Tag Archives: Google Play services

Barcode Detection in Google Play services

Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

With the release of Google Play services 7.8 we’re excited to announce that we’ve added new Mobile Vision APIs which provides the Barcode Scanner API to read and decode a myriad of different barcode types quickly, easily and locally.

Barcode detection

Classes for detecting and parsing bar codes are available in the com.google.android.gms.vision.barcode namespace. The BarcodeDetector class is the main workhorse -- processing Frame objects to return a SparseArray<Barcode> types.

The Barcode type represents a single recognized barcode and its value. In the case of 1D barcode such as UPC codes, this will simply be the number that is encoded in the barcode. This is available in the rawValue property, with the detected encoding type set in the format field.

For 2D barcodes that contain structured data, such as QR codes, the valueFormat field is set to the detected value type, and the corresponding data field is set. So, for example, if the URL type is detected, the constant URL will be loaded into the valueFormat, and the URL property will contain the desired value. Beyond URLs, there are lots of different data types that the QR code can support -- check them out in the documentation here.

When using the API, you can read barcodes in any orientation. They don’t always need to be straight on, and oriented upwards!

Importantly, all barcode parsing is done locally, making it really fast, and in some cases, such as PDF-417, all the information you need might be contained within the barcode itself, so you don’t need any further lookups.

You can learn more about using the API by checking out the sample on GitHub. This uses the Mobile Vision APIs along with a Camera preview to detect both faces and barcodes in the same image.

Supported Bar Code Types

The API supports both 1D and 2D bar codes, in a number of sub formats.

For 1D Bar Codes, these are:

AN-13
EAN-8
UPC-A
UPC-E
Code-39
Code-93
Code-128
ITF
Codabar

For 2D Bar Codes, these are:

QR Code
Data Matrix
PDF 417

Learn More

It’s easy to build applications that use bar code detection using the Barcode Scanner API, and we’ve provided lots of great resources that will allow you to do so. Check them out here:

Follow the Code Lab

Read the Mobile Vision Documentation

Explore the sample

Face Detection in Google Play services

Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

With the release of Google Play services 7.8, we announced the addition of new Mobile Vision APIs, which includes a new Face API that finds human faces in images and video better and faster than before. This API is also smarter at distinguishing faces at different orientations and with different facial features facial expressions.

Face Detection

Face Detection is a leap forward from the previous Android FaceDetector.Face API. It’s designed to better detect human faces in images and video for easier editing. It’s smart enough to detect faces even at different orientations -- so if your subject’s head is turned sideways, it can detect it. Specific landmarks can also be detected on faces, such as the eyes, the nose, and the edges of the lips.

Important Note

This is not a face recognition API. Instead, the new API simply detects areas in the image or video that are human faces. It also infers from changes in the position frame to frame that faces in consecutive frames of video are the same face. If a face leaves the field of view, and re-enters, it isn’t recognized as a previously detected face.


Detecting a face

When the API detects a human face, it is returned as a Face object. The Face object provides the spatial data for the face so you can, for example, draw bounding rectangles around a face, or, if you use landmarks on the face, you can add features to the face in the correct place, such as giving a person a new hat.

  • getPosition() - Returns the top left coordinates of the area where a face was detected
  • getWidth() - Returns the width of the area where a face was detected
  • getHeight() - Returns the height of the area where a face was detected
  • getId() - Returns an ID that the system associated with a detected face

Orientation

The Face API is smart enough to detect faces in multiple orientations. As the head is a solid object that is capable of moving and rotating around multiple axes, the view of a face in an image can vary wildly.

Here’s an example of a human face, instantly recognizable to a human, despite being oriented in greatly different ways:

The API is capable of detecting this as a face, even in the circumstances where as much as half of the facial data is missing, and the face is oriented at an angle, such as in the corners of the above image.

Here are the method calls available to a face object:

  • getEulerY() - Returns the rotation of the face around the vertical axis -- i.e. has the neck turned so that the face is looking left or right [The y degree in the above image]
  • getEulerZ() - Returns the rotation of the face around the Z azis -- i.e. has the user tilted their neck to cock the head sideways [The r degree in the above image]

Landmarks

A landmark is a point of interest within a face. The API provides a getLandmarks() method which returns a List , where a Landmark object returns the coordinates of the landmark, where a landmark is one of the following: Bottom of mouth, left cheek, left ear, left ear tip, left eye, left mouth, base of nose, right cheek, right ear, right ear tip, right eye or right mouth.

