Tag Archives: Events

BazelCon 2024: A celebration of community and the launch of Bazel 8


The Bazel community celebrated a landmark year at BazelCon 2024. With a record-breaking 330+ attendees, 125+ talk proposal submissions, and a renewed focus on community-driven development, BazelCon marked a significant step forward for the build system and its users.


BazelCon 2024: Key highlights

A cross section of ther audience facingthe stage at BazelCon 2024

The 8th annual build conference was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, on October 14 - 15, 2024. This was the first BazelCon not solely organized by Google; instead, it was organized by The Linux Foundation together with sponsors Google, BuildBuddy, EngFlow, NativeLink, AspectBuild, Gradle, Modus Create, and VirtusLab. The conference welcomed build enthusiasts from around the world to explore the latest advancements in build technologies, share learnings, and connect with each other.

The conference kicked off with an opening keynote delivered by Mícheál Ó Foghlú and Tobias Werth (Google), Alex Eagle (Aspect Build Systems), Helen Altshuler (EngFlow), and Chuck Grindel (Reveal Technology). The keynote highlighted the vital role of community contributions and charted a course for a future where Bazel thrives through shared stewardship.


Following the keynote, John Field and Tobias Werth (Engineering Managers at Google) delivered a state-of-the-union address, celebrating the year's top contributors and highlighting key achievements within the Bazel ecosystem.


Over the course of the conference, members of the Bazel community showcased their expertise and shared key insights through a series of live presentations. Some highlights include:

  • Spotify's compelling Bazel adoption journey
  • EngFlow's insightful post-mortems on remote execution
  • Explorations of cutting-edge features like BuildBuddy's "Remote Bazel”

Take a look at our playlist of BazelCon 2024 Talks at your convenience.

In addition to main stage talks, BazelCon provided ample opportunities for attendees to connect and collaborate. Birds of a Feather sessions fostered lively discussions on topics ranging from generating SBOM using Bazel, to IDE integrations, to external dependency management, allowing community members to provide direct feedback and shape the future of Bazel. Make sure to check out raw BazelCon '24 Birds of a Feather notes from these sessions.

BazelCon 2024 also served as the launchpad for Bazel 8, a long-term support (LTS) release that brings significant enhancements to modularity, performance, and dependency management.

Bazel 8 logo

What’s new in Bazel 8?

  • Starlark-powered modularity: Many core language rules traditionally shipped with Bazel are now Starlarkified and split into their own modules, including all Android, Java, Protocol Buffers, Python, and shell rules.
  • WORKSPACE deprecation: The legacy WORKSPACE mechanism for external dependency management is disabled by default in Bazel 8, and is slated for removal in Bazel 9. Bzlmod, the default since Bazel 7, is the recommended solution going forward.
  • Symbolic macros: Bazel 8 introduces a new way to write macros for build files, addressing many pitfalls and footguns of legacy macros. Symbolic macros offer better visibility encapsulation, type safety, and are amenable to lazy evaluation, coming in a future Bazel release.

Read the full release notes for Bazel 8.


Stay connected with the Bazel community

We extend our gratitude to everyone that contributed to the success of BazelCon 2024! We look forward to seeing you again next year.

To stay informed about the latest developments in the Bazel world, connect with us through the following channels:

We encourage you to share your Bazel projects and experiences with us at [email protected]. We're always excited to hear from you!

By Keerthana Kumar and Xudong Yang, on behalf of the Google Bazel Team

#TheAndroidShow: diving into the latest from Made by Google, including wearables, Foldable, Gemini and more!

Posted by Anirudh Dewani, Director – Android Developer Relations

We just dropped our summer episode of #TheAndroidShow, on YouTube and on developer.android.com, where we unpacked all of the goodies coming out of this month’s Made by Google event and what you as Android developers need to know. With two new Wear OS 5 watches, we show you how to get building for the wrist. And with the latest foldable from Google, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, we show how you can leverage out of the box APIs and multi-window experiences to make your apps adaptive for this new form factor.

Building for Pixel 9 Pro Fold with Adaptive UIs

With foldables like the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, users have options for how to engage and multitask based on the display they are using and the folded state of their device. Building apps that adapt based on screen size and device postures allows you to scale your UI for mobile, foldables, tablets and beyond. You can read more about how to get started building for devices like the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, or learn more about building for large screens.

Preparing for Pixel Watch 3: Wear OS 5 and Larger Displays

With Pixel Watch 3 ringing in the stable release of Wear OS 5, there’s never been a better time to prepare your app for the behavior changes from Wear OS 5 and larger screen sizes from Pixel. We covered how to get started building for wearables like Pixel Watch 3, and you can learn more about building for Wear OS 3.

