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Count ‘em up: 100 things we announced at I/O ‘19

Another I/O is in the books! We played in sandboxes, watched eye-popping product demos and listened to AI-powered music. But the fun isn’t over! In case you missed it, here are 100 announcements we made at I/O:

Hardware

1. Hold the phone! Our new smartphones—the Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL—hit the shelves this week, bringing together all the essential Google features at a lower price ($399 for the 5.6-inch display and $479 for the 6-inch model).
.2. Good things come in threes, like Pixel 3a’s color options. Choose from Purple-ish, Clearly White and Just Black.
3. And no matter what color your phone is, it has the same great Pixel camera. Capture shots in portrait mode and HDR+, or use Night Sight to take magical photos in low light (think outdoor concerts, swanky restaurants or night hikes with friends).
4. To add to the creativity, Time Lapse is coming to Pixel 3a. Soon you can capture an entire sunset within a few seconds of video.
5. All-day battery, baby! The Pixel 3a charges seven hours of battery life in 15 minutes and full battery can last up to 30 hours.
6. Squeeze the Pixel 3a to get the Google Assistant to send texts, find directions, set reminders and a lot more—simply by using your voice.
7. Hi, who’s there? The Google Assistant’s Call Screen feature (available in English in the U.S. and Canada) gives more information about who’s calling before you even answer your phone. Best of all, it helps save you from robocalls once and for all.
8. The Pixel 3a is protected against new threats with three years of security and operating system updates.
9. It also comes with the custom-built Titan M chip to help protect your most sensitive data.
10. All Pixel phones will get a preview of AR in Google Maps. So the next time you're getting around town, you can see walking directions overlaid on the world itself, rather than looking at a blue dot on a map.
11. Say hello to Google Nest. We’re bringing the Home products and Nest brand together to create a helpful home.
12. We welcomed the newest member of the Google Nest family: Google Nest Hub Max. Hub Max has a 10-inch screen, premium stereo sound, a camera with built-in Nest Cam features and the power of Google Assistant.
13. Live Albums on Nest Hub Max lets you select pictures of family and friends from your Google Photos to be displayed on the screen.
14. The built-in Nest Cam helps you keep an eye on things at home. You can turn the camera on when you’re away and check on things right from the Nest App on your phone.
15. The camera on Hub Max also lets you make video calls and leave personalized messages with Google’s video calling app, Duo.  
16. If you’re listening to music or watching a cooking tutorial, turn down the volume with a wave of your hand. With Gestures, you simply have to look at the Nest Hub Max and raise your hand to pause media.
17. The home view dashboard lets you control all your connected devices from one dashboard—and the Google Assistant now controls more than 30,000 smart devices from 3,500 brands.
18. Similar to Voice Match, you have the option to enable Nest Hub Max’s Face Match feature that recognizes who’s using the device and shares the most relevant information, like their calendar and estimated commute time.
19. We shared our new privacy commitments, explaining our security and privacy options for Google Nest products.
20. There’s a green light on the front of Hub Max that indicates when the camera is streaming. In addition, you have multiple controls to disable camera features, like the Nest Cam and Face Match.
21. Hub Max will be available in the U.S., U.K. and Australia this summer.
22. Google Nest Hub, formerly Google Home Hub, is now available in 12 more countries—Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Spain and Sweden.
23. And our prices are lower: Google Nest Hub available in the U.S. for $129, and starting today Google Home is $99 and Google Home Max is $299.

