Tag Archives: Explore

Notes from Google Play: The next phase of Play

Posted by Sam Bright – VP & GM, Google Play + Developer Ecosystem

Hello everyone,

Thank you for making this year another incredible one! Your innovative experiences continue to inspire us and bring joy to billions. We recently celebrated some of your amazing work in our Best of 2024 awards, showcasing moments of delight across phones, large-screen devices, watches, and PCs.

This year, we shared our vision for the next phase of Play where Play leans into being more than a store and becomes a dynamic platform that connects people with your content, when and where they need it most. To help people discover all you have to offer, truly engage with your experiences, and keep them coming back for more, we’re making Play:

    • A destination for discovery: Helping people find their new favorite apps and games and the content within
    • The best place for gaming: So people can play more of the games they love across more surfaces, with exclusive rewards available only through Play Points, and
    • Go beyond the store: Where people can get relevant content from installed apps directly on their home screen through our new Collections experience

Check out the video above, or keep reading for some of the key features we've launched this year to help you succeed at every stage of your app’s lifecycle.

New tools and features built in 2024

Launch with confidence

Launching a new app or update is a critical moment and we want to make this process as smooth and successful as possible.

    • The new quality panel gives you a centralized view of your app's quality so you can proactively find and address issues like crashes and ANRs, and see recommendations related to user experience.
    • And with SDK Console, we’re connecting you with SDK owners who can alert you in Android Studio and Play Console when new versions may address quality issues or help your app or game comply with Play policies.
Quality Panel in Google Play
Features like quality panel help you proactively find and address issues before you launch, helping you have a smooth and successful experience

Accelerate your growth and deepen your engagement with users

We've made Google Play even more content-forward with a visually engaging design that helps people discover the best of what you have to offer, wherever they are.

    • We integrated Gemini models to make it easier for everyone to find what they're looking for with AI-generated app review summaries, FAQs, and app highlights, providing key information at a glance.
    • Seamless app discovery helps users enjoy amazing experiences across their devices. Now, when people search for apps on their phone, they'll easily discover and install relevant apps for their TV, watch, and more.
    • Enhanced custom store listings give you even more ways to tailor your content. And now, with the ability to segment by search keyword, you can connect with users who are actively searching for the specific benefits your app offers. Play Console will even give you keyword suggestions.
    • Deep links help you create seamless web-to-app journeys to take users directly to the content they want, right inside your app. And now, we’ve made it even easier for you to manage and experiment with these deep links in Play Console, where you can make quick changes without waiting to publish a new app release.
App highlights in Google Play
App highlights is one of our latest AI-powered features making it easier for users to discover their next favorite apps.

Optimize revenue with Google Play Commerce

We're continuing to make it easier and more convenient for over 2.5 billion users in over 190 markets to have seamless and secure purchase experiences.

    • This year, we've helped over half a billion people be ready to make purchases by proactively encouraging them to set up payment and authentication methods in advance. With new secure biometric authentication options like fingerprint and facial recognition, checkout is now faster and more secure.
    • Our extensive payment method library, which includes over 300 local forms of payment in more than 65 markets, continues to grow. This year, we added CashApp (US), Blik Banking (Poland), Pix (Brazil), and MoMo (Vietnam).
    • Expanded payment options give more ways for users to pay for content. Parents with Google Family setup can now approve their child's in-app purchases from any OS, not just on Android devices.
    • And new subscription platform improvements, like flexible payment plans for long-term subscriptions, give users more options throughout the purchase experience, which helps drive higher conversions and new subscribers.
Installment subscriptions in Google Play
Flexible payment plans give users more options throughout the purchase experience, helping drive higher conversions and new subscribers for your app

Reinforcing trust, safety, and security

We continue to invest in more ways to protect users, your business, and the ecosystem. This includes actively combating bad actors who try to deceive users or spread malware, and giving you tools to combat abuse.

    • Google Play Protect scans 200 billion apps daily. When it finds a potentially harmful app, we let people know and may even disable particularly dangerous apps.
    • Easier automatic app updates help ensure users have the latest features and improved security. Users with limited Wi-Fi access have the option to get their app updates over mobile data, and within their data budgets. We also launched a new tool that empowers you to prompt users for timely updates.

These are just the highlights. To see how we're continuously improving the experience, check out our quarterly roundup of programs and launches on The Latest.