Gemini Nano, with multi-modality

We also took you behind the scenes with Gemini Nano with multimodality, Google’s latest model for on-device AI. Gemini Nano, the smallest version of the Gemini model family, can be executed on-device on capable Android devices including the latest Pixel 9. We caught up with the team to hear more about how the Pixel Recorder team used Gemini Nano to summarize users’ transcripts of audio recordings, with data remaining on-device.

And some voices from Android devs like you!

Across the show, we heard from some amazing developers building excellent apps, across devices. Like Rex Jin and Bismark Ito, Android Developers at Meta: they told us how the team at Instagram was able to add Ultra HDR in less than three months, dramatically improving the user experience. Later, SAP told us how within 5 minutes, they integrated NavigationSuiteScaffold, swiftly adapting their navigation UI to different window sizes. And AllTrails told us they are seeing 60% higher monthly retention from Wear OS users… pretty impressive!


Have an idea for our next episode of #TheAndroidShow? It’s your conversation with the broader community, and #TheAndroidShow is your conversation with the Android developer community, this time hosted by Huyen Tue Dao and John Zoeller. You'll hear the latest from the developers and engineers who build Android. You can watch the full show on YouTube Comment start and on developer.android.com/events/show!

OpenXLA Dev Lab 2024: Building Groundbreaking ML Systems Together


AMD, Arm, AWS, Google, NVIDIA, Intel, Tesla, SambaNova, and more come together to crack the code for colossal AI workloads

As AI models grow increasingly complex and compute-intensive, the need for efficient, scalable, and hardware-agnostic infrastructure has never been greater. OpenXLA is a deep learning compiler framework that makes it easy to speed up and massively scale AI models on a wide range of hardware types—from GPUs and CPUs to specialized chips like Google TPUs and AWS Trainium. It is compatible with popular modeling frameworks—JAX, PyTorch, and TensorFlow—and delivers leading performance. OpenXLA is the acceleration infrastructure of choice for global-scale AI-powered products like Amazon.com Search, Google Gemini, Waymo self-driving vehicles, and x.AI's Grok.


The OpenXLA Dev Lab

On April 25th, the OpenXLA Dev Lab played host to over 100 expert ML practitioners from 10 countries, representing industry leaders like AMD, Arm, AWS, ByteDance, Cerebras, Cruise, Google, NVIDIA, Intel, Tesla, SambaNova, and more. The full-day event, tailored to AI hardware vendors and infrastructure engineers, broke the mold of previous OpenXLA Summits by focusing purely on “Lab Sessions”, akin to office hours for developers, and hands-on Tutorials. The energy of the event was palpable as developers worked side-by-side, learning and collaborating on both practical challenges and exciting possibilities for AI infrastructure.

World map showing where developers come from across countries to the OpenXLA Dev Lab
Figure 1: Developers from around the world congregated at the OpenXLA Dev Lab.

The Dev Lab was all about three key things:

  • Educate and Empower: Teach developers how to implement OpenXLA's essential workflows and advanced features through hands-on tutorials.
  • Offer Expert Guidance: Provide personalized office hours led by OpenXLA experts to help developers refine their ideas and contributions.
  • Foster Community: Encourage collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and lasting connections among the brilliant minds in the OpenXLA community.

Tutorials

The Tutorials included:

Integrating an AI Compiler & Runtime into PJRT

  • Learn how PJRT connects ML frameworks to AI accelerators, standardizing their interaction for easy model deployment on diverse hardware.
  • Explore the PJRT C API for framework-hardware communication.
  • Implement a PJRT Plugin, a Python package that implements the C API.
  • Discover plugin examples for Apple Metal, CUDA, Intel GPU, and TPU.

Led by Jieying Luo and Skye Wanderman-Milne


Extracting StableHLO Graphs + Intro to StableHLO Quantizer

  • Learn to export StableHLO from JAX, PyTorch, and TensorFlow using static/dynamic shapes and SavedModel format.
  • Hack along with the tutorial using the JAX, PyTorch, and TensorFlow Colab notebooks provided on OpenXLA.org.
  • Simplify quantization with StableHLO Quantizer; a framework and device-agnostic tool.
  • Explore streamlined parameter selection and model rewriting for lower precision.

Led by Kevin Gleason Jen Ha, and Xing Liu


Optimizing PyTorch/XLA Auto-sharding for Your Hardware

  • Discover this experimental feature that automates distributing large-scale PyTorch models across XLA devices.
  • Learn how it partitions and distributes for out-of-the-box performance without manual intervention
  • Explore future directions such as customizable cost models for different hardware

Led by Yeounoh Chung and Pratik Fegade


Optimizing Compute and Communication Scheduling with XLA

  • Scale ML models on multi-GPUs with SPMD partitioning, collective communication, HLO optimizations.
  • Explore tensor parallelism, latency hiding scheduler, pipeline parallelism.
  • Learn collective optimizations, pipeline parallelism for efficient large-scale training.