Assistant 

24. The Assistant is now on more than one billion devices, available in more than 30 languages across 80 countries.
25. The next generation Assistant will run on-device and answer queries up to 10 times faster, with almost zero latency. It will come to Pixel phones later this year.
26. Keep the conversation going. Now with Continued Conversation, you can make several requests in a row without having to say “Hey Google” each time.
27. We’re extending Duplex to the web to help you complete tasks faster. Just ask the Assistant, “Book a car with for my next trip,” and it will figure out the rest.
28. Sound the alarm! You can now stop a timer or alarm that you set on Google Home speakers and Smart Displays by simply saying, “stop.”
29. Help is on the way! With a new feature called Personal References, the Assistant will better understand you and reference to the important things in your life. Say you’ve told the Assistant which contact “Mom” is. You can then ask, “Hey Google, what’s the weather like at my mom’s house this weekend?” and get the answer without any additional details.
30. Choose your next recipe to try, event to attend or podcast to listen to with Picks for You. This Assistant feature draws from past searches and other contextual cues to give you more personalized results.
31. Over the coming weeks, you’ll be able to access all of the helpfulness of the Assistant directly within Waze.
32. Take advantage of Google Assistant Driving Mode when you’re behind the wheel. The new dashboard automatically starts when you’re driving and displays the most relevant activities like navigation, messaging, calling and media.
33. It’s easier to use the Assistant to control your car remotely, so you can adjust your car’s temperature, check your fuel level or make sure your doors are locked without leaving the house.
34. Control your Assistant data and make privacy choices that are right for you from the “You” tab in your Assistant settings.
35. Ever Googled a “how-to” question? We’re giving content creators easy-to-use developer tools so in the coming months when you ask, “Hey Google, how do I install a dog door?” you’ll get a helpful step-by-step experience from a trusted source like DIY Networks.
36. The Assistant can now help you do specific things in some of your favorite apps. For example, you can say, “Hey Google, start my run in Nike Run Club.”
37. Game makers can now take full advantage of developing for Smart Displays' interactive screens, so you'll start seeing more games that combine voice, visuals and touch.

AI and ML

38. And the winner is…we unveiled the 20 Google AI Impact Challenge grantees  who are using AI to address societal challenges.
39. We’ve made progress on flood forecasting in India. Now we can better use AI to predict flood timing, location and severity across 90 percent of India, and share that information with Google Public Alerts.
40. Two bands took the stage at I/O—with a little help from machine learning. Both YACHT and The Flaming Lips worked with Google engineers to create music with Magenta, our AI tool for artistic creativity
41. Check out our new PAIR Guidebook, an external toolkit that will help ML practitioners make better, user-centered decisions when building with AI.
42. We’re taking the same AI research that makes our products better and using it to enhance user privacy. Federated learning allows Google’s AI products to work better for you, and work better for everyone, without collecting raw data from your devices.

Google News and Search 

43. Now it’s easier to stay in the know. The technology that powers Full Coverage in Google News is coming to Search to better organize search results for news-related topics and give you the context you need to understand a story.  
44. When you search for a news topic, you’ll have the option to see different points of a story—from a timeline of events to the key people involved—and surface a breadth of content including articles, tweets and even podcasts.
45. In the coming months, we’ll start including podcasts in Google Search results so you can listen to podcasts directly from the search results page or save an episode for later.

Augmented Reality and Google Lens

46. Seeing is believing! Soon you’ll be able to view 3D objects right from Search and place them into your own space.
47. Lens now provides more visual answers by using AR to overlay useful information and content onto the things you see. For example, if you see a dish you’d like to cook in an upcoming issue of Bon Appetit magazine, you’ll be able to point your camera at a recipe and have the page come to life and show you exactly how to make it.
48. Lens can help you decide what to order. Just point your camera at the menu, and Lens highlights which dishes are popular, right on the menu. Tap on a dish to see photos and snippets of reviews from Google Maps.
49. Now, you can point your camera at text and Lens will automatically overlay the translation right on top of the original words—it works in more than 100 languages.
50. Say what? When you point your camera at text, Lens can now read it out loud. You can also tap on a specific word to search for its definition. This feature is launching first in Google Go, our Search app for first-time smartphone users.

Privacy 

51. You’ll start seeing your Google Account profile icon appear more prominently across all Google products, so takes just one tap to access your privacy and security settings.
52. Now we’re making it easier to manage your data in Maps, the Assistant and YouTube (coming soon). For example, you'll be able to review and delete your location activity data directly in Google Maps, and then quickly get back to your directions.
53. New auto-delete controls for Location History and Web & App Activity allow you to choose to automatically and continuously delete your data.
54. We’re expanding Incognito mode—the option in Chrome that clears your browsing history after every session—to more of our products, including Maps.
55. Thanks to federated learning, Gboard has improved predictive typing as well as emoji predictions across tens of millions of devices.
56. We’ve built security keys directly into your Android phone, giving you easier and more convenient protection against phishing attacks. This is rolling out to all devices running Android 7.0 and above.