Investing in our app and game community

We’re continuing to help app and game businesses of all sizes reach their full potential.

    • This year, we’ve doubled the size of our global Indie Games Accelerator program and selected 60 game studios from around the world to participate in a 10-week program of masterclasses, workshops, and access to industry experts.
    • Ten studios from across Latin America were selected to receive a share of $2 million in equity-free funding and hands-on guidance from the Google Play team as part of our Indie Games Fund.
    • And the ChangGoo initiative in Korea has nurtured a thriving startup ecosystem, supporting over 500 startups and attracting over KRW 147.6 billion in investments.

And with another year of #WeArePlay, we shared and celebrated the stories of 300 app and game businesses from all over the world. Take a look back at just a few of the inspiring founders we’ve featured.

Looking ahead

I’m excited about the future of Google Play as a dynamic platform that connects users with your amazing content, wherever they are.

Next year, we're going to continue helping you maximize your investments on Play by:

    • Leaning into content-rich and interactive experiences for apps both within and beyond the Play store,
    • Building on our gaming destination to make it even more personalized, engaging, and part of daily routines, and,
    • Simplifying the payment and checkout experience for your apps and content.

Thanks again for your continued partnership and the innovation you’ve put into your apps and games. From our team to yours, happy holidays and best wishes for an amazing 2025!

Sam Bright 
VP & GM, Google Play + Developer Ecosystem

Our first Spotlight Week: diving into Android 15

Posted by Aaron Labiaga- Android Developer Relations Engineer

By now, you’ve probably heard the news: Android 15 was just released earlier today to AOSP. To celebrate, we’re kicking off a new series called “Spotlight Week” where we’ll shine a light on technical areas across Android development and equip you with the tools you need to take advantage of each area.

The Android 15 "Spotlight Week" will provide resources — blog posts, videos, sample code, and more — all designed to help you prepare your apps and take advantage of the latest features. These changes strive to improve the Android ecosystem, but updating the OS comes with potential app compatibility implications and integrations that require detailed guidance.

Here’s what we’re covering this week in our Spotlight Week on Android 15:


    The Android 15 summary page outlines what a developer needs to know about what is new in the release, behavioral changes affecting all apps, and changes applicable only when targeting the new SDK level 35.


  • Building for the future of Android, an in-depth video (Wednesday, Sept 4)

  • Foreground services and a live Android 15 Q&A (Thursday, September 5): Foreground services changes are coming in Android 15, and we’re introducing a new foreground service type, updating the exemption scenarios that allow a foreground service to start from the background, and updating the max duration of certain foreground service types. These changes are intended to improve user experience by preventing apps from misusing foreground service that may drain a user’s battery. Plus we’ll have a live Q&A.

  • Passkeys and Picture-in-Picture (Friday, September 6): Passkeys enable a more streamlined and secured means of authenticating your users. Learn more about passkeys through our sample code and about the updates made to further simplify the login process in Android 15. Plus, we're highlighting a Picture-in-Picture sample code that is applicable to apps with video functionality.

That’s just a taste of what we’re covering in our Spotlight Week on Android 15. Keep checking back to this blog post for updates, where we’ll be adding links and more throughout the week. Plus, follow Android Developers on X and Android by Google at Linkedin throughout the week to hear even more about Android 15.

Our first Spotlight Week: diving into Android 15

Posted by Aaron Labiaga- Android Developer Relations Engineer

By now, you’ve probably heard the news: Android 15 was just released earlier today to AOSP. To celebrate, we’re kicking off a new series called “Spotlight Week” where we’ll shine a light on technical areas across Android development and equip you with the tools you need to take advantage of each area.

The Android 15 "Spotlight Week" will provide resources — blog posts, videos, sample code, and more — all designed to help you prepare your apps and take advantage of the latest features. These changes strive to improve the Android ecosystem, but updating the OS comes with potential app compatibility implications and integrations that require detailed guidance.

Here’s what we’re covering this week in our Spotlight Week on Android 15:


    The Android 15 summary page outlines what a developer needs to know about what is new in the release, behavioral changes affecting all apps, and changes applicable only when targeting the new SDK level 35.