Led by Frederik Gossen, TJ Xu, and Abhinav Goel


Lab Sessions

Lab Sessions featured use case-specific office hours for AMD, Arm, AWS, ByteDance, Intel, NVIDIA, SambaNova, Tesla, and more. OpenXLA engineers were on hand to provide development teams with dedicated support and walkthrough specific pain points and designs. In addition, Informational Roundtables that covered broader topics like GPU ML Performance Optimization, JAX, and PyTorch-XLA GPU were available for those without specific use cases. This approach led to productive exchanges and fine-grained exploration of critical contribution areas for ML hardware vendors.

four photos of participants and vendors at OpenXLA Dev Lab

Don’t just take our word for it – here’s some of the feedback we received from developers:

"PJRT is awesome, we're looking forward to building with it. We are very grateful for the support we are getting." 
      — Mark Gottscho, Senior Manager and Technical Lead at SambaNova
"Today I learned a lot about Shardonnay and about some of the bugs I found in the GSPMD partitioner, and I got to learn a lot of cool stuff." 
      — Patrick Toulme, Machine Learning Engineer at AWS
“I learned a lot, a lot about how XLA is making tremendous progress in building their community.” 
      — Tejash Shah, Product Manager at NVIDIA
“Loved the format this year - please continue … lots of learning, lots of interactive sessions. It was great!” 
      — Om Thakkar, AI Software Engineer at Intel

Technical Innovations and The Bold Road Ahead

The event kicked off with a keynote by Robert Hundt, Distinguished Engineer at Google, who outlined OpenXLA's ambitious plans for 2024, particularly three major areas of focus:,/p>

  • Large-scale training
  • GPU and PyTorch compute performance
  • Modularity and extensibility

Empowering Large-Scale Training

OpenXLA is introducing powerful features to enable model training at record-breaking scales. One of the most notable additions is Shardonnay, a tool coming soon to OpenXLA that automates and optimizes how large AI workloads are divided across multiple processing units, ensuring efficient use of resources and faster time to solution. Building on the success of its predecessor, SPMD, Shardonnay empowers developers with even more fine-grained control over partitioning decisions, all while maintaining the productivity benefits that SPMD is known for.

Diagram of sharding representation with a simple rank 2 tensor and 4 devices.
Figure 2: Sharding representation example with a simple rank 2 tensor and 4 devices.

In addition to Shardonnay, developers can expect a suite of features designed to optimize computation and communication overlap, including:

  • Automatic profile-guided latency estimation
  • Collective pipelining
  • Heuristics-based collective combiners

These innovations will enable developers to push the boundaries of large-scale training and achieve unprecedented performance and efficiency.


OpenXLA Delivers on TorchBench Performance

OpenXLA has also made significant strides in enhancing performance, particularly on GPUs with key PyTorch-based generative AI models. PyTorch-XLA GPU is now neck and neck with TorchInductor for TorchBench Full Graph Models and has a TorchBench pass rate within 5% of TorchInductor.

A bar graph showing a performance comparison of TorchInductor vs. PyTorch-XLA GPU on Google Cloud NVIDIA H100 GPUs
Figure 3: Performance comparison of TorchInductor vs. PyTorch-XLA GPU on Google Cloud NVIDIA H100 GPUs. “Full graph models” represent all TorchBench models that can be fully represented by StableHLO

Behind these impressive gains lies XLA GPU's global cost model, a game-changer for developers. In essence, this cost model acts as a sophisticated decision-making system, intelligently determining how to best optimize computations for specific hardware. The cost model delivers state-of-the-art performance through a priority-based queue for fusion decisions and is highly extensible, allowing third-party developers to seamlessly integrate their backend infrastructure for both general-purpose and specialized accelerators. The cost model's adaptability ensures that computation optimizations are tailored to specific accelerator architectures, while less suitable computations can be offloaded to the host or other accelerators.

OpenXLA is also breaking new ground with novel kernel programming languages, Pallas and Mosaic, which empower developers to write highly optimized code for specialized hardware. Mosaic demonstrates remarkable efficiency in programming key AI accelerators, surpassing widely used libraries in GPU code generation efficiency for models with 64, 128, and 256 Q head sizes, as evidenced by its enhanced utilization of TensorCores.

A bar graph showing a performance comparison of Flash Attention vs. Mosaic GPU on NVIDIA H100 GPUs
Figure 4: Performance comparison of Flash Attention vs. Mosaic GPU on NVIDIA H100 GPUs.