Android

57. Android Q’s newest features are centered around innovation, security, privacy and digital wellbeing.
58. A new gesture-based navigation lets you easily move between tasks and utilize a bigger screen.
59. Android Q has tools for developers to build cool apps for foldable phones and 5G, opening up new possibilities for experiences like gaming on your device.
60. Live Caption will automatically caption media playing on your phone—like videos podcasts, audio messages, even stuff you record yourself—across any app.
61. Smart Reply is getting even smarter! Not only will your phone show suggested replies, it’ll also help you take action, like opening addresses from a text message in an app like Maps.
62. You asked, we listened! Android Q brings Dark Theme. You can activate in Settings, or by turning on Battery Saver.
63. We’re bringing privacy to the top level of Settings so you can find all the important controls in one place.
64. Android Q arms you with new permission controls so you can share your location (or not) with apps on your own terms.
65. Time for a time out? With the new Focus Mode, you can get things done without distraction, by selecting the apps you want to stay active and pausing everything you don't.
66. And to help children and families find a better balance with technology, we’re making Family Link part of every device that has Digital Wellbeing, starting with Android Q.
67. Signed, sealed, delivered! There’s a new way to deliver important updates. With Project Mainline, we can update core OS components without a full OS update.
68. All Android devices with Q—including phones, tablets, TVs, and Android Auto—are required to encrypt user data.
69. Some of these features are available today in Android Q Beta which is available on 15 devices from 12 manufacturers (in addition to all Pixel phones).
70. Android Q brings lots of new emoji, including 53 new non-binary designs for emoji that Unicode defines as "genderless.”
71. Buckle up! Android Auto’s new design coming out this summer will help you get on the road faster, show you useful information at a glance and simplify common tasks while driving.
72. Now media developers will be able to build new entertainment experiences for Android-powered infotainment systems.
73. With Tiles on Wear OS by Google you have more swipeable access to things right from your wrist like your goals, next event, weather forecast, heart rate and timer.
74. Android TV platform now has more than 140 pay TV partners, 6 of the 10 top smart TV OEMs using the Android TV platform; and more than 5,000 apps and games in its ecosystem.

Chrome

75. It’s now easier to share files between Linux, Android, and Chrome OS using file manager.
76. Android Studio on Chrome OS helps you optimize your apps for Chrome OS—directly on your Chromebook.
77. All Chromebooks launched this year will be Linux-ready right out of the box.
78. We have more user transparency and controls, like improved cookie controls and more restrictions for fingerprinting across the web.

Ads

79. With the option to bid on tROAS, advertisers will soon be able to automatically pay more for users who are likely to spend more in apps, and pay less for users likely to spend less.
80. We’re teaming up with eight agencies
https://blog.google/products/ads/google-io-ads-announcements/
—Vidmob, Consumer Acquisition, Bamboo, Apptamin, Webpals, Creadits, Kaizen Ad and Kuaizi—to provide advertisers end-to-end creative development and consultation services.
81. We’ll be expanding a new monetization program, called Open Bidding, to all publishers later this year so developers can automatically  maximize the value of every impression automatically.
82. New transparency tools across browsers
https://blog.google/products/ads/transparency-choice-and-control-digital-advertising/
will give people greater visibility into the data that Google uses to personalize ads.
83. We also launched new AdMob tools for developers that help give more control over ad content, easily access metrics and quickly identify and remove bad ads.

Accessibility

84. Project Euphonia is using AI to improve computer's' abilities to understand and transcribe a diverse set of speech patterns, including impaired speech.
85. Live Relay uses on-device speech recognition and text-to-speech conversion to allow the phone to listen and speak on people’s behalf while they type.
86. Project Diva is a research effort that makes Google Assistant more accessible for people with disabilities.

More developer announcements

87. We’re launching a preview for Local Home SDK that lets smart home developers bring a new level of speed and reliability to smart home devices.
88. The next version of our Maps Android SDK is now available for public beta. It’s built on a common platform with the Google Maps mobile app, which means better performance and feature support.
89. A new Google Maps Platform integration with deck.gl will make high-quality data visualizations at scale possible.
90. We’re unifying our efforts around third-party connected home devices under a single platform for developers. Now we’ll be delivering a single consumer and developer experience through the Works with Google Assistant program.
91. We introduced updates in ARCore to Augmented Images and Light Estimation— features that let you build more interactive, and realistic experiences.
92. Scene Viewer is a new tool that lets users view 3D objects in AR right from your website.
93. Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first.