Activity

In addition to detecting the landmark, the API offers the following function calls to allow you to smartly detect various facial states:

  • getIsLeftEyeOpenProbability() - Returns a value between 0 and 1, giving probability that the left eye is open
  • getIsRighteyeOpenProbability() - Same but for right eye
  • getIsSmilingProbability() - Returns a value between 0 and 1 giving a probability that the face is smiling

Thus, for example, you could write an app that only takes a photo when all of the subjects in the image are smiling.

Learn More

It’s easy to build applications that use facial detection using the Face API, and we’ve provided lots of great resources that will allow you to do so. Check them out here:

Follow the Code Lab

Read the Documentation

Explore the sample

Google Play services 7.8 – Let’s see what’s Nearby!

Posted by Magnus Hyttsten, Developer Advocate, Play services team

Today we’ve finished the roll-out of Google Play services 7.8. In this release, we’ve added two new APIs. The Nearby Messages API allows you to build simple interactions between nearby devices and people, while the Mobile Vision API helps you create apps that make sense of the visual world, using real-time on-device vision technology. We’ve also added optimization and new features to existing APIs. Check out the highlights in the video or read about them below.

Nearby Messages

Nearby Messages introduces a cross-platform API to find and communicate with mobile devices and beacons, based on proximity. Nearby uses a combination of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and an ultrasonic audio modem to connect devices. And it works across Android and iOS. For more info on Nearby Messages, check out the documentation and the launch blog post.

Mobile Vision API

We’re happy to announce a new Mobile Vision API. Mobile Vision has two components.

The Face API allows developers to find human faces in images and video. It’s faster, more accurate and provides more information than the Android FaceDetector.Face API. It finds faces in any orientation, allows developers to find landmarks such as the eyes, nose, and mouth, and identifies faces that are smiling and/or have their eyes open. Applications include photography, games, and hands-free user interfaces.

The Barcode API allows apps to recognize barcodes in real-time, on device, in any orientation. It supports a range of barcodes and can detect multiple barcodes at once. For more information, check out the Mobile Vision documentation.

Google Cloud Messaging

And finally, Google Cloud Messaging - Google’s simple and reliable messaging service - has expanded notification to support localization for Android. When composing the notification from the server, set the appropriate body_loc_key, body_loc_args, title_loc_key, and title_loc_args. GCM will handle displaying the notification based on current device locale, which saves you having to figure out which messages to display on which devices! Check out the docs for more info.

And getting ready for the Android M release, we've added high and normal priority to GCM messaging, giving you additional control over message delivery through GCM. Set messages that need immediate users attention to high priority, e.g., chat message alert, incoming voice call alert. And keep the remaining messages at normal priority so that it can be handled in the most battery efficient way without impeding your app performance.

SDK Now Available!

You can get started developing today by downloading the Google Play services SDK from the Android SDK Manager.

To learn more about Google Play services and the APIs available to you through it, visit our documentation on Google Developers.

Android Developer Story: Zabob Studio and Buff Studio reach global users with Google Play

Posted by Lily Sheringham, Google Play team

South Korean Games developers Zabob Studio and Buff Studio are start-ups seeking to become major players in the global mobile games industry.

Established in 2013, Zabob Studio was set up by Kwon Dae-hyeon and his wife in 2013. This couple-run business but they have already published ten games, including hits ‘Zombie Judgement Day’ and ‘Infinity Dungeon.’ So far, the company has generated more than KRW ₩140M (approximately $125,000 USD) in sales revenue, with about 60 percent of the studio’s downloads coming from international markets, such as Taiwan and Brazil.

Elsewhere, Buff Studio was founded in 2014 and right from the start, its first game Buff Knight was an instant hit. It was even featured as the ‘Game of the Week’ on Google Play and was included in “30 Best Games of 2014” lists. A sequel is already in the works showing the potential of the franchise.

In this video, Kwon Dae-hyeon, CEO of Zabob Studio ,and Kim Do-Hyeong, CEO of Buff Studio, talk about how Google Play services and the Google Play Developer Console have helped them maintain a competitive edge, market their games efficiently to global users and grow revenue on the platform.