Modular and Extensible AI Development

In addition to performance enhancements, OpenXLA is committed to making the entire stack more modular and extensible. Several initiatives planned for 2024 include:

  • Strengthening module interface contracts
  • Enhancing code sharing between platforms
  • Enabling a shared high-level compiler flow through runtime configuration and component registries

A flow diagram showing modules and subcomponents of the OpenXLA stack.
Figure 5: Modules and subcomponents of the OpenXLA stack.

These improvements will make it easier for developers to build upon and extend OpenXLA.

Alibaba's success with PyTorch XLA FSDP within their TorchAcc framework is a prime example of the benefits of OpenXLA's modularity and extensibility. By leveraging these features, Alibaba achieved state-of-the-art performance for the LLaMa 2 13B model, surpassing the previous benchmark set by Megatron. This demonstrates the power of the developer community in extending OpenXLA to push the boundaries of AI development.

A bar graph showing a performance comparison of TorchAcc and Megatron for LLaMa 2 13B at different number of GPUs.
Figure 6: Performance comparison of TorchAcc and Megatron for LLaMa 2 13B at different numbers of GPUs.

Join the OpenXLA Community

If you missed the Dev Lab, don't worry! You can still access StableHLO walkthroughs on openxla.org, as well as the GitHub Gist for the PJRT session. Additionally, the recorded keynote and tutorials are available on our YouTube channel. Explore these resources and join our global community – whether you're an AI systems expert, model developer, student, or just starting out, there's a place for you in our innovative ecosystem.

four photos of participants and vendors at OpenXLA Dev Lab

Acknowledgements

Adam Paske, Allen Hutchison, Amin Vahdat, Andrew Leaver, Andy Davis, Artem Belevich, Abhinav Goel, Benjamin Kramer, Berkin Illbeyi, Bill Jia, Eugene Zhulenev, Florian Reichl, Frederik Gossen, George Karpenkov, Gunhyun Park, Han Qi, Jack Cao, Jaesung Chung, Jen Ha, Jianting Cao, Jieying Luo, Jiewin Tan, Jini Khetan, Kevin Gleason, Kyle Lucke, Kuy Mainwaring, Lauren Clemens, Manfei Bai, Marisa Miranda, Michael Levesque-Dion, Milad Mohammadi, Nisha Miriam Johnson, Penporn Koanantakool, Robert Hundt, Sandeep Dasgupta, Sayce Falk, Shauheen Zahirazami, Skye Wanderman-milne, Yeounoh Chung, Pratik Fegade, Peter Hawkins, Vaibhav Singh, Tamás Danyluk, Thomas Jeorg, Adam Paszke and TJ Xu.

By James Rubin, Aditi Joshi, and Elliot English on behalf of the OpenXLA Project

Get ready for Google I/O: Program lineup revealed

Posted by Timothy Jordan – Director, Developer Relations and Open Source

Developers, get ready! Google I/O is just around the corner, kicking off live from Mountain View with the Google keynote on Tuesday, May 14 at 10 am PT, followed by the Developer keynote at 1:30 pm PT.

But the learning doesn’t stop there. Mark your calendars for May 16 at 8 am PT when we’ll be releasing over 150 technical deep dives, demos, codelabs, and more on-demand. If you register online, you can start building your 'My I/O' agenda today.

Here's a sneak peek at some of the exciting highlights from the I/O program preview:

Unlocking the power of AI: The Gemini era unlocks a new frontier for developers. We'll showcase the newest features in the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, and Gemma. Discover cutting-edge pre-trained models from Kaggle, and delve into Google's open-source libraries like Keras and JAX.

Android: A developer's playground: Get the latest updates on everything Android! We'll cover groundbreaking advancements in generative AI, the highly anticipated Android 15, innovative form factors, and the latest tools and libraries in the Jetpack and Compose ecosystem. Plus, discover how to optimize performance and streamline your development workflow.

Building beautiful and functional web experiences: We’ll cover Baseline updates, a revolutionary tool that empowers developers with a clear understanding of web features and API interoperability. With Baseline, you'll have access to real-time information on popular developer resource sites like MDN, Can I Use, and web.dev.

The future of ChromeOS: Get a glimpse into the exciting future of ChromeOS. We'll discuss the developer-centric investments we're making in distribution, app capabilities, and operating system integrations. Discover how our partners are shaping the future of Chromebooks and delivering world-class user experiences.

This is just a taste of what's in store at Google I/O. Stay tuned for more updates, and get ready to be a part of the future.

Don't forget to mark your calendars and register for Google I/O today!

Get ready for Google I/O: Program lineup revealed


Developers, get ready! Google I/O is just around the corner, kicking off live from Mountain View with the Google keynote on Tuesday, May 14 at 10 am PT, followed by the Developer keynote at 1:30 pm PT.

But the learning doesn’t stop there. Mark your calendars for May 16 at 8 am PT when we’ll be releasing over 150 technical deep dives, demos, codelabs, and more on-demand. If you register online, you can start building your 'My I/O' agenda today.