  • Building for the future of Android, an in-depth video (Wednesday, Sept 4)

  • Foreground services and a live Android 15 Q&A (Thursday, September 5): Foreground services changes are coming in Android 15, and we’re introducing a new foreground service type, updating the exemption scenarios that allow a foreground service to start from the background, and updating the max duration of certain foreground service types. These changes are intended to improve user experience by preventing apps from misusing foreground service that may drain a user’s battery. Plus we’ll have a live Q&A.

  • Passkeys and Picture-in-Picture (Friday, September 6): Passkeys enable a more streamlined and secured means of authenticating your users. Learn more about passkeys through our sample code and about the updates made to further simplify the login process in Android 15. Plus, we're highlighting a Picture-in-Picture sample code that is applicable to apps with video functionality.

That’s just a taste of what we’re covering in our Spotlight Week on Android 15. Keep checking back to this blog post for updates, where we’ll be adding links and more throughout the week. Plus, follow Android Developers on X and Android by Google at Linkedin throughout the week to hear even more about Android 15.

Prepare your app for the new Samsung Galaxy foldables and watches!

Posted by Maru Ahues Bouza – Product Management Director, Android Developer

Yesterday’s Galaxy Unpacked event from Samsung debuted the latest in foldables, wearables, and more! The event introduced the Galaxy Z Fold6 and Z Flip6 and the Galaxy Watch7 and Watch Ultra - and it has never been easier to build apps that look great across all these screen sizes and types. To help you get your apps ready for the latest Android devices, we’re sharing how you can prepare your app for Wear OS 5 and how to build adaptive apps that scale across mobile, tablets, foldables and more!

Get your app ready for Wear OS 5

Samsung’s new Galaxy Watch lineup, including the Watch Ultra and Watch7, will be the first smartwatches powered by Wear OS 5, the latest version of the Wear OS platform. As Wear OS 5 is based on Android 14, this new platform version brings with it a number of developer-facing changes. To ensure your app is ready for the next generation of devices, start by testing your app on the Wear OS 5 Emulator!

Galaxy Watch Ultra (left) and Galaxy Watch7 (right)
Galaxy Watch Ultra (left) and Galaxy Watch7 (right)

Wear OS 5 brings the next iteration of the Watch Face Format, providing more features to create expressive, efficient and individual watch faces for your users. New watches launched with Wear OS 5 will only support third-party watch faces built with Watch Face Format, prioritizing the user experience. For more information on watch face compatibility, see this Help Center article.

As we gather momentum behind the Watch Face Format, we’re changing requirements for publishing watch faces on Google Play. Check out the watch face page for the latest guidance.

Build adaptive to scale across screen sizes and types

The latest in large screens and foldables are here, with the new Galaxy Z Fold6 and Z Flip6, so there is even more reason to ensure your app looks great across whatever screen size or folded state your users are engaging with. The best way to do that is to make your app adaptive - meaning your users get an optimal experience on all their devices. By building an adaptive app, you scale across mobile, tablets, foldables, desktop and more.

Galaxy Watch Ultra (left) and Galaxy Watch7 (right)
Galaxy Z Fold6

A great place to start when building adaptive apps is with the new Compose adaptive layout libraries. These libraries are designed to help you to make your UI look good across window sizes. From navigation UI to list/detail and supporting pane layouts, we’re providing composables to make building an adaptive app easier than ever.

Additionally, window size classes are the best way to scale your UI, with opinionated breakpoints that help you design, develop, and test responsive/adaptive layouts across various window sizes. Window size classes enable you to change your app layout as the display space available to your app changes, for example, when a device folds or unfolds, the device orientation changes, or the app window is resized in multi‑window mode.

Discover everything you need to know about building adaptive apps with the adaptive apps documentation; it will be continually updated with the latest and greatest tools and APIs to enable you to scale across screens!

Get started with Adaptive Apps and Wear OS

With these new devices, from the smallest to the largest, there are opportunities to build apps that excite your users on all their favorite Android screens. Apps like SoundCloud, Peloton, and more are already building experiences that scale across their user’s favorite screens!

Get building for Wear OS today by checking out Wear OS developer site and visiting the Wear OS gallery for inspiration. And scale your app across even more screens by building adaptive with the latest from Compose!

Top 3 Updates for Building with AI on Android at Google I/O ‘24

Posted by Terence Zhang – Developer Relations Engineer

At Google I/O, we unveiled a vision of Android reimagined with AI at its core. As Android developers, you're at the forefront of this exciting shift. By embracing generative AI (Gen AI), you'll craft a new breed of Android apps that offer your users unparalleled experiences and delightful features.