94. We released 11 new Jetpack libraries and open-sourced an early preview of Jetpack Compose, a new unbundled toolkit designed to simplify UI development.
95. Android Studio 3.5 Beta is available for download and includes improvements in three core areas: system health, feature polish and bugs.
96. Flutter 1.5 includes hundreds of changes in response to developer feedback, including updates for new App Store iOS SDK requirements, updates to the iOS and Material widgets, engine support for new device types, and Dart 2.3 featuring new UI-as-code language features.
97. We released the first technical preview of Flutter for the web.
98. Our in-app updates API is out of beta. Now people can install updates without ever leaving the app.
99. New metrics and insights in the Google Play Console help developers better measure app health and analyze performance.
100.A new change is coming to Chrome Canary to help image-heavy websites can load more quickly.

At I/O ’19: Building a more helpful Google for everyone

Today, we welcomed thousands of people to I/O, our annual developer’s conference. It’s one of my favorite events of the year because it gives us a chance to show how we’re bringing Google’s mission to life through new technological breakthroughs and products.

Our mission to make information universally accessible and useful hasn’t changed over the past 21 years, but our approach has evolved over time. Google is no longer a company that just helps you find answers. Today, Google products also help you get stuff done, whether it’s finding the right words with Smart Compose in Gmail, or the fastest way home with Maps.

Simply put, our vision is to build a more helpful Google for everyone, no matter who you are, where you live, or what you’re hoping to accomplish. When we say helpful, we mean giving you the tools to increase your knowledge, success, health, and happiness. I’m excited to share some of the products and features we announced today that are bringing us closer to that goal.

Helping you get better answers to your questions

People turn to Google to ask billions of questions every day. But there’s still more we can do to help you find the information you need. Today, we announced that we’ll bring the popular Full Coverage feature from Google News to Search. Using machine learning, we’ll identify different points of a story—from a timeline of events to the key people involved—and surface a breadth of content including articles, tweets and even podcasts.

Sometimes the best way to understand new information is to see it. New features in Google Search and Google Lens use the camera, computer vision and augmented reality (AR) to provide visual answers to visual questions. And now we’re bringing AR directly into Search. If you’re searching for new shoes online, you can see shoes up close from different angles and even see how they go with your current wardrobe. You can also use Google Lens to get more information about what you’re seeing in the real world. So if you’re at a restaurant and point your camera at the menu, Google Lens will highlight which dishes are popular and show you pictures and reviews from people who have been there before. In GoogleGo, a search app for first-time smartphone users, Google Lens will read out loud the words you see, helping the millions of adults around the world who struggle to read everyday things like street signs or ATM instructions.

Google Lens: Urmila’s Story

Google Lens: Urmila’s Story

Helping to make your day easier

Last year at I/O we introduced our Duplex technology, which can make a restaurant reservation through the Google Assistant by placing a phone call on your behalf. Now, we’re expanding Duplex beyond voice to help you get things done on the web. To start, we’re focusing on two specific tasks: booking rental cars and movie tickets. Using “Duplex on the Web,” the Assistant will automatically enter information, navigate a booking flow, and complete a purchase on your behalf. And with massive advances in deep learning, it’s now possible to bring much more accurate speech and natural language understanding to mobile devices—enabling the Google Assistant to work faster for you.

We continue to believe that the biggest breakthroughs happen at the intersection of AI, software and hardware, and today we announced two Made by Google products: the new Pixel 3a (and 3a XL), and the Google Nest Hub Max. With Pixel 3a, we’re giving people the same features they love on more affordable hardware. Google Nest Hub Max brings the helpfulness of the Assistant to any room in your house, and much more.

Building for everyone

Building a more helpful Google is important, but it’s equally important to us that we are doing this for everyone. From our earliest days, Search has worked the same, whether you’re a professor at Stanford or a student in rural Indonesia. We extend this approach to developing technology responsibly, securely, and in a way that benefits all.

This is especially important in the development of AI. Through a new research approach called TCAV—or testing with concept activation vectors—we’re working to address bias in machine learning and make models more interpretable. For example, TCAV could reveal if a model trained to detect images of “doctors” mistakenly assumed that being male was an important characteristic of being a doctor because there were more images of male doctors in the training data. We’ve open-sourced TCAV so everyone can make their AI systems fairer and more interpretable, and we’ll be releasing more tools and open datasets soon.

Another way we’re building responsibly for everyone is by ensuring that our products are safe and private. We’re making a set of privacy improvements so that people have clear choices around their data. Google Account, which provides a single view of your privacy control settings, will now be easily accessible in more products with one tap. Incognito mode is coming to Maps, which means you can search and navigate without linking this activity with your Google account, and new auto-delete controls let you choose how long to save your data. We’re also making several security improvements on Android Q, and we’re building the protection of a security key right into the phone for two-step verification.

