and controls to the templates themselves. We’re also optimizing transitions and animations across the system to make them more smooth. As part of the updates, for apps targeting Android 12 we’re decorating notifications with custom content with icon and expand affordances to match all other notifications. More here.

Faster, more responsive notifications - When users tap a notification, they expect to jump immediately into the app - the faster the better. To meet that expectation, developers should make sure that notification taps trigger Activity starts directly, rather than using “trampolines” - an intermediary broadcast receiver or service - to start the Activity. Notification trampolines can cause significant delays and affect the user experience. To keep notifications responsive, Android 12 will block notification trampolines by preventing them from launching their target Activities, and we’re asking developers to migrate away from this pattern. The change applies only to apps targeting the new platform, but for all apps we’ll display a toast to make trampolines visible to you and to users. More here.

Improved Binder IPC calls - As part of our work on performance, we’ve put a focus on reducing system variability. We’ve taken a look at latency and workload distribution, and made optimizations that reduce the median experience from the tail end, or 99% percentile use case. In doing so, we’ve targeted improvements to system binder calls adding lightweight caching strategies and focusing on removing lock contention to improve latency distribution. This has yielded roughly a 2x performance increase on Binder calls overall, with significant improvements in specific calls, for example a 47x improvement in refContentProvider(), 15x in releaseWakeLock(), and 7.9x in JobScheduler.schedule().

App compatibility

We’re working to make updates faster and smoother by prioritizing app compatibility as we roll out new platform versions. In Android 12 we’ve made most app-facing changes opt-in to give you more time, and we’ve updated our tools and processes to help you get ready sooner. We’ve also added new functionality to Google Play system updates to give your apps a better environment on Android 12 devices.

More of Android updated through Google Play - We’re continuing to expand our investment in Google Play system updates (Project Mainline) to give apps a more consistent, secure environment across devices. In Android 12 we’ve added the Android Runtime (ART) module that lets us push updates to the core runtime and libraries on devices running Android 12. We can improve runtime performance and correctness, manage memory more efficiently, and make Kotlin operations faster - all without requiring a full system update. We’ve also expanded the functionality of existing modules - for example, we’re delivering our compatible media transcoding feature inside an updatable module.

Optimizing for tablets, foldables, and TVs - With more people than ever using apps on large-screen devices like foldables, tablets, and TVs, now is a great time to make sure your app or game is ready. Get started by optimizing for tablets and building apps for foldables. And, for the biggest screen in the home, the first Android 12 preview for Android TV is also available. In addition to bringing the latest Android features to the TV with this preview, you will also be able to test your apps on the all-new Google TV experience. Learn more on the Android TV Developers site and get started with your ADT-3 developer kit.

Updated lists of non-SDK interfaces - We’ve restricted additional non-SDK interfaces, and as always your feedback and requests for public API equivalents are welcome.

Easier testing and debugging of changes - To make it easier for you to test the opt-in changes that can affect your app, we’ve made many of them toggleable. WIth the toggles you can force-enable or disable the changes individually from Developer options or adb. Check out the details here.

mobile display of App Compatibility Changes with toggles

App compatibility toggles in Developer Options.

Platform stability milestone - Like last year, we’re letting you know our Platform Stability milestone well in advance, to give you more time to plan for app compatibility work. At this milestone we’ll deliver not only final SDK/NDK APIs, but also final internal APIs and app-facing system behaviors. We’re expecting to reach Platform Stability by August 2021, and you’ll have several weeks before the official release to do your final testing. The release timeline details are here.

Get started with Android 12

The Developer Preview has everything you need to try the Android 12 features, test your apps, and give us feedback. You can get started today by flashing a device system image to a Pixel 3 / 3 XL, Pixel 3a / 3a XL, Pixel 4 / 4 XL, Pixel 4a / 4a 5G, or Pixel 5 device. If you don’t have a Pixel device, you can use the 64-bit system images with the Android Emulator in Android Studio.

When you’re set up, here are some of the things you should do:

  • Try the new features and APIs - your feedback is critical during the early part of the developer preview. Report issues in our tracker or give us direct feedback by survey for selected features from the feedback and requests page.
  • Test your current app for compatibility - the goal here is to learn whether your app is affected by default behavior changes in Android 12. Just install your current published app onto a device or emulator running Android 12 and test.
  • Test your app with opt-in changes - Android 12 has opt-in behavior changes that only affect your app when it’s targeting the new platform. It’s extremely important to understand and assess these changes early. To make it easier to test, you can toggle the changes on and off individually.

We’ll update the preview system images and SDK regularly throughout the Android 12 release cycle. This initial preview release is for developers only and not intended for daily or consumer use, so we're making it available by manual download only. You can flash a factory image to your Pixel device, or you can sideload an OTA image to a Pixel device running Android 11, in which case you won’t need to unlock your bootloader or wipe data. Either way, once you’ve manually installed a preview build, you’ll automatically get future updates over-the-air for all later previews and Betas. More here.

As we get closer to a final product, we'll be inviting consumers to try it out as well, and we'll open up enrollments through Android Beta at that time. Stay tuned for details, but for now please note that Android Beta is not currently available for Android 12.

For complete information, visit the Android 12 developer site.

Android 11 Beta 2 and Platform Stability

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering

Android 11 dial

A few weeks ago we unwrapped the first Beta of Android 11 with a focus on people, controls, and privacy. As we highlighted in the #Android11Beta Launch, we’re making Android more people-centric and expressive, helping users control their smart devices, and giving them even more control over sensitive permissions. Developers can use APIs like Conversations, Bubbles, Device Controls, and Media Controls, to integrate these experiences into their apps.

Today we’re pushing out the second Beta of Android 11 for you to try. This release takes us to the Platform Stability milestone, which means that Android 11’s APIs and behaviors are finalized. For developers, it’s time to get started on your final compatibility updates and publish them in time for the official release later in Q3.

This week’s theme in #11 Weeks of Android is Android 11 Compatibility and we’ll be sharing helpful content and materials all week. You can find them on the #11 Weeks page or follow Android Developers on Twitter and Youtube.

You can get Beta 2 today on your Pixel 2, 3, 3a, and 4 device by enrolling here for over-the-air updates, and downloads are also available. If you previously enrolled for Beta 1, you will automatically get the over-the-air update. Let us know what you think, and thanks for the feedback you’ve provided so far!

Platform Stability

Beta 2 brings Android 11 to Platform Stability, a new release milestone that we added this year just for developers, based on your feedback.

Platform Stability means that all app-facing surfaces and behaviors are now final in Android 11. This includes not only final SDK and NDK APIs, but also final system behaviors and restrictions on non-SDK interfaces that may affect apps. So from Beta 2, you can release compatibility updates with confidence that the platform won’t change. More on the timeline is here.

Platform Stability timeline

With the platform now stable, we’re encouraging all app and game developers to start your final compatibility testing and publish your updates ahead of the final release.

For all SDK, library, tools, and game engine developers, it’s even more important to start testing now and release your compatible updates as soon as possible -- your downstream app and game developers may be blocked until they receive your updates. When you’ve released a compatible update, be vocal and let developers know!



Why app compatibility is important

For Android, the term app compatibility means that your app runs properly on a specific version of the platform, typically the latest version. You can check this right now by installing your production app on a device or emulator running Android 11. Just test all of the user flows and features, and if the app looks and runs properly, then you’re done, it’s compatible!