Here's a sneak peek at some of the exciting highlights from the I/O program preview:

Unlocking the power of AI: The Gemini era unlocks a new frontier for developers. We'll showcase the newest features in the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, and Gemma. Discover cutting-edge pre-trained models from Kaggle, and delve into Google's open-source libraries like Keras and JAX.

Android: A developer's playground: Get the latest updates on everything Android! We'll cover groundbreaking advancements in generative AI, the highly anticipated Android 15, innovative form factors, and the latest tools and libraries in the Jetpack and Compose ecosystem. Plus, discover how to optimize performance and streamline your development workflow.

Building beautiful and functional web experiences: We’ll cover Baseline updates, a revolutionary tool that empowers developers with a clear understanding of web features and API interoperability. With Baseline, you'll have access to real-time information on popular developer resource sites like MDN, Can I Use, and web.dev.

The future of ChromeOS: Get a glimpse into the exciting future of ChromeOS. We'll discuss the developer-centric investments we're making in distribution, app capabilities, and operating system integrations. Discover how our partners are shaping the future of Chromebooks and delivering world-class user experiences.

This is just a taste of what's in store at Google I/O. Stay tuned for more updates, and get ready to be a part of the future.

Don't forget to mark your calendars and register for Google I/O today!

Posted by Timothy Jordan – Director, Developer Relations and Open Source

Google for Games is coming to GDC 2024

Posted by Aurash Mahbod – General Manager, Games on Google Play

Google for Games is coming to GDC in San Francisco! Join us on March 19 for the Game Developers Conference (GDC) at the Moscone Center, where game developers from across the world will gather to learn, network, problem-solve, and help shape the future of the industry. From March 18 to March 22, experience our comprehensive suite of multi-platform game development tools and explore the new features from Play Pass at the West Hall, Level 2 Lobby.

This year, we’re proud to host eight sessions for developers, designers, business and marketing teams, and everyone else in the gaming community with an interest to grow their game business. Take a look at this year’s sessions below and if you’re interested in learning more about topics from Google Play and Android, check out key product updates from the Google for Games Developer Summit.


Scaling your game development

We’re hosting three sessions designed to help scale your game development using tools from Firebase, Android, and Google Cloud. Learn more about building high quality games with case studies from industry experts.


Beyond "Set and Forget": Advanced Debugging with Firebase Crashlytics

Tuesday, March 19, 9:30 am - 10:00 am 

Speaker: Joe Spiro (Developer Relations Engineer, Google) 

Crashlytics has added a number of features that make detecting, tracking, and understanding bugs even easier, from high-level to native code. Take your fixes to another level with native stack traces, memory debugging, issue annotation, and the ability to log uncaught exceptions as fatal.


Enhancing Game Performance: Vulkan and Android Adaptability Technology

Tuesday, March 19, 10:50 am - 11:50 am 

Speakers: Dohyun Kim (Developer Relations Engineer, Android Games, Google), Hak Matsuda (Developer Relations Engineer, Android Games, Google), Jungwoo Kim (Principal Engineer, Samsung), Syed Farhan Hassan (Software Engineer, ARM) 

Learn how to leverage Vulkan graphics API to improve your graphics quality or performance, including performance tuning with dynamic upscaling. Find out how the Android Dynamic Performance Framework (ADPF) can enhance game performance and power in Unity and native C++, with easy integration through the Unreal Engine plugin. We're also sharing how NCSoft Lineage W improved thermal status and performance using ADPF.


Creating a global-scale game with Google Cloud

Tuesday, March 19, 4:40 pm - 5:10 pm 

Speaker: Mark Mandel (Developer Advocate, Google) 

This session will cover the best of Google Cloud's open source projects (Agones, Open Match, and more) and products (GKE, Spanner, Anthos Service Mesh, Cloud Build, Cloud Deploy, and more) to teach you how to build, deploy, and scale world-scale multiplayer games with Google Cloud.


Increasing user engagement

We’re hosting two sessions designed to help you increase engagement by creating dynamic gameplay experiences using generative AI and expanding opportunities on Google Play to grow your community of players with exclusive rewards.

Reimagine the Future of Gaming with Google AI

Tuesday, March 19, 10:50 am - 11:50 am 

Speakers: Gus Martins (Developer Advocate, Google), Dan Zaratsian (AI/ML Solutions Architect, Google), Lei Zhang (Director, Play Partnerships, Global GenAI & Greater China Play Partnerships, Google), Jack Buser (Director, Game Industry Solutions), Simon Tokumine (Director of Product Management, Google AI), Giovane Moura Jr. (App Modernization Specialist, Google), Moonlit Beshinov (Head of Google for Games Partnerships and Industry Strategy, Google) 

In our keynote session, senior executives from Google Cloud, Google Play, and Labs will share their unique perspectives on generative AI in the gaming landscape. Learn more about cutting-edge AI solutions from Google Cloud, Android, Google Play, and Labs designed to simplify game development, publishing, and business operations, plus actionable strategies to leverage AI for faster development, better player experiences, and sustainable growth.