As we look ahead, we’re challenging the notion that products need more data to be more helpful. A new technique called federated learning allows us to train AI models and make products smarter without raw data ever leaving your device. With federated learning, Gboard can learn new words like “zoodles” or “Targaryen” after thousands of people start using them, without us knowing what you’re typing. In the future, AI advancements will provide even more ways to make products more helpful with less data.

Building for everyone also means ensuring that everyone can access and enjoy our products, including people with disabilities. Today we introduced several products with new tools and accessibility features, including Live Caption, which can caption a conversation in a video, a podcast or one that’s happening in your home. In the future, Live Relay and Euphonia will help people who have trouble communicating verbally, whether because of a speech disorder or hearing loss.

Project Euphonia: Helping everyone be better understood

Project Euphonia: Helping everyone be better understood

Developing products for people with disabilities often leads to advances that improve products for all of our users. This is exactly what we mean when we say we want to build a more helpful Google for everyone. We also want to empower other organizations who are using technology to improve people’s lives. Today, we recognized the winners of the Google AI Impact Challenge, 20 organizations using AI to solve the world’s biggest problems—from creating better air quality monitoring systems to speeding up emergency responses.

Our vision to build a more helpful Google for everyone can’t be realized without our amazing global developer community. Together, we’re working to give everyone the tools to increase their knowledge, success, health and happiness. There’s a lot happening, so make sure to keep up with all the I/O-related news.

Source: Android


From puzzles to poster-making: 2019’s Google Play Award winners

To kick off this year’s Google I/O, we hosted our fourth annual Google Play Award ceremony to recognize the most innovative developers behind the top apps and games on Google Play over the past year. These apps and games had stiff competition across nine categories, including new additions like Most Inventive, Best Living Room Experience and Most Beautiful Game. We’re sharing the winners that rose to the top for providing the best experiences for fans, making an impact on their communities and raising the bar for quality content on Google Play.

Standout Well-Being App

Apps empowering people to live the best version of their lives, while demonstrating responsible design and engagement strategies.

The Woebot app logo, which features a yellow robot on a blue background.

Woebot: Your Self-Care Expert by Woebot Labs

Best Accessibility Experience

Apps and games enabling device interaction in an innovative way that serve people with disabilities or special needs.

The Envision AI logo with a dark green background and "e" in the center.

Envision AI by Envision Technologies BV

Best Social Impact

Apps and games that create a positive impact in communities around the world (focusing on health, education, crisis response, refugees, and literacy).

The Wisdo logo with a purple background and "w" in the center.

Wisdo by Wisdo LTD.

Most Beautiful Game

Games that exemplify artistry or unique visual effects either through creative imagery, and/or utilizing advanced graphics API features.

The Shadowgun Legends logo with two robots.

SHADOWGUN LEGENDS by MADFINGER Games

Best Living Room Experience

Apps that create, enhance, or enable a great living room experience that brings people together.

The Neverthink logo with multicolored background and "nt" in the center.

Neverthink: Handpicked videos by Neverthink

Most Inventive

Apps and games that display a groundbreaking new use case, like utilize new technologies, cater to a unique audience, or demonstrate an innovative application of mobile technology for users.

The Tick Tock logo with 2 hands holding pocket watches.

Tick Tock: A Tale of Two by Other Tales Interactive

Standout Build for Billions Experience

Apps and games with optimized performance, localization and culturalization for emerging markets.

The Canva logo with a blog logo and "C" in the middle.

Canva: Graphic Design & Logo, Flyer, Poster maker by Canva

Best Breakthrough App

New apps with excellent overall design, user experience, engagement, retention and strong growth.

The Slowly logo with a mailbox with a letter in it.

SLOWLY by Slowly Communications Ltd.

Best Breakthrough Game

New games with excellent overall design, user experience, engagement, retention and strong growth.

Marvel logo with colorful background

MARVEL Strike Force by FoxNext Games

To check out this year’s winners, head over to play.google.com/gpa2019.

Source: Android


Level up on Android with Indie Games Accelerator

Games are a powerful medium of creative expression, and at Google Play we’re inspired by the passion of game developers everywhere. Last year we announced the Indie Games Accelerator, a special edition of Launchpad Accelerator, to help top indie game developers from emerging markets achieve their full potential on Google Play.