It sounds simple, but sometimes there’s more to it. With each release, we make integral changes that improve privacy and security, as well as implement changes that evolve the overall user experience across the OS. Sometimes these can affect your apps, so it’s important to take a look at the behavior changes and test against them, then publish the compatible update to users. It’s a basic but critical level of quality.

App compatibility comes into play as users update to the latest version of Android, whether they’ve purchased a new device or installed an update on their current device. They’re excited to explore the latest version of Android, and they want to experience it with their favorite apps. If the apps don’t work properly, it’s a major issue - for users and for all of us.

So while there are a ton of new APIs and capabilities to explore, and more changes to consider when you’re ready to change your app’s targeting, start by testing your current app and releasing a compatible update first.

Updates to Pixel and other devices will get started as soon as Android 11 reaches the final release to Android Open Source Project (AOSP), which we expect later in Q3. Multiple partner devices are also in active public previews now to support your compatibility testing.

Making app compatibility easier in Android 11

With each release, we’re working to reduce the work you’ll need to do to get your apps ready. In Android 11, we’ve added new processes, developer tools, and release milestones to minimize the impact of platform updates and make it easier for apps to stay compatible.

  • Minimizing the impact of behavior changes - we’re making a conscious effort to minimize platform changes that could affect apps by making them opt-in, wherever possible, until you set targetSdkVersion to Android 11 in your app. If you are distributing through Google Play, you’ll have more than a year to opt-in to these changes.
  • Easier testing and debugging - To help you test for compatibility, we’ve made many of the breaking changes toggleable - meaning that you can force-enable or disable the changes individually from Developer options or adb. With this change, there’s no longer a need to change targetSdkVersion or recompile your app for basic testing. Check out the details here.
    App compatibility toggles in Developer options

    App compatibility toggles in Developer options.

  • Restrictions on non-SDK interfaces - as part of our ongoing effort to gradually move developers away from non-SDK APIs, we’ve updated the lists of restricted non-SDK interfaces, and as always your feedback and requests for public API equivalents are welcome.
  • Dynamic resource loader - As part of their migration away from non-SDK interfaces, developers asked us for a public API to load resources and assets dynamically at runtime. We’ve now added a Resource Loader framework in Android 11, and thank you to the developers who gave us this input!
  • Platform stability milestone - As mentioned, this is a new milestone we’ve added to our release process to give developers a clear date for final changes. It includes not only final SDK/NDK APIs, but also final internal APIs and system behaviors that may affect apps.


Get your apps ready for Android 11!

Now that Android 11 is stable, make your apps compatible as soon as possible. Here’s how to do it.

Android 11 compatibility flow chart

For testing your current app, start with the behavior changes for all apps to see where it could be affected. Here are the top changes (these apply regardless of your app’s targetSdkVersion):

  • One-time permission - Users can now grant single-use permission to access location, device microphone and camera. Details here.
  • External storage access - Apps can no longer access other apps’ files in external storage. Details here.
  • Scudo hardened allocator - Now the heap memory allocator for native code in apps. Details here.
  • File descriptor sanitizer - Now enabled by default to detect file descriptor handling issues for native code in apps. Details here.

Remember to test the libraries and SDKs in your app for compatibility. If you find an issue, try updating to the latest version of the SDK, or reach out to the developer for help.

Later, after you’ve published the compatible version of your current app, you can start the process of updating your app's targetSdkVersion. Review the behavior changes for Android 11 apps and try the compatibility framework to help find impacts. Here are some of the top changes to test for (these apply only to targetSdkVersion 30+):

  • Scoped storage - New storage restrictions, behaviors, and APIs for apps reading and writing files. Details here.
  • Background location - Changes to how apps request background location and how users grant it. Details here.
  • Package visibility - Changes to how apps can query and interact with other installed apps. Details here.
  • Compressed resource files - Apps can’t be installed or updated if they contain a compressed resources.arsc file, or if the file is not aligned on a 4-byte boundary. Details here.
  • APK Signature Scheme v2 - Apps must now be signed using APK Signature Scheme v2 or higher. Details here.
  • Heap pointer tagging - For 64-bit processes, native heap allocations have a tag set in the top byte of the pointer that should not be modified by apps. Details here.

During testing, watch for uses of restricted non-SDK interfaces in your app and move those to public SDK equivalents instead. You can read about the restricted APIs here.

Explore the new features and APIs

As soon as you’re ready, dive into Android 11 and learn about the new experiences you can build. Our #Android11 Beta post has a recap of new features for developers, and you can also visit the Beta Launch page to see talks from the Android team on what’s new in their areas.

Android Studio also has new features for Android 11 also, to improve your productivity and workflow, such as ADB incremental for faster installs of large APKs, and additional nullability annotations on platform APIs. You can give these a try by downloading the latest Android Studio Beta or Canary version. Instructions for configuring Android Studio for Android 11 are here.

For complete details on Android 11 features and APIs, visit the Android 11 developer site.

How do I get Beta 2?

It’s easy! You can enroll here to get Android 11 Beta updates over-the-air for Pixel 2, 3, 3a, and 4 devices. Alternatively, give Android Flash Tool a try for easy on-demand updates, and downloadable system images are also available. If you don't have a Pixel device, you can use the Android Emulator in Android Studio or try a GSI image to run Android 11 on supported Treble-compliant devices.

As always, your feedback is critical, so please let us know what you think. You can use our hotlists for filing platform issues (including privacy and behavior changes), app compatibility issues, and third-party SDK issues. You've shared great feedback with us so far -- thank you!

Android 11 compatibility week

This week in #11 Weeks of Android, we’re highlighting Android 11 Compatibility, a theme that’s important for all developers now that the platform has reached stability.

We’re sharing resources to help you with compatibility testing here, and you can follow Android Developers on Twitter and Youtube to catch helpful content and materials in this area all this week!

Also, the Android engineering team will host a Reddit AMA on r/androiddev tomorrow, July 9 at 12:00PM PST, to answer your technical questions about Android 11. See this post for details and to submit your questions.

Excelliance Tech: moving to new Android dynamic resource loading APIs for long-term compatibility

This blogpost is a collaboration between Google and Excelliance Tech. Authored by Zhuo Chen with support from Zhihai Wang, Gao Huang from Excelliance Tech.

Excelliance Tech improved the stability and compatibility of their LeBian SDK by moving away from non-SDK APIs, toward stable, official APIs. Their collaboration with the Android team during the process also led to a new public API for resource loading that all developers can use - the ResourcesLoader API in Android 11.

Helping game developers keep users engaged

Games are becoming increasingly complex, and a loading progress bar is not only a countdown to a new adventure, but also a bridge which connects players and developers.

Players want the game to load right away, so "loading" has its own priorities: resources that will be used in the first few minutes need to be packed into the APK, while the rest of the content can be downloaded in the background after the game starts.

Developers are always creating new content for their games, so "change" is the only constant: different campaigns bring different launch screens and themes, keeping the game experience fresh for players.

Excelliance Tech’s LeBian (乐变) game assets streaming service helps game developers meet players’ needs by loading fresh resources dynamically while the game is loading or being played.