Android Developer Story: Buff Studio - Reaching global users with Google Play

Android Developer Story: Zabob Studio - Growing revenue with Google Play

Check Zabob Studio apps and Buff Knight on Google Play!

We’re pleased to share that Android Developer Stories will now come with translated subtitles on YouTube in popular languages around the world. Find out how to turn on YouTube captions. To read locally translated blog posts, visit the Google developer blog in Korean.

A Closer Look at Google Play services 7.5

Posted by Ian Lake, Developer Advocate

At Google I/O, we announced the rollout of Google Play services 7.5 that deliver new capabilities and optimizations to devices across the Android ecosystem. Google Play services ensures that you can build on the latest features from Google for your users, with the confidence that those services will work properly on Android 2.3 and higher devices.

You’ll find the addition of Smart Lock for Passwords, Instance ID, new APIs for Google Cloud Messaging and Google Cast, as well as access to the Google Maps API on Android Wear devices.

Smart Lock for Passwords

Typing in a password, particularly on a mobile device, is never a pleasant experience. In many cases, your users have already logged in on the web or another device - shouldn’t your login process know that? Smart Lock for Passwords builds on the Chrome Password Manager, adding a new CredentialsApi API and UI on Android to retrieve saved credentials as part of your login process and saving new credentials for later use on other Android devices and any Chrome browser. Both password-based and Identity Provider (IDP, like Google Sign-In) credentials are supported. Keep your users logged in as they move between and to new devices; don’t let them drop off, get frustrated, or end up with multiple accounts.

Learn more about Smart Lock for Passwords on the developer site.

Instance ID, Identity, and Authorization

Instance ID (IID) allows you to retrieve a unique identifier for every app instance, providing a mechanism to authenticate and authorize actions, even if your app does not have user registration and accounts. For example, this allows you to uniquely determine which app instance is sending a request from by including the Instance ID token. We’ve also made it easy to handle edge cases to ensure that you’ll have valid Instance ID tokens.

Google Cloud Messaging

Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) gives developers a battery efficient mechanism for sending information to your users as well as send upstream messages from a device to your server.

Google Cloud Messaging and InstanceID

Previously, GCM used a unique registration ID to refer to each device - while these IDs will continue to work, you can now utilize Instance ID tokens for GCM, gaining all of the advantages of InstanceID around handling error cases. Instance ID tokens are fully compatible with user notifications, allowing you to send notifications to all of a user's devices.

Topic based subscriptions

You’ll also get another new feature for switching to InstanceID with GCM - topic based subscriptions! This makes it easy to publish a message to exactly the right audience and have GCM handle all the heavy lifting of sending to all subscribed instances. Your app can subscribe to multiple topics, allowing you to create any set of topics needed to best handle your app’s messaging needs.

Receiving messages with GCM

Of course, just subscribing to receive messages is only half the battle: receiving GCM messages can now be done using a GcmReceiver and a subclass of GcmListenerService. These two classes make it easy to help your app reliably process messages, even when the device is awakened from deep sleep.

GCM Network Manager

Applications often need to sync data with their servers when new information is available. In GCM we refer to this model as “send to sync”. We made this task much simpler with the introduction of the GCM Network Manager APIs, which handles many of the common implementation patterns such as waiting for network connectivity, device charging, network retries, and backoff. GcmNetworkManager will schedule your background tasks when it is most appropriate and it can batch multiple tasks together for efficiency and battery savings, even utilizing the JobScheduler APIs for best performance on Android 5.0+ devices. With support for both one-off tasks and periodic tasks, this API serves as a flexible framework for many different types of operations.

App Invites Beta

Now in beta, App Invites is new functionality for both Android and iOS that provides a standard UI for users to invite their contacts to install your app and optionally deep link specifically to selected content, using your users’ device and Google-wide contacts as a source to drive referrals to increase the reach of your app.

With the ability to send invites via SMS or email, this provides a great mechanism to organically grow your user base, give your users a consistent way to share your app with exactly who would like it, and track how effective your invites are.

With App Invites, our goal is to take the hard work out of building user referral and onboarding flows, so that you can focus on your core app experience. Learn more about App Invites on the developer site!