Google Play | Indie Games Accelerator 2018

Our team of program mentors coached some of the best gaming talent from India, Pakistan and Southeast Asia. Thanks to the positive feedback we received around the program, we are bringing it back in 2019. Applications for the class of 2019 are now open, and we’re expanding the program to developers from select countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.


Selected participants will be invited to attend two all-expenses-paid gaming bootcamps at the Google Asia-Pacific office in Singapore. There, they’ll receive personalized mentorship from Google teams and industry experts. Additional benefits include Google hardware, invites to exclusive Google and industry events and more.
Indie Games Accelerator journey | MochiBits (Android Developer Story)

Howard Go, the co-founder of Mochibits LLC, talks about how the program helped him improve his game's downloads and ratings.

Head to our website to find out more about our program and apply. Applications are due May 19, 2019.


Advance your career with the Google Africa Certifications Scholarships

Posted by William Florance, Global Head, Developer Training Programs

Building upon our pledge to provide mobile developer training to 100,000 Africans to develop world class apps, today we are pleased to announce the next round of Google Africa Certification Scholarships aimed at helping developers become certified on Google’s Android, Web, and Cloud technologies.

This year, we are offering 30,000 additional scholarship opportunities and 1,000 grants for the Google Associate Android Developer, Mobile Web Specialist, and Associate Cloud Engineer certifications. The scholarship program will be delivered by our partners, Pluralsight and Andela, through an intensive learning curriculum designed to prepare motivated learners for entry-level and intermediate roles as software developers. Interested students in Africa can learn more about the Google Africa Certifications Scholarships and apply here

According to World Bank, Africa is on track to have the largest working-age population (1.1 billion) by 2034. Today’s announcement marks a transition from inspiring new developers to preparing them for the jobs of tomorrow. Google’s developer certifications are performance-based. They are developed around a job-task analysis which test learners for skills that employers expect developers to have.

As announced during Sundar Pichai - Google CEO’s visit to Nigeria in 2017, our continued initiatives focused on digital skills training, education and economic opportunity, and support for African developers and startups, demonstrate our commitment to help advance a healthy and vibrant ecosystem. By providing support for training and certifications we will help bridge the unemployment gap on the continent through increasing the number of employable software developers.

Although Google’s developer certifications are relatively new, we have already seen evidence that becoming certified can make a meaningful difference to developers and employers. Adaobi Frank - a graduate of the Associate Android Developer certification - got a better job that paid ten times more than her previous salary after completing her certification. Her interview was expedited as her employer was convinced that she was great for the role after she mentioned that she was certified. Now, she's got a job that helps provide for her family - see her video here. Through our efforts this year, we want to help many more developers like Ada and support the growth of startups and technology companies throughout Africa.

Follow this link to learn more about the scholarships and apply.

One week until Code Jam kicks off—here’s why you should register

Code Jam, Google's longest-running programming competition, is returning for its sixteenth year. We’re offering another season of challenging algorithmic problems (including some that are interactive) for our global community. Whether you're a seasoned contestant or brand new to the coding competition space, here are three reasons why you shouldn't miss Code Jam 2019:

  1. Solve intriguing and fun problems. Every year, the Code Jam engineering team and a dedicated group of Google contributors spend thousands of combined hours creating, testing and publishing some of the toughest problem sets in the world. Despite the complexity of these problems, we hear from contestants that they enjoy the playful nature of Code Jam problem statements. (Who wouldn't want to help a group of raucous mathematicians with their party acoustics?) One of our more recent and unusual problems, Name-Preserving Network, required contestants to evaluate a scrambled network (of their own design) to prove they could map it back to its original configuration. This was also an interactive problem, in which contestants' code had an adaptive conversation with our judge. We introduced problems like this to Code Jam in 2018, and we're proud to offer many more this year. The best part? All you need to get started is access to a computer and an internet connection.
  2. Experience some of the old, plus some of the new. We’re bringing back the beloved "ask a question" feature this year, which gives contestants the opportunity to interact with Code Jam engineers during online rounds. We're also introducing new concepts, like the ability to test a solution on our servers as well as providing certificates to our competitors. Our website and platform received a refreshed look and feel that we're debuting this season. But don’t worry—the Code Jam staples you may know and love aren't going away. We're retaining our contest structure and the coveted prizes—our World Champion will take home $15,000, while the top 1,000 competitors will win a limited edition 2019 t-shirt. And speaking of the World Finals...
  3. Join us back where it all started. After our last online round wraps up in June, we're looking forward to returning to the Bay Area for the World Finals. Out of the tens of thousands of contest participants, only the top 25 will qualify to attend on Friday, August 9th at Google's San Francisco office. As always, we'll livestream the competition on YouTube so that you can watch the action from anywhere. While this is our inaugural World Finals in San Francisco, we're feeling nostalgic about heading back to the Bay Area for the first time in ten years. Almost all of the early Code Jam final rounds took place at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, CA.