Meteor, Butterfly And a Sword (流星群侠传) by NetEase Games, Duoduo Auto Chess (多多自走棋) by Dragonest Game, Langrisser (梦幻模拟战) by ZlongGames, Junior Three Kingdom 2 (少年三国志 2) by Yoozoo Games - these games are created by different developers and have different look and feel, but one thing they have in common: they all use LeBian game streaming service to load resources.

The resource loading technology is so useful that Excelliance Tech is even using it in the LeBian SDK itself, bringing a better experience for developers. Dynamic resource loading makes the SDK much easier to use. By dynamically updating its internal resources when needed, the library doesn’t require developers to update the SDK for new resources.

Before Android 11 introduced the ResourcesLoader API, Excelliance Tech had to build their dynamic resource loading capability the hard way, using non-SDK interfaces.

Building the initial product

When Excelliance was first building their product, Android did not offer public APIs for the dynamic resource loading use-case. The team did what they could, but ended up using non-SDK interfaces to add the external resources. While this met the technical need initially, the implementation was fragile - it depended on non-SDK interfaces, which don’t have the same compatibility guarantees as official SDK APIs and can change without notice.

As a result, Excelliance found that compatibility issues would surface unexpectedly as new versions of Android were released. These required additional testing and development to assure the stability of the product. Over many iterations, it took the Excelliance team six engineer-months and a lot of code to stabilize their solution, while knowing that it might break again in the next Android release. With Android tightening restrictions on non-SDK interfaces to achieve better stability and app compatibility, relying on those non-SDK interfaces became no longer an option.

Working toward a sustainable solution

As the Android team increased its focus on moving apps to public APIs, Excelliance saw an opportunity to migrate to a stronger foundation. They reached out to the Android team to give their feedback and highlighted their use case and need for public SDK APIs.

Over time, their collaboration led to the development of the ResourcesLoader public API that’s available for the first time in Android 11. Excelliance Tech has already moved to the new ResourcesLoader API and they’ve seen better productivity and product quality as a result. Excelliance believes the ResourcesLoader API provides advantages including the following:

  • Easy to use. The development team migrated the solution to the new API in 2 days, testing included.
  • No performance loss. In some cases, the loading speed even increased because ResourcesLoader can load uncompressed resources much faster.
  • Easy to develop. Before using the ResourcesLoader API, the team had to assign a senior engineer to 1) understand how AssetManager works, 2) find private APIs and find out how they work on different Android versions, 3) learn zip file structure, etc. Now it only takes a junior engineer who can read the API documentation.
  • Much less code. Before the ResourcesLoader API, the solution took more than 1,000 lines of code, now it has less than 50 lines of code, with the essential code down to just a few lines.
  • Forward compatibility. By using official public APIs that will continue to be supported by the Android team, the developer’s solution will have much better compatibility on the future Android platforms. 
String sdkroot = getApplicationInfo().dataDir + "/lebian";
ResourcesLoader rl = new ResourcesLoader();
rl.addProvider(ResourcesProvider.loadFromDirectory(sdkroot, null));
Resources res = getResources();
res.addLoaders(rl);
final AssetManager assetManager = res.getAssets();

After moving to the new ResourcesLoader API, the essential code has just a few lines (down from hundreds of lines of code across a number of source files).

Improving performance

Excelliance Tech did a comparison test, loading 16,028 files (uncompressed 1.47GB, compressed 1.36GB) in 4 ways:

  1. Load resources directly from APK
  2. Load resources using non-SDK interfaces
  3. Load APK using ResourcesLoader
  4. Load resources directly from a directory using ResourcesLoader

Resources are compressed in option 1, 2 and 3, and the average loading times are around 19 seconds. Option 4 loads uncompressed resources directly from a directory using ResourcesLoader, the average loading time is about 3 seconds - a 6x performance improvement!

Summarizing the overall impact of ResourcesLoader, Huang Gao, CEO & Product Lead at Excelliance Tech, said “The new ResourcesLoader API dramatically reduces development and maintenance costs and allows us to focus more on product and business innovation."

Co-creating the future

The Excelliance Tech team.

The Excelliance Tech team.

"On the Android platform, we've created some valuable products and services, which makes us want to invest more to create innovative products", Excelliance Tech stated, "We hope to have more opportunities to participate in the building of the Android ecosystem and contribute our efforts to make a better Android both for consumers and developers."

Excelliance Tech made an investment for the long-term compatibility of the LeBian SDK. Moving to the ResourcesLoader API has already yielded stability and performance benefits, reduced the complexity of their code, and reduced risks of future compatibility issues as Android rolls out new versions of the platform. The ResourcesLoader API is part of Android 11’s public APIs, benefitting the entire Android developer community.

Excelliance Tech: moving to new Android dynamic resource loading APIs for long-term compatibility

This blogpost is a collaboration between Google and Excelliance Tech. Authored by Zhuo Chen with support from Zhihai Wang, Gao Huang from Excelliance Tech.

Excelliance Tech improved the stability and compatibility of their LeBian SDK by moving away from non-SDK APIs, toward stable, official APIs. Their collaboration with the Android team during the process also led to a new public API for resource loading that all developers can use - the ResourcesLoader API in Android 11.

Helping game developers keep users engaged

Games are becoming increasingly complex, and a loading progress bar is not only a countdown to a new adventure, but also a bridge which connects players and developers.

Players want the game to load right away, so "loading" has its own priorities: resources that will be used in the first few minutes need to be packed into the APK, while the rest of the content can be downloaded in the background after the game starts.

Developers are always creating new content for their games, so "change" is the only constant: different campaigns bring different launch screens and themes, keeping the game experience fresh for players.

Excelliance Tech’s LeBian (乐变) game assets streaming service helps game developers meet players’ needs by loading fresh resources dynamically while the game is loading or being played.

Meteor, Butterfly And a Sword (流星群侠传) by NetEase Games, Duoduo Auto Chess (多多自走棋) by Dragonest Game, Langrisser (梦幻模拟战) by ZlongGames, Junior Three Kingdom 2 (少年三国志 2) by Yoozoo Games - these games are created by different developers and have different look and feel, but one thing they have in common: they all use LeBian game streaming service to load resources.

The resource loading technology is so useful that Excelliance Tech is even using it in the LeBian SDK itself, bringing a better experience for developers. Dynamic resource loading makes the SDK much easier to use. By dynamically updating its internal resources when needed, the library doesn’t require developers to update the SDK for new resources.

Before Android 11 introduced the ResourcesLoader API, Excelliance Tech had to build their dynamic resource loading capability the hard way, using non-SDK interfaces.

Building the initial product

When Excelliance was first building their product, Android did not offer public APIs for the dynamic resource loading use-case. The team did what they could, but ended up using non-SDK interfaces to add the external resources. While this met the technical need initially, the implementation was fragile - it depended on non-SDK interfaces, which don’t have the same compatibility guarantees as official SDK APIs and can change without notice.

As a result, Excelliance found that compatibility issues would surface unexpectedly as new versions of Android were released. These required additional testing and development to assure the stability of the product. Over many iterations, it took the Excelliance team six engineer-months and a lot of code to stabilize their solution, while knowing that it might break again in the next Android release. With Android tightening restrictions on non-SDK interfaces to achieve better stability and app compatibility, relying on those non-SDK interfaces became no longer an option.