Gemini models are powering new generative AI apps both over the cloud and directly on-device. You can now build with Gen AI using our most capable models over the Cloud with the Google AI client SDK or Vertex AI for Firebase in your Android apps. For on-device, Gemini Nano is our recommended model. We have also integrated Gen AI into developer tools - Gemini in Android Studio supercharges your developer productivity.

Let’s walk through the major announcements for AI on Android from this year's I/O sessions in more detail!

#1: Build AI apps leveraging cloud-based Gemini models

To kickstart your Gen AI journey, design the prompts for your use case with Google AI Studio. Once you are satisfied with your prompts, leverage the Gemini API directly into your app to access Google’s latest models such as Gemini 1.5 Pro and 1.5 Flash, both with one million token context windows (with two million available via waitlist for Gemini 1.5 Pro).

If you want to learn more about and experiment with the Gemini API, the Google AI SDK for Android is a great starting point. For integrating Gemini into your production app, consider using Vertex AI for Firebase (currently in Preview, with a full release planned for Fall 2024). This platform offers a streamlined way to build and deploy generative AI features.

We are also launching the first Gemini API Developer competition (terms and conditions apply). Now is the best time to build an app integrating the Gemini API and win incredible prizes! A custom Delorean, anyone?


#2: Use Gemini Nano for on-device Gen AI

While cloud-based models are highly capable, on-device inference enables offline inference, low latency responses, and ensures that data won’t leave the device.

At I/O, we announced that Gemini Nano will be getting multimodal capabilities, enabling devices to understand context beyond text – like sights, sounds, and spoken language. This will help power experiences like Talkback, helping people who are blind or have low vision interact with their devices via touch and spoken feedback. Gemini Nano with Multimodality will be available later this year, starting with Google Pixel devices.

We also shared more about AICore, a system service managing on-device foundation models, enabling Gemini Nano to run on-device inference. AICore provides developers with a streamlined API for running Gen AI workloads with almost no impact on the binary size while centralizing runtime, delivery, and critical safety components for Gemini Nano. This frees developers from having to maintain their own models, and allows many applications to share access to Gemini Nano on the same device.

Gemini Nano is already transforming key Google apps, including Messages and Recorder to enable Smart Compose and recording summarization capabilities respectively. Outside of Google apps, we're actively collaborating with developers who have compelling on-device Gen AI use cases and signed up for our Early Access Program (EAP), including Patreon, Grammarly, and Adobe.

Moving image of Gemini Nano operating in Adobe

Adobe is one of these trailblazers, and they are exploring Gemini Nano to enable on-device processing for part of its AI assistant in Acrobat, providing one-click summaries and allowing users to converse with documents. By strategically combining on-device and cloud-based Gen AI models, Adobe optimizes for performance, cost, and accessibility. Simpler tasks like summarization and suggesting initial questions are handled on-device, enabling offline access and cost savings. More complex tasks such as answering user queries are processed in the cloud, ensuring an efficient and seamless user experience.

This is just the beginning - later this year, we'll be investing heavily to enable and aim to launch with even more developers.

To learn more about building with Gen AI, check out the I/O talks Android on-device GenAI under the hood and Add Generative AI to your Android app with the Gemini API, along with our new documentation.


#3: Use Gemini in Android Studio to help you be more productive

Besides powering features directly in your app, we’ve also integrated Gemini into developer tools. Gemini in Android Studio is your Android coding companion, bringing the power of Gemini to your developer workflow. Thanks to your feedback since its preview as Studio Bot at last year’s Google I/O, we’ve evolved our models, expanded to over 200 countries and territories, and now include this experience in stable builds of Android Studio.

At Google I/O, we previewed a number of features available to try in the Android Studio Koala preview release, like natural-language code suggestions and AI-assisted analysis for App Quality Insights. We also shared an early preview of multimodal input using Gemini 1.5 Pro, allowing you to upload images as part of your AI queries — enabling Gemini to help you build fully functional compose UIs from a wireframe sketch.


You can read more about the updates here, and make sure to check out What’s new in Android development tools.

The Kubernetes ecosystem is a candy store


For the 10th anniversary of Kubernetes, I wanted to look at the ecosystem we created together.