Grow your community of loyal gamers with Google Play

Tuesday, March 19, 1:20 pm - 1:50 pm 

Speaker: Tom Grinsted (Group Product Manager, Google Play Games, Google) 

In this session, we’ll cover new features and insights from Google Play to create rewarding experiences for gamers using Play Pass, Play Points, and Play Games Services. Get a behind-the-scenes look at how Google Play rewards a growing community of passionate gamers, and how to use this to super-charge your business.


Maximizing reach across screens

These sessions, from Google Play, Android, and Flutter, introduce ways to expand your mobile games to PC. Learn about the latest tools that will help you accelerate growth across large screens.

Bringing more users to your Google Play Games on PC game

Tuesday, March 19, 2:10 pm - 2:40 pm 

Speakers: Aly Hung (Developer Relations Engineer, Android and Google Play, Google), Dara Monasch (Product Manager, Google), Justin Gardner (Partner Program Manager, App Attribution, Google) 

Join us for an overview of Google Play Games on PC, how it has grown in the past year, and a walkthrough of how to optimize and attribute your PC advertisements for your Google Play Games on PC titles. Learn how to use Google Play Games to increase your reach and acquisition of PC users for your mobile game, as well as how to effectively use the Google Play Install Referrer API to attribute and optimize your ads across mobile and PC.

Android input on desktop: How to delight your users

Tuesday, March 19, 3:00 pm - 3:30 pm 

Speakers: Shenshen Cui (Staff Developer Relations Engineer, Google), Patrick Martin (Developer Relations Engineer, Google) 

Give your players a first-class gaming experience with our best practices for handling input between mobile and PC games, including technical details on how to implement these best practices across mobile, tablets, Chromebooks and Windows PCs1. Learn how Android handles keyboard, mouse, and controller input across different form factors, with case studies for designing for both touch and hardware input.

Building Multiplatform Games with Flutter

Tuesday, March 19, 3:50 pm - 4:20 pm 

Speakers: Zoey Fan (Senior Product Manager, Flutter, Google), Brett Morgan (Developer Relations Engineer, Google) 

Learn why game developers are choosing Flutter to build casual games on mobile, desktop, and web browsers. We’ll cover the free, open-source tools and resources available through the Casual Games Toolkit, a collection of free and open-source tools, templates, and resources to make game dev more productive with Flutter.

Learn more about all of our sessions coming to you on March, 19, at GDC in San Francisco.


________________

1Windows is a trademark of the Microsoft group of companies.

#TheAndroidShow: the latest from MWC, Gemini Nano, Android 15 and more!

Posted by Anirudh Dewani, Director of Android Developer Relations


Last week, Android device makers released a slew of new devices, and today we’re unpacking what that means for developers, as well as the latest in Gemini Nano, Android 15, Jetpack Compose and more, in another episode of our quarterly show, #TheAndroidShow:

The lastest wearables and foldables – get building!

Android device makers unveiled their latest wearables and foldables last week at Mobile World Congress, and we were on the ground in Barcelona taking a look at those new devices and how you can get started building on top of them. A few of our favorites:

    • Xiaomi Watch 2,the latest smart watch from the Xiaomi team. This device is powered by Wear OS by Google and provides upgraded camera, fitness, and sleep experiences to allow users to get the most from their device.
    • PORSCHE DESIGN HONOR Magic V2 RSR, the world’s thinnest inward foldable smartphone. This is the latest foldable for Android and was designed with the user experience at the forefront, including human-centric eye comfort technology.

Compose is an amazing way to build apps for your users across form factors. Compose for Wear OS and the upcoming adaptive layouts for large screens help devs bring their apps to life with less code, powerful tools, and intuitive APIs. Check out the Wear OS and Large Screen galleries, where you can find UX inspiration and design guidance tailored to your type of app.




Behind the scenes, with Gemini Nano and AICore

With all of the excitement around generative AI, it could be daunting to know where to start. So in today’s show, we’re taking you behind the scenes with Gemini Nano, Google’s most efficient model built for on-device tasks, and AICore, Android’s system service for on-device foundation models. And we’re spotlighting how the team that builds the Recorder app used Gemini Nano to help summarize users’ voice memos on-device and with privacy in mind. And here’s the best part: the team built the feature in a short time with only a small number of engineers.