Working toward a sustainable solution

As the Android team increased its focus on moving apps to public APIs, Excelliance saw an opportunity to migrate to a stronger foundation. They reached out to the Android team to give their feedback and highlighted their use case and need for public SDK APIs.

Over time, their collaboration led to the development of the ResourcesLoader public API that’s available for the first time in Android 11. Excelliance Tech has already moved to the new ResourcesLoader API and they’ve seen better productivity and product quality as a result. Excelliance believes the ResourcesLoader API provides advantages including the following:

  • Easy to use. The development team migrated the solution to the new API in 2 days, testing included.
  • No performance loss. In some cases, the loading speed even increased because ResourcesLoader can load uncompressed resources much faster.
  • Easy to develop. Before using the ResourcesLoader API, the team had to assign a senior engineer to 1) understand how AssetManager works, 2) find private APIs and find out how they work on different Android versions, 3) learn zip file structure, etc. Now it only takes a junior engineer who can read the API documentation.
  • Much less code. Before the ResourcesLoader API, the solution took more than 1,000 lines of code, now it has less than 50 lines of code, with the essential code down to just a few lines.
  • Forward compatibility. By using official public APIs that will continue to be supported by the Android team, the developer’s solution will have much better compatibility on the future Android platforms. 
String sdkroot = getApplicationInfo().dataDir + "/lebian";
ResourcesLoader rl = new ResourcesLoader();
rl.addProvider(ResourcesProvider.loadFromDirectory(sdkroot, null));
Resources res = getResources();
res.addLoaders(rl);
final AssetManager assetManager = res.getAssets();

After moving to the new ResourcesLoader API, the essential code has just a few lines (down from hundreds of lines of code across a number of source files).

Improving performance

Excelliance Tech did a comparison test, loading 16,028 files (uncompressed 1.47GB, compressed 1.36GB) in 4 ways:

  1. Load resources directly from APK
  2. Load resources using non-SDK interfaces
  3. Load APK using ResourcesLoader
  4. Load resources directly from a directory using ResourcesLoader

Resources are compressed in option 1, 2 and 3, and the average loading times are around 19 seconds. Option 4 loads uncompressed resources directly from a directory using ResourcesLoader, the average loading time is about 3 seconds - a 6x performance improvement!

Summarizing the overall impact of ResourcesLoader, Huang Gao, CEO & Product Lead at Excelliance Tech, said “The new ResourcesLoader API dramatically reduces development and maintenance costs and allows us to focus more on product and business innovation."

Co-creating the future

The Excelliance Tech team.

The Excelliance Tech team.

"On the Android platform, we've created some valuable products and services, which makes us want to invest more to create innovative products", Excelliance Tech stated, "We hope to have more opportunities to participate in the building of the Android ecosystem and contribute our efforts to make a better Android both for consumers and developers."

Excelliance Tech made an investment for the long-term compatibility of the LeBian SDK. Moving to the ResourcesLoader API has already yielded stability and performance benefits, reduced the complexity of their code, and reduced risks of future compatibility issues as Android rolls out new versions of the platform. The ResourcesLoader API is part of Android 11’s public APIs, benefitting the entire Android developer community.

Excelliance Tech: moving to new Android dynamic resource loading APIs for long-term compatibility

This blogpost is a collaboration between Google and Excelliance Tech. Authored by Zhuo Chen with support from Zhihai Wang, Gao Huang from Excelliance Tech.

Excelliance Tech improved the stability and compatibility of their LeBian SDK by moving away from non-SDK APIs, toward stable, official APIs. Their collaboration with the Android team during the process also led to a new public API for resource loading that all developers can use - the ResourcesLoader API in Android 11.

Helping game developers keep users engaged

Games are becoming increasingly complex, and a loading progress bar is not only a countdown to a new adventure, but also a bridge which connects players and developers.

Players want the game to load right away, so "loading" has its own priorities: resources that will be used in the first few minutes need to be packed into the APK, while the rest of the content can be downloaded in the background after the game starts.

Developers are always creating new content for their games, so "change" is the only constant: different campaigns bring different launch screens and themes, keeping the game experience fresh for players.

Excelliance Tech’s LeBian (乐变) game assets streaming service helps game developers meet players’ needs by loading fresh resources dynamically while the game is loading or being played.

Meteor, Butterfly And a Sword (流星群侠传) by NetEase Games, Duoduo Auto Chess (多多自走棋) by Dragonest Game, Langrisser (梦幻模拟战) by ZlongGames, Junior Three Kingdom 2 (少年三国志 2) by Yoozoo Games - these games are created by different developers and have different look and feel, but one thing they have in common: they all use LeBian game streaming service to load resources.

The resource loading technology is so useful that Excelliance Tech is even using it in the LeBian SDK itself, bringing a better experience for developers. Dynamic resource loading makes the SDK much easier to use. By dynamically updating its internal resources when needed, the library doesn’t require developers to update the SDK for new resources.

Before Android 11 introduced the ResourcesLoader API, Excelliance Tech had to build their dynamic resource loading capability the hard way, using non-SDK interfaces.

Building the initial product

When Excelliance was first building their product, Android did not offer public APIs for the dynamic resource loading use-case. The team did what they could, but ended up using non-SDK interfaces to add the external resources. While this met the technical need initially, the implementation was fragile - it depended on non-SDK interfaces, which don’t have the same compatibility guarantees as official SDK APIs and can change without notice.

As a result, Excelliance found that compatibility issues would surface unexpectedly as new versions of Android were released. These required additional testing and development to assure the stability of the product. Over many iterations, it took the Excelliance team six engineer-months and a lot of code to stabilize their solution, while knowing that it might break again in the next Android release. With Android tightening restrictions on non-SDK interfaces to achieve better stability and app compatibility, relying on those non-SDK interfaces became no longer an option.

Working toward a sustainable solution

As the Android team increased its focus on moving apps to public APIs, Excelliance saw an opportunity to migrate to a stronger foundation. They reached out to the Android team to give their feedback and highlighted their use case and need for public SDK APIs.

Over time, their collaboration led to the development of the ResourcesLoader public API that’s available for the first time in Android 11. Excelliance Tech has already moved to the new ResourcesLoader API and they’ve seen better productivity and product quality as a result. Excelliance believes the ResourcesLoader API provides advantages including the following:

  • Easy to use. The development team migrated the solution to the new API in 2 days, testing included.
  • No performance loss. In some cases, the loading speed even increased because ResourcesLoader can load uncompressed resources much faster.
  • Easy to develop. Before using the ResourcesLoader API, the team had to assign a senior engineer to 1) understand how AssetManager works, 2) find private APIs and find out how they work on different Android versions, 3) learn zip file structure, etc. Now it only takes a junior engineer who can read the API documentation.
  • Much less code. Before the ResourcesLoader API, the solution took more than 1,000 lines of code, now it has less than 50 lines of code, with the essential code down to just a few lines.
  • Forward compatibility. By using official public APIs that will continue to be supported by the Android team, the developer’s solution will have much better compatibility on the future Android platforms. 
String sdkroot = getApplicationInfo().dataDir + "/lebian";
ResourcesLoader rl = new ResourcesLoader();
rl.addProvider(ResourcesProvider.loadFromDirectory(sdkroot, null));
Resources res = getResources();
res.addLoaders(rl);
final AssetManager assetManager = res.getAssets();

After moving to the new ResourcesLoader API, the essential code has just a few lines (down from hundreds of lines of code across a number of source files).