I recently wrote about the pervasiveness and magnitude of the Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystem. This was the result of a deliberate flywheel. This is a diagram I used several years ago:

Flywheel diagram of Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystem

Because Kubernetes runs on public clouds, private clouds, on the edge, etc., it is attractive to developers and vendors to build solutions targeting its users. Most tools built for Kubernetes or integrated with Kubernetes can work across all those environments, whereas integrating directly with cloud providers directly entails individual work for each one. Thus, Kubernetes created a large addressable market with a comparatively lower cost to build.

We also deliberately encouraged open source contribution, to Kubernetes and to other projects. Many tools in the ecosystem, not just those in CNCF, are open source. This includes many tools built by Kubernetes users and tools built by vendors but were too small to be products, as well as those intended to be the cores of products. Developers built and/or wrote about solutions to problems they experienced or saw, and shared them with the community. This made Kubernetes more usable and more visible, which likely attracted more users.

Today, the result is that if you need a tool, extension, or off-the-shelf component for pretty much anything, you can probably find one compatible with Kubernetes rather than having to build it yourself, and it’s more likely that you can find one that works out of the box with Kubernetes than for your cloud provider. And often there are several options to choose from. I’ll just mention a few. Also, I want to give a shout out to Kubetools, which has a great list of Kubernetes tools that helped me discover a few new ones.

For example, if you’re an application developer whose application runs on Kubernetes, you can build and deploy with Skaffold, test it on Kubernetes locally with Minikube, or connect to Kubernetes remotely with Telepresence, or sync to a preview environment with Gitpod or Okteto. When you need to debug multiple instances, you can use kubetail to view the logs in real time.

To deploy to production, you can use GitOps tools like FluxCD, ArgoCD, or Google Cloud’s Config Sync. You can perform database migrations with Schemahero. To aggregate logs from your production deployments, you can use fluentbit. To monitor them, you have your pick of observability tools, including Prometheus, which was inspired by Google’s Borgmon tool similar to how Kubernetes was inspired by Borg, and which was the 2nd project accepted into the CNCF.

If your application needs to receive traffic from the Internet, you can use one of the many Ingress controllers or Gateway implementations to configure HTTPS routing, and cert-manager to obtain and renew the certificates. For mutual TLS and advanced routing, you can use a service mesh like Istio, and take advantage of it for progressive delivery using tools like Flagger.

If you have a more specialized type of workload to run, you can run event-driven workloads using Knative, batch workloads using Kueue, ML workflows using Kubeflow, and Kafka using Strimzi.

If you’re responsible for operating Kubernetes workloads, to monitor costs, there’s kubecost. To enforce policy constraints, there’s OPA Gatekeeper and Kyverno. For disaster recovery, you can use Velero. To debug permissions issues, there are RBAC tools. And, of course, there are AI-powered assistants.

You can manage infrastructure using Kubernetes, such as using Config Connector or Crossplane, so you don’t need to learn a different syntax and toolchain to do that.

There are tools with a retro experience like K9s and Ktop, fun tools like xlskubectl, and tools that are both retro and fun like Kubeinvaders.

If this makes you interested in migrating to Kubernetes, you can use a tool like move2kube or kompose.

This just scratched the surface of the great tools available for Kubernetes. I view the ecosystem as more of a candy store than as a hellscape. It can take time to discover, learn, and test these tools, but overall I believe they make the Kubernetes ecosystem more productive. To develop any one of these tools yourself would require a significant time investment.

I expect new tools to continue to emerge as the use cases for Kubernetes evolve and expand. I can’t wait to see what people come up with.

By Brian Grant, Distinguished Engineer, Google Cloud Developer Experience

Top 3 Updates for Building Excellent Apps at Google I/O ‘24

Posted by Tram Bui, Developer Programs Engineer, Developer Relations

Google I/O 2024 was filled with the latest Android updates, equipping you with the knowledge and tools you need to build exceptional apps that delight users and stand out from the crowd.

Here are our top three announcements for building excellent apps from Google I/O 2024:

#1: Enhancing User Experience with Android 15

Android 15 introduces a suite of enhancements aimed at elevating the user experience:

    • Edge-to-Edge Display: Take advantage of the default edge-to-edge experience offered by Android 15. Design interfaces that seamlessly extend to the edges of the screen, optimizing screen real estate and creating an immersive visual experience for users.
    • Predictive Back: Predictive back can enhance navigation fluidity and intuitiveness. The system animations are no longer behind a Developer Option, which means users will be able to see helpful preview animations. Predictive back support is available for both Compose and Views.