Now in Android

We celebrated the 100th episode of Now in Android, covering the latest developer news, including:




And that’s a wrap on another episode of our quarterly show, #TheAndroidShow. But the conversation continues on YouTube, X and LinkedIn: tell us your favorite part, or what you’d like us to dive into next time on our quarterly episode. And before we sign off, you can watch the full playlist, with the latest in Android developer news, here.

Google Cloud Next ’24 session library is now available

Posted by Max Saltonstall – Developer Relations Engineer

Google Cloud Next 2024 is coming soon, and our session library is live!

Next ‘24 covers a ton of ground, so choose your adventure. There's something on the menu for everyone, not just AI.

Developer-focused

Developers, this is your time. We have got a huge collection of edutainment for you in store for Next, including:

  • Thousands of Googlers on-site to connect and chat
  • Demos you can play with, try out, poke and see inside of (rather than just watching)
  • Talks from Champion Innovators about how they put cloud to use
  • Gathering spots for classes, interest groups, trainings and hanging out

This year we have more than double the number of advanced technical sessions, and recommendations for startups, small and medium businesses, and sustainability for all. Data scientists and data engineers can shard themselves out into 60+ big data sessions, including going to the cutting edge with BigQuery multi-modal data.


Artificial intelligence

If you want to build your own AI model, LLM or chatbot we've got sessions for that, covering ways to use Vertex AI to spin up your own large-language models on cloud, to search your multimedia library and to maintain equity in your data used for training.


Diversity, equity, and inclusion

Equity and inclusion go way past AI, and we’re really excited to have talks this year addressing allyship for your Muslim colleagues, growing inclusion in your org, and dialogues for change.

A cupped hand with a lock floating in a bed of clouds above it against a nebulous blue background. A faint ray of sunshine is shining through from the top left corner.

Security and data privacy

Don't forget security (really, who does?). Whether you are tackling security at the infrastructure, platform, machine or workload level, we've got sessions for you. Even if you're on multiple clouds, with multiple teams, you still need to get insight into the security and compliance of it all.

Speaking of all these fun chips, what about the salsa? We've got supply chain security with talks on SLSA and GUAC, plus numerous options for serverless workload security and ML data privacy.


Come join us

So, still on the fence?

Come for the magnificent shows in Vegas.

Come for the chance to sit down with expert developers and engineers.

Come for the amazing technical talks and tutorials.

Or just come for the spectacle. We've got it all at Google Cloud Next ‘24.

Check out sessions and secure your spot for three days of learning, community-building, and cloud tech with experts and peers at Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, April 9–11.

Congratulations to the winners of Google’s Immersive Geospatial Challenge

Posted by Bradford Lee – Product Marketing Manager, Augmented Reality, and Ahsan Ashraf – Product Marketing Manager, Google Maps Platform

In September, we launched Google's Immersive Geospatial Challenge on Devpost where we invited developers and creators from all over the world to create an AR experience with Geospatial Creator or a virtual 3D immersive experience with Photorealistic 3D Tiles.

"We were impressed by the innovation and creativity of the projects submitted. Over 2,700 participants across 100+ countries joined to build something they were truly passionate about and to push the boundaries of what is possible. Congratulations to all the winners!" 

– Shahram Izadi, VP of AR at Google

We judged all submissions on five key criteria:

  • Functionality - How are the APIs used in the application?
  • Purpose - What problem is the application solving?
  • Content - How creative is the application?
  • User Experience - How easy is the application to use?
  • Technical Execution - How well are you showcasing Geospatial Creator and/or Photorealistic 3D Tiles?

Many of the entries are working prototypes, with which our judges thoroughly enjoyed experiencing and interacting. Thank you to everyone who participated in this hackathon.



From our outstanding list of submissions, here are the winners of Google’s Immersive Geospatial Challenge:


Category: Best of Entertainment and Events

Winner, AR Experience: World Ensemble

Description: World Ensemble is an audio-visual app that positions sound objects in 3D, creating an immersive audio-visual experience.


Winner, Virtual 3D Experience: Realistic Event Showcaser

Description: Realistic Event Showcaser is a fully configurable and immersive platform to customize your event experience and showcase its unique location stories and charm.


Winner, Virtual 3D Experience: navigAtoR

Description: navigAtoR is an augmented reality app that is changing the way you navigate through cities by providing a 3 dimensional map of your surroundings.



Category: Best of Commerce

Winner, AR Experience: love ya

Description: love ya showcases three user scenarios for a special time of year that connect local businesses with users.



Category: Best of Travel and Local Discovery

Winner, AR Experience: Sutro Baths AR Tour

Description: This guided tour through the Sutro Baths historical landmark using an illuminated walking path, information panels with text and images, and a 3D rendering of how the Sutro Baths swimming pool complex would appear to those attending.


Winner, Virtual 3D Experience: Hyper Immersive Panorama

Description: Hyper Immersive Panorama uses real time facial detection to allow the user to look left, right, up or down, in the virtual 3D environment.