Google Cast

Google Cast is a technology that lets you easily cast content from your mobile device or laptop right to your TV or speakers. With the new ability to use remote display on any Android, iOS, or Chrome app, better media support, better game support, we hope your Google Cast experience is better than ever!

Remote Display API

We are making it easy for mobile developers to bring graphically intensive apps or games to Google Cast receivers with Google Cast Remote Display APIs for Android and iOS. The new Remote Display API allows you to build a tailored, integrated second screen experience, without requiring an identical mirroring of content between mobile devices and the Google Cast device.

Learn more about Remote Display on the Google Cast Developers Site!

Autoplay and Queuing APIs

Playing single media items on Chromecast has been something RemoteMediaPlayer (or CastCompanionLibrary’s VideoCastController) has been doing well for some time. With this release, RemoteMediaPlayer is gaining a full media queue and support for autoplay for a seamless media playback experience. This ensures that all connected devices can easily maintain a synchronized queue of upcoming media items, opening up new possibilities of creating collaborative Google Cast media experiences.

Game Manager APIs for Google Cast

Bringing your game to Google Cast can make for a great multiplayer experience, using a mobile device as a game controller and the TV to display the action. To make it easier to send messages and state changes to all connected clients and the cast receiver, Google Play services 7.5 introduces the GameManagerClient and the Game Manager APIs for Google Cast, available for Android, iOS, Chrome, and for receivers.

Android Wear

Watches are great devices for telling time. But what if in addition showing you when you are, watches could easily show you where you are? With the new release, you can now use the familiar Maps APIs on Android Wear devices:

This makes it possible to display fully interactive maps, as well as lite mode maps, directly on Android Wear devices. You’ll be able to scroll and zoom interactive maps, show the user’s current location, and more. Check out the full list of supported features in the developer documentation and check out all the details on the Geo Developers blog.

Google Fit

Google Fit is an open platform designed to make building fitness apps, whether that means retrieving sensor data like current location and speed, collecting and storing activity data, or automatically aggregating that data into a single view of the user’s fitness data.

You’ll now be able to use the RecordingApi for gathering estimated distance traveled and calories burned data, making it available to your app and other Google Fit enabled apps via the HistoryApi.

Being active can take many forms. While some activities are easily measured in terms of steps or distance, strength training is measured in terms of type, resistance and repetitions. This type of data can now be stored in Google Fit via new support for a large number of workout exercises, helping users build a complete view of their activity.

SDK is now available!

Google Play services 7.5 is now available: get started with updated SDK now!

To learn more about Google Play services and the APIs available to you through it, visit the Google APIs for Android site.

Android M Developer Preview & Tools

By Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

Today at Google I/O, we announced a developer preview of the next version of Android, the M release. Last year’s developer preview was a first for Android and we received great feedback. We want to continue to give you developers early access to Android so you have time to get your apps ready for the next version of Android. This time with the M Developer Preview, we will provide a clear timeline for testing and feedback plus more updates to the preview build.

Visit the M Developer Preview for downloads and documentation

The Android M release: improving the fundamentals

For the M release, we focused on improving the core user experience of Android, from fixing thousands of bugs, to making some big changes to the fundamentals of the platform:

  • Permissions - We are giving users control of app permissions in the M release. Apps can trigger requests for permissions at runtime, in the right context, and users can choose whether to grant the permission. Making permission requests right when they’re needed means users can get up and running in your app faster. Also, users have easy access to manage all their app permissions in settings. On M, as a developer, you should design your app to prompt for permissions in context and account for permissions that don’t get granted. As more devices upgrade to M, app permission behavior will be a critical development flow to test.

    • Runtime App Permissions

  • App links - We are making it even easier to link between apps. Android has always allowed apps to register to natively handle URLs. Now you can add an autoVerify attribute to your app manifest so that users can be linked deep into your native app without any disambiguation prompt. App links, along with App Indexing for Google search, make it easier for users to discover and re-engage with your app.
  • Battery - We’re making Android devices smarter about managing power through a new feature called Doze. With M, Android uses significant motion detection to learn if a device has been left unattended for a while. In this state, Android will exponentially back off background activity, trading off a little bit of app freshness for longer battery life. Consider how this may affect your app; for instance, if you’re building a chat app, you may want to make use of high priority messages to wake your app when the device is dozing.