#2: Stylus Support on Large Screens

Android's enhanced stylus support brings exciting capabilities:

    • Stylus Handwriting: Android now supports handwriting input in text fields for both Views and Compose. Users can seamlessly input text using their stylus without having to switch input methods, which can offer a more natural and intuitive writing experience.
    • Reduced Stylus Latency: To enhance the responsiveness of stylus interactions, Android introduces two new APIs designed to lower stylus latency. Android developers have seen great success with our low latency libraries, with Infinite Painter achieving a 5x reduction in latency from from 60-90 ms down to 8-16 ms.

#3: Wear OS 5: Watch Face Format, Conservation, and Performance

In the realm of Wear OS, we are focused on power conservation and performance enhancements:

    • Enhanced Watch Face Format: We've introduced improvements to the Watch Face Format, making it easier for developers to customize and optimize watch faces. These enhancements can enable the creation of more responsive, visually appealing watch faces that delight users.
    • Power Conservation: Wear OS 5 prioritizes power efficiency and battery conservation. Now available in developer preview along with a new emulator, you can leverage these improvements to create Wear OS apps that deliver exceptional battery life without compromising functionality.

There you have it— the top updates from Google I/O 2024 to help you build excellent apps. Excited to explore more? Check out the full playlist for deeper insights into these announcements and other exciting updates unveiled at Google I/O.

SoundCloud supported more screens using 45% less code with Jetpack Compose

Posted by Chris Arriola, Developer Relations Engineer and Nick Butcher, Product Manager for Jetpack Compose

As one of the largest audio streaming platforms in the world, SoundCloud supports a network of creators who use its service to upload and promote their music. SoundCloud’s developers are always exploring ways to improve its user experience, which means going beyond simply building the best mobile app. The team also wants to make SoundCloud available on as many form factors as possible so users can easily access and listen to SoundCloud in any situation and on the devices that work best for them.

That’s why the SoundCloud team adopted Jetpack Compose, Android’s modern declarative toolkit for building native UI. Compose enabled SoundCloud engineers to not only expand the app to more form factors, but also streamline new feature development—in some cases reducing nearly half the code.

Compose helped us reach new users and markets, ultimately increasing our global reach” — Vitus Ortner, Android engineer at SoundCloud


Simplified UI development with Compose

Before migrating to Compose, building UI was much slower for SoundCloud developers because they had to constantly switch context between Kotlin and XML. This also made managing and maintaining its design system much more difficult. The team’s engineers wanted to find a simpler way to write code, and they knew Compose would help them get there.

“We started adopting Compose to quickly build dynamic layouts using Kotlin, the language we love,” said Vitus Ortner, an Android engineer at SoundCloud. “We wanted to empower our engineers to effectively create rich UIs through Compose.”

SoundCloud engineers overhauled the app’s design system with Compose and can now build new features using 45% less code on average. Compose’s concise Kotlin syntax and its ability to create reusable UI made design and maintenance much easier for the team. Prototyping new features was also simpler thanks to Compose’s declarative approach, as well as its live edit and UI preview features.

“We implemented a new content discovery feature with an interactive vertical feed layout. We used Compose to prototype, and it enabled us to iterate fast even when we changed our design ideas daily,” said Vitus. “That wouldn’t have been possible with Views.”

Compose’s interoperability with Views made it easier for developers to migrate SoundCloud’s design system to the new toolkit because they could do it gradually. Because SoundCloud uses a model–view–viewModel architecture, developers could reuse the app’s old view models in the new Compose framework. This meant they only needed to migrate the app’s View-based layouts to Compose, rather than rewrite the entire UI layer.

“Compose helped us reach new users and markets, ultimately increasing our global reach” — Vitus Ortner, Android engineer at SoundCloud

Optimizing for more form factors with Compose

Switching to Compose enabled developers to do more than streamline the app’s codebase. It also made supporting multiple form factors easier. With Compose, SoundCloud engineers were able to more easily bring the app to tablets, TVs, cars, and wearables.

“We’re using Compose across all form factors in the Android ecosystem,” said Vitus. “We implemented our Wear OS and TV apps from the ground up with Compose, which allowed us to rapidly iterate and ship new products in a fraction of the time it would have taken before.”