Improving performance

Excelliance Tech did a comparison test, loading 16,028 files (uncompressed 1.47GB, compressed 1.36GB) in 4 ways:

  1. Load resources directly from APK
  2. Load resources using non-SDK interfaces
  3. Load APK using ResourcesLoader
  4. Load resources directly from a directory using ResourcesLoader

Resources are compressed in option 1, 2 and 3, and the average loading times are around 19 seconds. Option 4 loads uncompressed resources directly from a directory using ResourcesLoader, the average loading time is about 3 seconds - a 6x performance improvement!

Summarizing the overall impact of ResourcesLoader, Huang Gao, CEO & Product Lead at Excelliance Tech, said “The new ResourcesLoader API dramatically reduces development and maintenance costs and allows us to focus more on product and business innovation."

Co-creating the future

The Excelliance Tech team.

The Excelliance Tech team.

"On the Android platform, we've created some valuable products and services, which makes us want to invest more to create innovative products", Excelliance Tech stated, "We hope to have more opportunities to participate in the building of the Android ecosystem and contribute our efforts to make a better Android both for consumers and developers."

Excelliance Tech made an investment for the long-term compatibility of the LeBian SDK. Moving to the ResourcesLoader API has already yielded stability and performance benefits, reduced the complexity of their code, and reduced risks of future compatibility issues as Android rolls out new versions of the platform. The ResourcesLoader API is part of Android 11’s public APIs, benefitting the entire Android developer community.

Unwrapping the Android 11 Beta, plus more developer updates

Posted by Stephanie Cuthbertson, Director, Product Management

Editor’s note: The global community of Android developers has always been a powerful force in shaping the direction of the Android platform; each and every voice matters to us. We have cancelled the virtual launch event to allow people to focus on important discussions around racial justice in the United States. Instead, we are releasing the Android 11 Beta today in a much different form, via short-form videos and web pages that you can consume at your own pace when the time is right for you. Millions of developers around the world build their business with Android, and we're releasing the Beta today to continue to support these developers with the latest tools. We humbly thank those who are able to offer their feedback on this release.

Today, we’re unwrapping the Beta release for Android 11 as well as the latest updates for developers from Kotlin coroutines, to progress on the Jetpack Compose toolkit, to faster builds in Android Studio, even a refreshed experience for the Play Console.

Android 11 Beta: now available

You’ve been helping us with feedback on the Android 11 developer previews since February, and today we released the first Beta of Android 11 focused on three key themes: People, Controls, and Privacy.

People: we’re making Android more people-centric and expressive, reimagining the way we have conversations on our phones, and building an OS that can recognize and prioritize the most important people in your life:

  • Conversation notifications appear in a dedicated section at the top of the shade, with a people-forward design and conversation specific actions, such as opening the conversation as a bubble, creating a conversation shortcut on the home screen, or setting a reminder.
  • Bubbles help users to keep conversations in view and accessible while multitasking. Messaging and chat apps should use the Bubbles API on notifications to enable this in Android 11.
  • Consolidated keyboard suggestions let Autofill apps and Input Method https://developer.android.com/preview/overview#timeline Editors (IMEs) securely offer context-specific entities and strings directly in an IME’s suggestion strip, where they are most convenient for users.
  • Voice Access, for people who control their phone entirely by voice, now includes an on-device visual cortex that understands screen content and context, and generates labels and access points for accessibility commands.
gif of people features such as prioritize messages across apps from the VIPs in your life

Controls: the latest release of Android can now help you can quickly get to all of your smart devices and control them in one space:

  • Device Controls make it faster and easier than ever for users to access and control their connected devices. Now, by simply long pressing the power button, they’re able to bring up device controls instantly, and in one place. Apps can use a new API to appear in the controls. More here.
  • Media Controls make it quick and convenient for users to switch the output device for their audio or video content, whether it be headphones, speakers or even their TV. You can enable this today from Developer Options, and it will be on by default in an upcoming Beta release. More here.
Controls gif including Smart home controls, payment methods and more, all in one place

Privacy: In Android 11, we’re giving users even more control over sensitive permissions and working to keep devices more secure through faster updates.

  • One-time permission lets users give an app access to the device microphone, camera, or location, just that one time. The app can request permissions again the next time the app is used. More here.
  • Permissions auto-reset: if users haven’t used an app for an extended period of time, Android 11 will “auto-reset” all of the runtime permissions associated with the app and notify the user. The app can request the permissions again the next time the app is used. More here.
  • Background location: In February, we announced developers will need to get approval to access background location in their app to prevent misuse. We're giving developers more time to make changes and won't be enforcing the policy for existing apps until 2021. More here.
  • Google Play System Updates, launched last year, lets us expedite updates of core OS components to devices in the Android ecosystem. In Android 11, we more than doubled the number of updatable modules, and those 12 new modules will help improve privacy, security, and consistency for users and developers.
Privacy gif including more ways to keep your data secure with one-time permissions and permissions auto-reset.

Developer friendliness: We want to make it easy for developers to take advantage of the new release, so to make compat testing easier, we’ve:

  • Gated most breaking changes until you target Android 11 (so they won’t take effect until you explicitly change your manifest)
  • Added new UI in developer options to let you toggle many of these changes for testing
  • added a new Platform Stability release milestone where all API and behavior changes will be complete, so you can finalize your app updates knowing the platform is stable.

Android 11 also includes a number of other developer productivity improvements like wireless ADB debugging, ADB incremental for faster installs of large APKs, and more nullability annotations on platform APIs (to catch issues at build time instead of runtime), and more.

The first Beta for Android 11 is available today, with final SDK and NDK APIs and new features to try in your apps. If you have a Pixel 2, 3, 3a, or 4 device, enroll here to get Android 11 Beta updates over-the-air. As always, downloads for Pixel and the Android Emulator are also available. To learn about all of the developer features in Android 11, visit the Android 11 developer site.

Modern Android development

Over the past several years, the Android team has been hard at work improving the mobile developer experience, to make you more productive. This includes the Android Studio IDE, a great language (Kotlin!), Jetpack libraries to make common tasks easy, and Android App Bundles to improve app distribution. Today we call this modern Android development - bringing you the best of Android to make you as efficient and productive as possible.

Modern android development showcasing new logos gif

Android Studio

Today, we released new features in Android Studio 4.1 Beta and 4.2 Canary, focused on a number of crucial asks from developers:

  • Debugging is simpler with wireless debugging over ADB with Android 11 devices. We also added the Database Inspector and Dependency Injection (Dagger) tools;
  • Device testing is better, with the Android Emulator now hosted directly inside the IDE. Tests now run side-by-side so you can see results from multiple devices at the same time. And we’ve improved the device manager to more easily handle your devices.
  • Machine learning is easier -- you can now import your models for ML Kit and TensorFlow Lite directly in the IDE.
  • Build and deployment are faster thanks to Kotlin Symbol Processing, caching of the task graph in Gradle, and faster app deployment to all devices on Android 11. And the new build analyzer can help you diagnose where your build may have bottlenecks.
  • Games tooling is more powerful with an updated performance profiler UI, an overhauled System Trace tool, and support for native memory profiling.
Android Studio - New Features, 4.1 Beta & 4.2 Canary

Try out the latest: Android Studio 4.1 Beta and Android Studio 4.2 Canary.