The Android M release: advancing assistance and payments

We are also delighted to announce a couple of big new features:

  • Now on tap - We are making it even easier for Android users to get assistance with Now on tap -- whenever they need it, wherever they are on their device. For example, if your friend texts you about dinner at a new restaurant, without leaving the app, you can ask Google Now for help. Using just that context, Google can find menus, reviews, help you book a table, navigate there, and deep link you into relevant apps. As a developer, you can implement App Indexing for Google search to let users discover and re-engage with your app through Now on tap.

    • Now on tap

  • Android Pay & Fingerprint - We’ve built on our work with Near Field Communications (NFC) in Gingerbread and Host Card Emulation in Kitkat to develop Android Pay. Android Pay will enable Android users to simply and securely use their Android phone to pay in stores or in thousands of Android Pay partner apps. With M, native fingerprint support enhances Android Pay by allowing users to confirm a purchase with their fingerprint. Moreover, fingerprint on M can be used to unlock devices and make purchases on Google Play. With new APIs in M, it’s easy for you to add fingerprint authorization to your app and have it work consistently across a range of devices and sensors.

These are just a few highlights from the M Developer Preview that we announced today. The M preview will be available for download right after the keynote.

Android Developer Tools

In addition to the developer preview, we are launching new tools to help you in the development of your Android App:

  • Android Studio v1.3 Preview - To help take advantage of the M Developer Preview features, we are releasing a new version of Android Studio. Most notable is a much requested feature from our Android NDK & game developers: code editing and debugging for C/C++ code. Based on JetBrains Clion platform, the Android Studio NDK plugin provides features such as refactoring and code completion for C/C++ code alongside your Java code. Java and C/C++ code support is integrated into one development experience free of charge for Android app developers. Update to Android Studio v1.3 via the Canary channel and let us know what you think.

    • Android Studio 1.3 with Android NDK Support

  • Android Design Support Library - Making Material design apps gets even easier with the new Android Design support library. We have packaged a set a key design components (e.g floating action button, snackbar, navigation view, motion enabled Toolbars) that are backward compatible to API 7 and can be added to your app to create a modern, great looking Android app without building everything from scratch.
  • Google Play Services - Today we also are releasing v7.5 of Google Play services which includes new features ranging from Smart Lock for Passwords, new APIs for Google Cloud Messaging and Google Cast, to Google Maps API on Android Wear devices.

Get Started

The M Developer Preview includes an updated SDK with tools, system images for testing on the official Android emulator, and system images for testing on Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 9, and Nexus Player devices. We are excited to expand the program and give you more time to ensure your apps support M when it launches this fall. Based on your feedback, we plan to update the M Developer preview system images often during the developer preview program. The sooner we hear from you, the more feedback we can integrate, so let us know!

To get started with the M Developer Preview and prepare your apps for the full release, just follow these steps:

  1. Update to Android Studio v1.3+ Preview
  2. Visit the M Developer Preview site for downloads and documentation.
  3. Explore the new APIs & App Permissions changes
  4. Explore the Android Design Support Library & Google Play Services APIs
  5. Get the emulator system images through the SDK Manager or download the Nexus device system images.
  6. Test your app with your supported Nexus device or emulator
  7. Give us feedback

There’s a lot to explore with Google Play services 7.3

Posted by Ian Lake, Developer Advocate

Today, we’re excited to give you new tools to build better apps with the rollout of Google Play services 7.3. With new Android Wear APIs, the addition of nutrition data to Google Fit, improvements to retrieving the user’s activity and location, and better support for optional APIs, there’s a lot to explore in this release.

Android Wear

Google Play services 7.3 extends the Android Wear network by enabling you to connect multiple Wear devices to a single mobile device.

While the DataApi will automatically sync DataItems across all nodes in the Wear network, the directed nature of the MessageApi is faced with new challenges. What node do you send a message to when the NodeApi starts showing multiple nodes from getConnectedNodes()? This is exactly the use case for the new CapabilityApi, which allows different nodes to advertise that they provide a specific functionality (say, the phone node being able to download images from the internet). This allows you to replace a generic NodeListener with a more specific CapabilityListener, getting only connection results and a list of nodes that have the specific functionality you need. We’ve updated the Sending and Receiving Messages training to explore this new functionality.