The Qualification Round takes place on April 5 (one week from today!), so now’s the time to register for this year’s Code Jam. For the exact time zone in your location, visit our schedule page. We also recommend warming up with previous problems to improve your chances of advancing to Round 1. Do you have what it takes?

Build your next iOS and Android app with Flutter

Mobile development is full of compromises. When you’re building a new app, you’re often forced into a difficult choice: do you build the same app twice—once for iOS, once for Android—so that you have a high quality experience for both platforms? Or do you create one app from a shared codebase that works across both platforms, but doesn't have the performance or user experience you were hoping for? Flutter offers a third way: enabling high-quality user experiences with excellent performance, along with letting you express your designers’ intent and share a common codebase.

The Flutter team headed to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress 2019. At MWC, we released Flutter 1.2 and Dart 2.2. In this recap, you will learn about the highlights from Flutter’s MWC sessions on business, development, and design.

Whether you're an entrepreneur with a new app idea, a developer who’s frustrated by the edit-compile-debug cycle of building an app, or a designer who wants to be able to iterate on new design concepts, here are a few reasons why you should consider creating your next app with Flutter.

Beautifully-designed apps on each platform

Creating app designs can involve trade-offs between the creative intent of a designer and the reality of what actually goes into production. Mobile designers and developers often work in different worlds, separated by a hard boundary between the different tools that they use and challenges with iterating on a design during the development process. Sometimes the designer’s vision is compromised by limitations in the APIs or framework the developer uses; sometimes, visual polish gets deferred until “later” because of other development work (and “later” often means “never” in practice).

Two mobile phone screens showing the differences between what was designed, and what was sent into production.

With Flutter, you have control over every pixel on the screen from the beginning, including a full set of widgets that deliver pixel-perfect experiences on both iOS and Android. Designers are using Flutter to create attractive experiences like Reflectly, the number one journaling app on the Apple app store:

The user interface of Reflectly, a journaling app.

There are also some design tools made for Flutter—like 2Dimensions Flare, which you can use to build animations and incorporate them into any app with a single line of code. Here’s an example of a custom animation built with Flare that interactively follows your typing at login:

A mobile log-in screen displaying a bear who follows your cursor as it moves across the screen.

You can find more details about this example here.

And Supernova, a design-to-code tool, recently announced support for exporting Sketch designs directly to Flutter, allowing users of this popular design and wire-framing tool to turn their ideas directly into code.

Fast apps on each platform

Rather than introducing a layer of abstraction between your code and the underlying operating system, Flutter apps are native apps—meaning they compile directly to both iOS and Android devices.

Flutter’s programming language, Dart, is designed around the needs of apps that are created for global audiences. It’s easy to learn, contains a comprehensive set of libraries and packages that reduce the amount of code you have to write and is built for developer performance. When you’re ready to release your app, you can compile your code directly to the ARM machine code of your phone—meaning what you write is exactly what appears on the device—so you can harness the full power of your phone, rather than using a language like JavaScript that needs a separate engine to run.

A side-by-side comparison of two mobile screens showing Flutter rendering animations on the phone in real-time.

Flutter rendering animations on the phone in real-time.

Flutter isn’t a games engine, but it brings games-level performance to your application. Every pixel in Flutter is drawn with the Skia graphics engine: the same hardware-accelerated engine that powers Android and Chrome. This combination enables fast, glitch-free performance for apps—meaning that apps can operate on a phone's screen at 60 frames per second—which will never feel sluggish, even on a slower device.

Productive app creation on each platform

If you’re a mobile app developer, you might feel like you spend more time waiting than coding. When you make a change to your code, you have to recompile it, deploy it to a mobile phone and then bring the app back into the same state it was in before you made the change to see the results. By contrast, Flutter introduces a new capability called Stateful Hot Reload, which transforms this development cycle, letting you implement changes in milliseconds—not minutes. Stateful Hot Reload also allows better collaboration between developers and designers when they want to improve the app design and immediately see the effects.