Kotlin and Jetpack

Languages and libraries are a major area of investment in modern Android development, with Kotlin’s modern, concise language and Jetpack’s opinionated powerful libraries all focused around making you more productive.

With the rise in Kotlin adoption (with over 70% of top 1000 apps on Google Play now using Kotlin) and so many developers using Kotlin, we can now use it to simplify your experience in new ways. Kotlin coroutines are a language feature of Kotlin which make concurrent calls much easier to write and understand. We’re making coroutines our official recommendation, and we’ve built coroutines support into 3 of the most-used Jetpack libraries -- Lifecycle, WorkManager, and Room -- so you can write even better code.

Kotlin itself also continues to get better with every release, thanks to the awesome team at Jetbrains. Kotlin 1.4 provides faster code completion, more powerful type inference enabled by default, function interfaces, as well as helpful quality of life improvements like mixing named and positioning arguments.

We also continue to push Jetpack forward - a suite of libraries which spans multiple Android releases and is designed to make common mobile development patterns fast and easy. Many of us have long loved Dagger, so we worked with the Dagger team to bring you Hilt, a developer-friendly wrapper on top of Dagger, as a recommended Dependency Injection solution for Android. You’ll find this in alpha ready to try out. We’ve also added a second new library App Startup, to help both app developers and library developers improve app startup time by optimizing initialization of libraries. We have many more updates to existing libraries as well, including a major update to Paging 3, rewritten Kotlin-first with full support for coroutines!

The latest on our new UI toolkit, Compose

There’s one more thing you need to be super productive — and that’s a powerful UI toolkit to quickly and easily build beautiful UIs on Android, with native access to the platform APIs. That’s why we’re building Jetpack Compose, our new modern UI toolkit that brings your app to life with less code, powerful tools, and intuitive Kotlin APIs.

Today we are launching Jetpack Compose Developer Preview 2, packed with features developers have been asking us for:

  • Interoperability with Views (start mixing Composable functions in your existing app) (new!)
  • Animations (new!)
  • Testing (new!)
  • Constraint Layout (new!)
  • Adapter list (new!)
  • Material UI components
  • Text and editable Text (new!)
  • Theming and Graphics
  • Window management
  • Input and Gestures

We've also added a number of new capabilities to Android Studio 4.2, in close partnership with Jetbrains Kotlin team, to help you build apps with Compose:

  • Kotlin compiler plugin for code generation
  • Compose Preview Annotations
  • Real-time interactive Compose previews
  • Deploy individual composables to device
  • Compose Code completion
  • Sample Data API for Compose

Compose isn’t ready for production use yet, in particular as we finish performance optimizations, but we’d love you to give it a try and share feedback. We plan to launch Alpha this summer and 1.0 next year.

An all-new Google Play Console

Google Play is focused on helping developers grow their business. With that mission in mind, we've redesigned the Google Play Console to help you maximize your success on our platform. In addition to being clearer and easier to use, we've added features to help you:

  • Find, discover, and understand features to help you thrive on Google Play
  • Find new guidance on policy changes, release status, and user feedback
  • Better understand performance insights with new acquisition reports
  • Enable everyone on your team to use Play Console features with new user management options

Learn more about the new Google Play Console in this post or join the beta now at play.google.com/console. Your feedback helps us continue to improve Google Play Console for everyone, so please let us know what you think.

Wrapping it all up

But there’s so much more we’re launching that we didn’t get to talk about!

  • We have 12 talks we just posted right on the Android Developers YouTube channel.
  • We’re launching 11 Weeks of Android to keep the conversation going, with new developer content each week on topics you’ve asked for, like UI, Jetpack and Machine Learning. Check out the schedule here to learn more.
  • We’re introducing a global series of online community meetups to discuss what’s new in Android 11, how to make your app compatible, and the essentials and best practices of modern Android development. Find an Android 11 Meetup near you.

Unwrapping the Android 11 Beta, plus more developer updates

Posted by Stephanie Cuthbertson, Director, Product Management

Editor’s note: The global community of Android developers has always been a powerful force in shaping the direction of the Android platform; each and every voice matters to us. We have cancelled the virtual launch event to allow people to focus on important discussions around racial justice in the United States. Instead, we are releasing the Android 11 Beta today in a much different form, via short-form videos and web pages that you can consume at your own pace when the time is right for you. Millions of developers around the world build their business with Android, and we're releasing the Beta today to continue to support these developers with the latest tools. We humbly thank those who are able to offer their feedback on this release.

Today, we’re unwrapping the Beta release for Android 11 as well as the latest updates for developers from Kotlin coroutines, to progress on the Jetpack Compose toolkit, to faster builds in Android Studio, even a refreshed experience for the Play Console.

Android 11 Beta: now available

You’ve been helping us with feedback on the Android 11 developer previews since February, and today we released the first Beta of Android 11 focused on three key themes: People, Controls, and Privacy.

People: we’re making Android more people-centric and expressive, reimagining the way we have conversations on our phones, and building an OS that can recognize and prioritize the most important people in your life:

  • Conversation notifications appear in a dedicated section at the top of the shade, with a people-forward design and conversation specific actions, such as opening the conversation as a bubble, creating a conversation shortcut on the home screen, or setting a reminder.
  • Bubbles help users to keep conversations in view and accessible while multitasking. Messaging and chat apps should use the Bubbles API on notifications to enable this in Android 11.
  • Consolidated keyboard suggestions let Autofill apps and Input Method Editors (IMEs) securely offer context-specific entities and strings directly in an IME’s suggestion strip, where they are most convenient for users.
  • Voice Access, for people who control their phone entirely by voice, now includes an on-device visual cortex that understands screen content and context, and generates labels and access points for accessibility commands.
gif of people features such as prioritize messages across apps from the VIPs in your life

Controls: the latest release of Android can now help you can quickly get to all of your smart devices and control them in one space:

  • Device Controls make it faster and easier than ever for users to access and control their connected devices. Now, by simply long pressing the power button, they’re able to bring up device controls instantly, and in one place. Apps can use a new API to appear in the controls. More here.
  • Media Controls make it quick and convenient for users to switch the output device for their audio or video content, whether it be headphones, speakers or even their TV. You can enable this today from Developer Options, and it will be on by default in an upcoming Beta release. More here.
Controls gif including Smart home controls, payment methods and more, all in one place

Privacy: In Android 11, we’re giving users even more control over sensitive permissions and working to keep devices more secure through faster updates.

  • One-time permission lets users give an app access to the device microphone, camera, or location, just that one time. The app can request permissions again the next time the app is used. More here.
  • Permissions auto-reset: if users haven’t used an app for an extended period of time, Android 11 will “auto-reset” all of the runtime permissions associated with the app and notify the user. The app can request the permissions again the next time the app is used. More here.
  • Background location: In February, we announced developers will need to get approval to access background location in their app to prevent misuse. We're giving developers more time to make changes and won't be enforcing the policy for existing apps until 2021. More here.
  • Google Play System Updates, launched last year, lets us expedite updates of core OS components to devices in the Android ecosystem. In Android 11, we more than doubled the number of updatable modules, and those 12 new modules will help improve privacy, security, and consistency for users and developers.
Privacy gif including more ways to keep your data secure with one-time permissions and permissions auto-reset.