To adapt the mobile experience to a variety of screen sizes while maintaining interoperability with existing code, SoundCloud developers provide different XML layouts to combine existing View code with newer Compose components. Easy-to-implement features like this helped the team quickly build experiences across different devices, including optimizing SoundCloud for cars and tablets.

With these improvements, SoundCloud engineers built their Wear OS app and TV app from the ground up in just four months using Compose. According to Vitus, this “would’ve been unthinkable” using their previous system.

“Our mobile Compose skills transferred directly to Compose for other form factors,” said Vitus. “The concepts and most APIs are the same across form factors. We still needed to learn some form factor-specific APIs, like ScalingLazyColumn for Wear OS and TvLazyColumn for TVs.”

UI example

Future investment in Compose

By migrating its Android app to Compose, SoundCloud developers improved productivity, simplified the app’s code, and established smoother development processes for new features and experiences. Switching to Compose also helped SoundCloud expand to more form factors, creating new ways for users to access the platform.

“Compose helped us reach new users and markets, ultimately increasing our global reach,” said Vitus. “We're fully committed to Compose and plan to use it for all projects in the future.”


Get started

Optimize your UI development with Jetpack Compose.

The Power of Open Source


At the day 1 keynote of Open Source Summit North America, Timothy Jordan, Director of Developer Relations and Open Source at Google, will talk about the landscape of open source and AI, the importance of a responsible approach, and the transformative impact of community collaboration. In anticipation of this talk, let’s break down the AI open source ecosystem, and how Google approaches it.

Google believes in the power of open technology to drive innovation and benefit everyone. It fosters creativity and collaboration, while ensuring technology access for developers and allowing customization to fit unique use cases. Open source licenses give developers full creative autonomy without restriction. It is this ecosystem of open source and open technology, shaped by ML frameworks like TensorFlow, Keras, and JAX, that has enabled so many incredible advances in AI in recent years.

The open source community has been in discussion on how to apply the Open Source Definition to carry forward the open principles of the OSD while addressing concepts like derived work and author attribution in AI. During Timothy’s keynote, he’ll speak to his own philosophy on Open Source and AI, and share how his assumptions about how we apply open source to AI have evolved. The immediate availability of AI models, powered by the open source ecosystem of ML frameworks, means it’s more important than ever that we establish a shared definition for open source and AI.

While that definition is in development, at Google we’re using precise language to describe our openly available models like Gemma. The definition and license is only one part of this open ML/AI future; advancements in safety tooling, policies, and developer knowledge are all part of creating a responsible and open future for AI. Those advancements are all fueled by a dedication to collaboration. Whether sharing innovations and improvements with the community, or having conversations with policymakers and open source leaders, collaboration is key to a responsible approach to AI in the open ecosystem. AI can only be safe and responsible if everyone’s experiences and perspectives are brought to the forefront as it’s built.

To demonstrate how open source has made AI readily available, Timothy will also take the audience through a “low code” demo of how to run large language models in-browser for web applications. Using MediaPipe, the LLM Inference API, and Gemma, users can quickly add genAI capabilities like document summarization and text generation.

Join us at Open Source Summit North America for this keynote, and visit opensource.google to learn more.

By the Google Open Source team

Achieving privacy compliance with your CI/CD: A guide for compliance teams

Posted by Fergus Hurley – Co-Founder & GM, Checks, and Evan Otero – Product Manager, Checks

In the fast-paced world of software development, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) have become cornerstones, enabling teams to deliver high-quality software faster than ever. However, the rise of rapid innovation, increasing use of third-party libraries, and AI-generated code have accelerated vulnerabilities and risks. Therefore, addressing these issues early in the development lifecycle is essential so that teams can launch their products quickly and confidently.

The introduction of Checks privacy compliance CI/CD tooling feature represents a significant stride towards addressing these concerns, by reducing manual intervention and automating compliance and privacy standards as part of a release cycle.

In this post, we explore the meaning of CI/CD for compliance team members unfamiliar with this technology and how Checks can weave privacy and compliance protection practices into that pipeline.


What is CI/CD?

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) are foundational practices in modern software development. They enable development teams to increase efficiency, improve quality, and accelerate delivery.