Two side-by-side screens show how an app’s user interface and logic are updated in the app without the need for recompilation.

Changes to an app’s user interface and logic are updated in the app without the need for recompilation.

Teams using Stateful Hot Reload report major gains to their productivity when making apps. Combining the quick turnaround on changes with the ability to ship for both iOS and Android, we’ve seen apps from brands like Abbey Road Studios, Hamilton and Reflectly go from writing their first line of code to a published app in just weeks.

Get started today

We just launched version 1.2 of Flutter at Mobile World Congress 2019. We encourage you to try Flutter by visiting flutter.dev. You’ll find all the resources you need to get started including videos, codelabs, case studies, documentation and community links.

Building a safer internet, one secure domain at a time

Do you lock your doors when you're not home or when you’re sleeping at night? Your home protects everything and everyone that lies within it—whether that’s your family, pets or belongings—and a door is the most direct way for a criminal to access your home. Locking your door is the simplest thing you can do to keep safe. Similarly, when you’re browsing the web, there’s one key thing that helps keep you and your information safe and “locked” up.


HTTPS is a certificate that works just like the lock on your front door at home. By “locking” your connection to a website, it helps prevent interception or alteration of content on the site you’re visiting. We want every website to have a lock on it. That’s why Google Registry created safe.page: so you can understand the most direct steps you can take to keep yourself and others safe while browsing the internet.

Visit safe.page to learn how to read a URL (to avoid phishing attacks) and the importance of a secure connection (especially when sharing sensitive info like credit cards and passwords).

Build safely, get rewarded

That’s not all we’re doing to support HTTPS. We're also teaming up with WordPress to make it easy for anyone to build a secure website. They make building secure websites a snap by automatically installing SSL certificates at no cost for domains they host. If HTTPS is locking your online information safely, an SSL certificate acts like the actual lock on the door.


If you’ve been thinking of building a website, now’s a good time to get started: We're running a contest for the best sites created through April 30, 2019. Nine winners will be selected based on their website’s user experience, user interface, originality, design and content clarity. Winners will receive a Pixel 3 phone or equivalent prize and the opportunity to be featured on one of Google Registry's websites (get.page, get.app and get.dev). Entering the competition is simple:

  1. Register your .page, .app or .dev domain. All three extensions are secure by default (registered domains only work with an SSL certificate). You can register your domain through your preferred registrar.
  2. Build your website. You can get started building your site on WordPress.com and save 25 percent using the promo code SAFE_A24F at checkout. (The offer is valid until April 30, 2019.) Websites created in other ways on .app, .page and .dev are also eligible for the contest.
  3. Learn more about the contest rules here, including eligibility restrictions, prize details and entry deadlines. Submit your website to the contest at safe.page.

That’s it! Regardless of whether you create your own secure website, we encourage everyone to visit safe.page to learn the fundamentals of keeping your information safe. Good luck and thanks for doing your part to build a safer internet!

.dev for all

Posted by Adam Seligman, VP, Developer Relations

Last week we announced the new .dev top-level domain (TLD) was open for Early Access registrations. As of today, .dev is available to anyone through your registrar of choice (typically $12-$15 for standard priced domains, varies by registrar).

We envision .dev as a home for developers. From tools to programming languages to blogs, .dev is the best place for all the amazing things that you build. Over the past few months, we've launched, or re-launched, many of our own developer sites on the new domain. Here are some of our favorites:

  • Learn how to build a better web at web.dev.
  • Start your open source journey with the right license. Did you know that without the right license, software isn't really open source? Opensource.dev explains why.
  • Learn how to build beautiful native apps on iOS and Android from a single codebase. Visit flutter.dev to learn more.
  • Join the TensorFlow community at tfhub.dev.
  • Analyze and tune your software with performance tracing for Android, Linux, and Chrome. Check out perfetto.dev.
  • Explore Google's open source JavaScript and WebAssembly engine at v8.dev
  • Get your hands on Puppeteer, a Node library that provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. Get it at pptr.dev.

But we're not done yet! We've got big plans for .dev, and we'd like to invite you to join us. To start, everyone who applied for a ticket to Google I/O 2019 will get a .dev domain at no cost for one year. If you entered the drawing, check your inbox for your redemption code. We'll be moving more of our existing projects and launching some exciting things on .dev in the months to come. We can't wait to see what you build on .dev -- share what you create with #hellodotdev.