Winner, Virtual 3D Experience: The World is Flooding!

Description: The World is Flooding! allows you to visualize a 3D, realistic flooding view of your neighborhood.


Category: Best of Productivity and Business

Winner, AR Experience: GeoViz

Description: GeoViz revolutionizes architectural design, allowing users to create, modify, and visualize architectural designs in their intended context. The platform facilitates real-time collaboration, letting multiple users contribute to designs and view them in AR on location.



Category: Best of Sustainability

Winner, AR Experience: Geospatial Solar

Description: Geospatial Solar combines the Google Geospatial API with the Google Solar API for instant analysis of a building's solar potential by simply tapping it.


Winner, Virtual 3D Experience: EarthLink - Geospatial Social Media

Description: EarthLink is the first geospatial social media platform that uses 3D photorealistic tiles to enable users to create and share immersive experiences with their friends.


Honorable Mentions

In addition, we have five projects that earned honorable mentions:

  1. Simmy
  2. FrameView
  3. City Hopper
  4. GEOMAZE - The Urban Quest
  5. Geospatial Route Check

Congratulations to the winners and thank you to all the participants! Check out all the amazing projects submitted. We can't wait to see you at the next hackathon.

A look back at BazelCon ’23 and the launch of Bazel 7

In October ‘23, the Google Bazel team hosted the 7th annual BazelCon, a gathering for the Bazel community and broader Build ecosystem. We welcomed enterprise users and program partners, companies building businesses on top of Bazel, as well as enthusiasts curious to learn more about this space. This year, BazelCon made its debut outside North America and was hosted in the Google Munich office.


BazelCon recap

The Bazel ecosystem is growing. This year, we had over 200 in-person external attendees, over 3K livestream views, and a record number of 120 proposals submitted by the community.

We started the conference with a keynote address by Mícheál Ó Foghlú (Engineering Director at Google), followed by a state-of-the-union address by John Field and Tobias Werth (Engineering Managers at Google).

The Bazel community showcased a series of technical and lightning main-stage talks. To highlight a few:

    • BMW shared insights into how they released several “Bazel cars”
    • JetBrains* announced the preview release of their new Bazel plugin for their IDEs
    • Booking.com walked through their journey of adopting Bazel, thereby reducing CI time from 22 minutes to under 2 minutes and container image size by 80%

Take a look at published recordings of all of these talks at your own leisure.

In addition to hearing from presenters, conference attendees also had the opportunity to engage with each other in smaller, more interactive forums. Through live Q&A with the Bazel team and several Birds of a Feather sessions on topics ranging from authoring rulesets, to collecting usage data responsibly, to IDE integrations, the Bazel community was able to provide direct feedback to the team and spark productive discussions. Make sure to check out published notes from these sessions.

At BazelCon, we also proudly announced the initial release candidate for Bazel 7, which has since launched.


What’s new in Bazel 7?

Bazel 7 is the latest major release on the long-term support (LTS) track. Many multi-year efforts have landed in this release. For example:

Bzlmod: Bzlmod, Bazel's new modular external dependency management system, is now enabled by default (i.e. --enable_bzlmod defaults to true). If your project doesn't have a MODULE.bazel file, Bazel will create an empty one for you. The old WORKSPACE mechanism will continue to work alongside the new Bzlmod-managed system. Learn more about what’s changed since Bazel 6 and what’s coming up in Bazel 8 and 9.

Build without the Bytes (BwoB): Build without the Bytes for builds using remote execution is now enabled by default (i.e. --remote_download_outputs defaults to toplevel). Bazel will no longer try to download any intermediate outputs from the remote server, but only the outputs of requested top-level targets instead. This significantly improves remote build performance. Learn more about BwoB.

Merged analysis and execution (Skymeld): Project Skymeld aims to improve multi-target build performance by removing the boundary between the analysis and execution phases and allowing targets to be independently executed as soon as their analysis finishes.

Platform-based toolchain resolution for Android and C++: This change helps streamline the toolchain resolution API across all rulesets, obviating the need for language-specific flags. It also removes technical debt by having Android and C++ rules use the same toolchain resolution logic as other rulesets. Full details for Android developers are available in the Android Platforms announcement.

Read the full release notes for Bazel 7.
 

Stay up-to-date with Bazel

We are thankful to everyone who played a role in making BazelCon ‘23 a big success - speakers, contributors, attendees, the planning committee, and more. We look forward to seeing you again next year!

In the meantime, follow along as we work together towards Bazel 8:

If you have any questions or feedback, or would like to share something you’ve built, reach out to [email protected]. We would love to hear from you!

By the Google Bazel team

*Copyright © 2023 JetBrains s.r.o. JetBrains and IntelliJ are registered trademarks of JetBrains s.r.o