Another new addition for Android Wear is the ChannelApi, which provides a bidirectional data connection between two nodes. While assets are the best way to efficiently add binary data to the data layer for synchronization to all devices, this API focuses on sending larger binary data directly between specific nodes. This comes in two forms: sending full files via the sendFile() method (perfect for later offline access) or opening an OutputStream to stream real time binary data. We hope this offers a flexible, low level API to complement the DataApi and MessageApi.

We’ve updated our samples with these changes in mind so go check them out here!

Google Fit

Google Fit makes building fitness apps easier with fitness specific APIs on retrieving sensor data like current location and speed, collecting and storing activity data in Google Fit’s open platform, and automatically aggregating that data into a single view of the user’s fitness data.

To make it even easier to retrieve up-to-date information, Google Play Services 7.3 adds a new method to the HistoryApi: readDailyTotal(). This automatically aggregates data for a given DataType from midnight on the current day through now, giving you a single DataPoint. For TYPE_STEP_COUNT_DELTA, this method does not require any authentication, making it possible to retrieve the current number of steps for today from any application whether on mobile devices or on Android Wear - great for watch faces!

Google Fit is also augmenting its existing data types with granular nutrition information, including protein, fat, cholesterol, and more. By leveraging these details about the user’s diet, developers can help users stay more informed about their health and fitness.

Location

LocationRequest is the heart of the FusedLocationProviderApi, encapsulating the type and frequency of location information you’d like to receive. An important, but small change to LocationRequest is the addition of a maximum wait time for location updates via setMaxWaitTime(). By using a value at least two times larger than the requested interval, the system can batch location updates together, reducing battery usage and, on some devices, actually improving location accuracy.

For any ongoing location requests, it is important to know that you will continue to get good location data back. The SettingsApi is still incredibly useful for confirming that user settings are optimal before you put in a LocationRequest, however, it isn’t the best approach for continual monitoring. For that, you can use the new LocationCallback class in place of your existing LocationListener to receive LocationAvailability updates in addition to location updates, giving you a simple callback whenever settings might have changed which will affect the current set of LocationRequests. You can also use FusedLocationProviderApi’s getLocationAvailability() to retrieve the current state on demand.

Connecting to Google Play services

One of the biggest benefits of GoogleApiClient is that it provides a single connection state, whether you are connecting to a single API or multiple APIs. However, this made it hard to work with APIs that might not be available on all devices, such as the Wearable API. This release makes it much easier to work with APIs that may not always be available with the addition of an addApiIfAvailable() method ensuring that unavailable APIs do not hold up the connection process. The current state for each API can then be retrieved via getConnectionResult(), giving you a way to check at runtime whether an API is available and connected.

While GoogleApiClient’s connection process already takes care of checking for Google Play services availability, if you are not using GoogleApiClient, you’ll find many of the static utility methods in GooglePlayServicesUtil such as isGooglePlayServicesAvailable() have now been moved to the singleton GoogleApiAvailability class. We hope the move away from static methods helps you when writing tests, ensuring your application can properly handle any error cases.

SDK is now available!

Google Play services 7.3 is now available: get started with updated SDK now!

To learn more about Google Play services and the APIs available to you through it, visit the Google Play services section on the Android Developer site.

Hello Places API for Android and iOS!

Posted by Jen Kovnats Harrington, Product Manager, Google Maps APIs

Originally posted to Google Geo Developers blog

People don’t think of their location in terms of coordinates on a map. They want context on what shops or restaurants they’re at, and what’s around them. To help your apps speak your users’ language, we’re launching the Places API for Android, as well as opening a beta program for the Places API for iOS.

The Places API web service and JavaScript library have been available for some time. By providing native support for Android and iOS devices, you can optimize the mobile experience with the new APIs by taking advantage of the device’s location signals.

The Places APIs for Android and iOS bridge the gap between simple geographic locations expressed as latitude and longitude, and how people associate location with a known place. For example, you wouldn’t tell someone you were born at 25.7918359,-80.2127959. You’d simply say, “I was born in Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, Florida.” The Places API brings the power of Google’s global places database into your app, providing more than 100 million places, like restaurants, local businesses, hotels, museums, and other attractions.