Developer friendliness: We want to make it easy for developers to take advantage of the new release, so to make compat testing easier, we’ve:

  • Gated most breaking changes until you target Android 11 (so they won’t take effect until you explicitly change your manifest)
  • Added new UI in developer options to let you toggle many of these changes for testing
  • added a new Platform Stability release milestone where all API and behavior changes will be complete, so you can finalize your app updates knowing the platform is stable.

Android 11 also includes a number of other developer productivity improvements like wireless ADB debugging, ADB incremental for faster installs of large APKs, and more nullability annotations on platform APIs (to catch issues at build time instead of runtime), and more.

The first Beta for Android 11 is available today, with final SDK and NDK APIs and new features to try in your apps. If you have a Pixel 2, 3, 3a, or 4 device, enroll here to get Android 11 Beta updates over-the-air. As always, downloads for Pixel and the Android Emulator are also available. To learn about all of the developer features in Android 11, visit the Android 11 developer site.

Modern Android development

Over the past several years, the Android team has been hard at work improving the mobile developer experience, to make you more productive. This includes the Android Studio IDE, a great language (Kotlin!), Jetpack libraries to make common tasks easy, and Android App Bundles to improve app distribution. Today we call this modern Android development - bringing you the best of Android to make you as efficient and productive as possible.

Modern android development showcasing new logos gif

Android Studio

Today, we released new features in Android Studio 4.1 Beta and 4.2 Canary, focused on a number of crucial asks from developers:

  • Debugging is simpler with wireless debugging over ADB with Android 11 devices. We also added the Database Inspector and Dependency Injection (Dagger) tools;
  • Device testing is better, with the Android Emulator now hosted directly inside the IDE. Tests now run side-by-side so you can see results from multiple devices at the same time. And we’ve improved the device manager to more easily handle your devices.
  • Machine learning is easier -- you can now import your models for ML Kit and TensorFlow Lite directly in the IDE.
  • Build and deployment are faster thanks to Kotlin Symbol Processing, caching of the task graph in Gradle, and faster app deployment to all devices on Android 11. And the new build analyzer can help you diagnose where your build may have bottlenecks.
  • Games tooling is more powerful with an updated performance profiler UI, an overhauled System Trace tool, and support for native memory profiling.
Android Studio - New Features, 4.1 Beta & 4.2 Canary

Try out the latest: Android Studio 4.1 Beta and Android Studio 4.2 Canary.

Kotlin and Jetpack

Languages and libraries are a major area of investment in modern Android development, with Kotlin’s modern, concise language and Jetpack’s opinionated powerful libraries all focused around making you more productive.

With the rise in Kotlin adoption (with over 70% of top 1000 apps on Google Play now using Kotlin) and so many developers using Kotlin, we can now use it to simplify your experience in new ways. Kotlin coroutines are a language feature of Kotlin which make concurrent calls much easier to write and understand. We’re making coroutines our official recommendation, and we’ve built coroutines support into 3 of the most-used Jetpack libraries -- Lifecycle, WorkManager, and Room -- so you can write even better code.

Kotlin itself also continues to get better with every release, thanks to the awesome team at Jetbrains. Kotlin 1.4 provides faster code completion, more powerful type inference enabled by default, function interfaces, as well as helpful quality of life improvements like mixing named and positioning arguments.

We also continue to push Jetpack forward - a suite of libraries which spans multiple Android releases and is designed to make common mobile development patterns fast and easy. Many of us have long loved Dagger, so we worked with the Dagger team to bring you Hilt, a developer-friendly wrapper on top of Dagger, as a recommended Dependency Injection solution for Android. You’ll find this in alpha ready to try out. We’ve also added a second new library App Startup, to help both app developers and library developers improve app startup time by optimizing initialization of libraries. We have many more updates to existing libraries as well, including a major update to Paging 3, rewritten Kotlin-first with full support for coroutines!

The latest on our new UI toolkit, Compose

There’s one more thing you need to be super productive — and that’s a powerful UI toolkit to quickly and easily build beautiful UIs on Android, with native access to the platform APIs. That’s why we’re building Jetpack Compose, our new modern UI toolkit that brings your app to life with less code, powerful tools, and intuitive Kotlin APIs.

Today we are launching Jetpack Compose Developer Preview 2, packed with features developers have been asking us for:

  • Interoperability with Views (start mixing Composable functions in your existing app) (new!)
  • Animations (new!)
  • Testing (new!)
  • Constraint Layout (new!)
  • Adapter list (new!)
  • Material UI components
  • Text and editable Text (new!)
  • Theming and Graphics
  • Window management
  • Input and Gestures

We've also added a number of new capabilities to Android Studio 4.2, in close partnership with Jetbrains Kotlin team, to help you build apps with Compose:

  • Kotlin compiler plugin for code generation
  • Compose Preview Annotations
  • Real-time interactive Compose previews
  • Deploy individual composables to device
  • Compose Code completion
  • Sample Data API for Compose

Compose isn’t ready for production use yet, in particular as we finish performance optimizations, but we’d love you to give it a try and share feedback. We plan to launch Alpha this summer and 1.0 next year.

An all-new Google Play Console

Google Play is focused on helping developers grow their business. With that mission in mind, we've redesigned the Google Play Console to help you maximize your success on our platform. In addition to being clearer and easier to use, we've added features to help you:

  • Find, discover, and understand features to help you thrive on Google Play
  • Find new guidance on policy changes, release status, and user feedback
  • Better understand performance insights with new acquisition reports
  • Enable everyone on your team to use Play Console features with new user management options

Learn more about the new Google Play Console in this post or join the beta now at play.google.com/console. Your feedback helps us continue to improve Google Play Console for everyone, so please let us know what you think.

Wrapping it all up

But there’s so much more we’re launching that we didn’t get to talk about!

  • We have 12 talks we just posted right on the Android Developers YouTube channel.
  • We’re launching 11 Weeks of Android to keep the conversation going, with new developer content each week on topics you’ve asked for, like UI, Jetpack and Machine Learning. Check out the schedule here to learn more.
  • We’re introducing a global series of online community meetups to discuss what’s new in Android 11, how to make your app compatible, and the essentials and best practices of modern Android development. Find an Android 11 Meetup near you.

Android 11: Beta Plans

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering

Android 11 Dial logo

When we started planning Android 11, we didn’t expect the kinds of changes that would find their way to all of us, across nearly every region in the world. These have challenged us to stay flexible and find new ways to work together, especially with our developer community.

To help us meet those challenges we’re announcing an update to our release timeline. We’re bringing you a fourth Developer Preview today and moving Beta 1 to June 3. And to tell you all about the release and give you the technical resources you need, we’re hosting an online developer event that we’re calling #Android11: the Beta Launch Show.