Continuous Integration (CI) automatically integrates code changes from multiple contributors into a software project. This practice enables teams to detect problems early by running automated tests on each change before it is merged into the main branch.

Graphic showing CI/CD continuous cycle

Continuous Deployment (CD) takes automation further by automatically deploying all code changes to a testing or production environment after the build stage. This means that, in addition to automated testing, automated release processes ensure that new changes are accessible to users as quickly as possible.


Shifting issue-spotting left with CI/CD pipelines

The automation of CI/CD processes is typically called “pipelines.” CI/CD pipelines automate the steps software changes go through, from development to deployment. These steps include compiling code, running tests (unit tests, integration tests, etc.), security scans, and more. If all automated tests pass, the changes go live without human intervention in a specific environment, such as testing or production.

These pipelines are designed to catch issues as early as possible, embodying the practice known as “shifting left.” The benefits of “shifting left”, particularly when applied through CI/CD pipelines, include:

  • Improved quality and security: Automated testing in CI/CD pipelines ensures that code is rigorously tested for functional and compliance issues before it reaches production. This early detection enables teams to address vulnerabilities and errors when they are generally easier and less costly to fix.
  • Faster release cycles: By catching and addressing issues early, teams avoid the bottlenecks associated with late-stage discovery of problems. This efficiency reduces the time from development to deployment, enabling faster release cycles and more responsive delivery of features and fixes.
  • Reduced costs: Detecting issues later in the development process can be significantly more expensive to resolve, especially if they're found after deployment. Early detection through CI/CD pipelines minimizes these costs by preventing complex rollbacks and the need for emergency fixes in production environments.
  • Increased reliability and trust: Software that undergoes thorough testing before release is generally more reliable and secure. This reliability builds trust among users and stakeholders, crucial for maintaining a positive reputation and ensuring user satisfaction.

Checks brings privacy and compliance tests to your CI/CD

TChecks CI/CD tooling seamlessly integrates app compliance scanning into CI/CD pipelines via plugins for GitHub, Jenkins, and FastLane. You can also use Checks in any other CI/CD system that supports custom scripts, such as GitLab, TeamCity, Bitbucket, and more.

image showing logos of CI/CD systems that support custom scripts - FastLane, Jenkins, GitHub, Atlassian BitBucket, GitLab, Azure DevOps, and Team City

When Checks scans an app, the binary undergoes dynamic and static analysis to understand your data collection and sharing practices, including app dependencies such as SDKs, permissions, and endpoints. This data is then tested against global regulatory requirements, store policies, your custom Checks policies, and your privacy policy to find potential issues and opportunities for improvement.


Top 5 benefits of integrating Checks into your CI/CD

image showing checks report highlighting potential issues

By adding Checks as a step in your CI/CD pipeline, you can automate app and code compliance scanning as part of the development lifecycle.

The top 5 benefits of integrating Checks in your CI/CD are:

  1. Real-time, intelligent alerting: You can stay informed of new compliance issues or changes in data behavior across your product portfolio with instant notifications via email or Slack. 
  2. Understand data sharing & SDKs: Checks can help ensure secure third-party data sharing by gaining visibility into SDK integrations, permissions, and data flow analysis. By using Checks, you can be confident in your third-party dependencies before your public release. 
  3. Ensure new builds follow your company policies: Checks enables you to automate data governance with custom policies that let you set up safeguards against specific endpoints, SDKs, data types, and permissions, tailoring privacy to your specific needs. These policies help ensure all new releases comply with your company’s data policies. 
  4. Keep your Google Play Data safety section up-to-date: Checks can recommend Google Play Data safety section disclosures and alert you if you should make an update before releasing publicly, ensuring your declarations are always up-to-date. 
  5. Deploy quickly and with confidence: When Checks finds issues in the CI/CD, these vulnerabilities are caught and remedied early, significantly reducing the risk of compliance violations once you deploy the app. Checks helps you maintain high compliance standards without slowing down the release cycle, enabling teams to deploy with confidence and ensuring that user data is protected from the outset.

Next steps

Getting started is simple. Start by first signing up for Checks and then adding Checks to your CI/CD pipelines with these simple configuration steps. Once configured, Checks is ready to perform a variety of privacy and compliance verifications.

This proactive approach to privacy and compliance safeguards against potential risks and aligns with regulatory compliance requirements, making it an invaluable asset for any compliance and development team.