Join us for #Android11: The Beta Launch Show

While the circumstances prevent us from joining together with you in-person at Shoreline Amphitheatre for Google I/O, our annual developer conference, we’re organizing an online event where we can share with you all the best of what’s new in Android. We hope you’ll join us for #Android11: The Beta Launch Show, your opportunity to find out what’s new in Android from the people who build Android. Hosted by me, Dave Burke, we’ll be kicking off at 11AM ET on June 3. And we’ll be wrapping it up with a post-show live Q&A; tweet your #AskAndroid questions to get them answered live!

Later that day, we’ll be sharing a number of talks on a range of topics from Jetpack Compose to Android Studio and Google Play–talks that we had originally planned for Google I/O–to help you take advantage of the latest in Android development. You can sign-up to receive updates on this digital event at developer.android.com/android11.

Android 11 schedule update

Our industry moves really fast, and we know that many of our device-maker partners are counting on us to help them bring Android 11 to new consumer devices later this year. We also know that many of you have been working to prioritize early app and game testing on Android 11, based in part on our Platform Stability and other milestones. At the same time, all of us are collaborating remotely and prioritizing the well-being of our families, friends and colleagues.

So to help us meet the needs of the ecosystem while being mindful of the impacts on our developers and partners, we’ve decided to add a bit of extra time in the Android 11 release schedule. We’re moving out Beta 1 and all subsequent milestones by about a month, which gives everyone a bit more room but keeps us on track for final release later in Q3.

Here are some of the key changes in the new schedule:

  • We’re releasing a fourth Developer Preview today for testing and feedback.
  • Beta 1 release moves to June 3. We’ll include the final SDK and NDK APIs with this release and open up Google Play publishing for apps targeting Android 11.
  • Beta 2 moves to July. We’ll reach Platform Stability with this release.
  • Beta 3 moves to August and will include release candidate builds for final testing

By bringing you the final APIs on the original timeline while shifting the other dates, we’re giving you an extra month to compile and test with the final APIs, while also ensuring that you have the same amount of time between Platform Stability and the final release, planned for later in Q3. Here’s a look at the timeline.

Android 11 timeline

You can read more about what the new timeline means to app developers in the preview program overview.

App compatibility

The schedule change adds some extra time for you to test your app for compatibility and identify any work you’ll need to do. We recommend releasing a compatible app update by Android 11 Beta on June 3rd to get feedback from the larger group of Android Beta users who will be getting the update.

With Beta 1 the SDK and NDK APIs will be final, and as we reach Platform Stability in July, the system behaviors and non-SDK greylists will also be finalized. At that time, plan on doing your final compatibility testing and releasing your fully compatible app, SDK, or library as soon as possible so that it is ready for the final Android 11 release. You can read more in the timeline for developers.

You can start compatibility testing today on a Pixel 2, 3, 3a, or 4 device, or you can use the Android Emulator. Just flash the latest build, install your current production app, and test the user flows. Make sure to review the behavior changes for areas where your app might be affected. There’s no need to change the app’s targetSdkVersion at this time, although we recommend evaluating the work since many changes apply once your app is targeting the new API level.

Get started with Android 11

Today we're pushing a Developer Preview 4 with the latest bug fixes, API tweaks, and features to try in your apps. It’s available by manual download and flash for Pixel 2, 3, 3a, or 4 devices, and if you’re already running a Developer Preview build, you’ll get an over-the-air (OTA) update to today’s release.

For complete information on Android 11, visit the Android 11 developer site, and please continue to let us know what you think!

Android 11: Beta Plans

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering

Android 11 Dial logo

When we started planning Android 11, we didn’t expect the kinds of changes that would find their way to all of us, across nearly every region in the world. These have challenged us to stay flexible and find new ways to work together, especially with our developer community.

To help us meet those challenges we’re announcing an update to our release timeline. We’re bringing you a fourth Developer Preview today and moving Beta 1 to June 3. And to tell you all about the release and give you the technical resources you need, we’re hosting an online developer event that we’re calling #Android11: the Beta Launch Show.

Join us for #Android11: The Beta Launch Show

While the circumstances prevent us from joining together with you in-person at Shoreline Amphitheatre for Google I/O, our annual developer conference, we’re organizing an online event where we can share with you all the best of what’s new in Android. We hope you’ll join us for #Android11: The Beta Launch Show, your opportunity to find out what’s new in Android from the people who build Android. Hosted by me, Dave Burke, we’ll be kicking off at 11AM ET on June 3. And we’ll be wrapping it up with a post-show live Q&A; tweet your #AskAndroid questions to get them answered live!

Later that day, we’ll be sharing a number of talks on a range of topics from Jetpack Compose to Android Studio and Google Play–talks that we had originally planned for Google I/O–to help you take advantage of the latest in Android development. You can sign-up to receive updates on this digital event at developer.android.com/android11.

Android 11 schedule update

Our industry moves really fast, and we know that many of our device-maker partners are counting on us to help them bring Android 11 to new consumer devices later this year. We also know that many of you have been working to prioritize early app and game testing on Android 11, based in part on our Platform Stability and other milestones. At the same time, all of us are collaborating remotely and prioritizing the well-being of our families, friends and colleagues.

So to help us meet the needs of the ecosystem while being mindful of the impacts on our developers and partners, we’ve decided to add a bit of extra time in the Android 11 release schedule. We’re moving out Beta 1 and all subsequent milestones by about a month, which gives everyone a bit more room but keeps us on track for final release later in Q3.

Here are some of the key changes in the new schedule:

  • We’re releasing a fourth Developer Preview today for testing and feedback.
  • Beta 1 release moves to June 3. We’ll include the final SDK and NDK APIs with this release and open up Google Play publishing for apps targeting Android 11.
  • Beta 2 moves to July. We’ll reach Platform Stability with this release.
  • Beta 3 moves to August and will include release candidate builds for final testing

By bringing you the final APIs on the original timeline while shifting the other dates, we’re giving you an extra month to compile and test with the final APIs, while also ensuring that you have the same amount of time between Platform Stability and the final release, planned for later in Q3. Here’s a look at the timeline.

Android 11 timeline

You can read more about what the new timeline means to app developers in the preview program overview.

App compatibility

The schedule change adds some extra time for you to test your app for compatibility and identify any work you’ll need to do. We recommend releasing a compatible app update by Android 11 Beta on June 3rd to get feedback from the larger group of Android Beta users who will be getting the update.

With Beta 1 the SDK and NDK APIs will be final, and as we reach Platform Stability in July, the system behaviors and non-SDK greylists will also be finalized. At that time, plan on doing your final compatibility testing and releasing your fully compatible app, SDK, or library as soon as possible so that it is ready for the final Android 11 release. You can read more in the timeline for developers.

You can start compatibility testing today on a Pixel 2, 3, 3a, or 4 device, or you can use the Android Emulator. Just flash the latest build, install your current production app, and test the user flows. Make sure to review the behavior changes for areas where your app might be affected. There’s no need to change the app’s targetSdkVersion at this time, although we recommend evaluating the work since many changes apply once your app is targeting the new API level.

Get started with Android 11

Today we're pushing a Developer Preview 4 with the latest bug fixes, API tweaks, and features to try in your apps. It’s available by manual download and flash for Pixel 2, 3, 3a, or 4 devices, and if you’re already running a Developer Preview build, you’ll get an over-the-air (OTA) update to today’s release.

For complete information on Android 11, visit the Android 11 developer site, and please continue to let us know what you think!