Key features include:

  • Add a place picker: a drop-in UI widget that allows your users to specify a place
  • Get the place where the user is right now
  • Show detailed place information, including the place’s name, address, phone number, and website
  • Use autocomplete to save your users time and frustration typing out place names, by automatically completing them as they type
  • Make your app stand out by adding new places that are relevant to your users and seeing the places appear in Google's Places database
  • Improve the map around you by reporting the presence of a device at a particular place.

To get started with the Places API for Android, watch this DevByte, check out the developer documentation, and play with the demos. To apply for the Places API for iOS beta program, go here.

Google Play services 7.0 – Places Everyone!

Posted by Ian Lake, Developer Advocate

Today, we’re bringing you new tools to build better apps with the rollout of Google Play services 7.0. With this release, we’re delivering improvements to location settings experiences, a brand new API for place information, new fitness data, automatic integration of AdMob and Google Analytics, Google Play Games, and more.

Location Settings Dialog

While the FusedLocationProviderApi combines multiple sensors to give you the optimal location, the accuracy of the location your app receives still depends greatly on what settings are enabled on the device (e.g. GPS, wifi, airplane mode, etc). In Google Play services 7.0, we’re introducing a standard mechanism to check that the necessary location settings are enabled for a given LocationRequest to succeed. If there are possible improvements, you can display a one touch control for the user to change their settings without leaving your app.

This API provides a great opportunity to make for a much better user experience, particularly if location information is critical to the user experience of your app such as was the case with Google Maps when they integrated the Location Settings dialog and saw a dramatic increase in the number of users in a good location state.

Places API

Location can be so much more than a latitude and longitude: the new Places API makes it easy to get details from Google’s database of places and businesses. The built-in place picker makes it easy for the user to pick their current place and provides all the relevant place details including name, address, phone number, website, and more.

If you prefer to provide your own UI, the getCurrentPlace() API returns places directly around the user’s current location. Autocomplete predictions are also provided to allow a low latency search experience directly within your app.

You can also manually add places with the addPlace() API and report that the user is at a particular place, ensuring that even the most explorative users can input and share their favorite new places.

The Places API will also be available cross-platform: in a few days, you’ll be able to apply for the Places API for iOS beta program to ensure a great and consistent user experience across mobile platforms.

Google Fit

Google Fit makes building fitness apps easier with fitness specific APIs on retrieving sensor data like current location and speed, collecting and storing activity data in Google Fit’s open platform, and automatically aggregating that data into a single view of the user’s fitness data.

In Google Play services 7.0, the previous Fitness.API that you passed into your GoogleApiClient has now been replaced with a number of APIs, matching the high level set of Google Fit Android APIs:

  • SENSORS_API to access raw sensor data via SensorsApi
  • RECORDING_API to record data via RecordingApi
  • HISTORY_API for inserting, deleting, or reading data via HistoryApi
  • SESSIONS_API for managing sessions via SessionsApi
  • BLE_API to interact with Bluetooth Low Energy devices via BleApi
  • CONFIG_API to access custom data types and settings for Google Fit via ConfigApi

This change significantly reduces the memory requirement for Google Fit enabled apps running in the background. Like always, apps built on previous versions of Google Play services will continue to work, but we strongly suggest you rebuild your Google Fit enabled apps to take advantage of this change.

Having all the data can be an empowering part of making meaningful changes and Google Fit is augmenting their existing data types with the addition of body fat percentage and sleep data.

Google Mobile Ads

We’ve found integration of AdMob and Google Analytics a powerful combination for analyzing how your users really use your app since we launched Google Analytics in AdMob last year. This new release enables any Google Mobile Ads SDK implementation to automatically get Google Analytics integration giving you the number of users and sessions, session duration, operating systems, device models, geography, and automatic screen reporting without any additional development work.

In addition, we’ve made numerous improvements across the SDK including ad request prefetching (saving battery usage and improving apparent latency) and making the SDK MRAIDv2 compliant.

Google Play Games

Announced at Game Developers Conference (GDC), we’re offering new tools to supercharge your games on Google Play. Included in Google Play services 7.0 is the Nearby Connections API, allowing games to seamlessly connect smartphones and tablets as second-screen controls to the game running on your TV.

App Indexing

App Indexing lets Google index apps just like websites, enabling Google search results to deep-link directly into your native app. We've simplified the App Indexing API to make this integration even easier for you by combining the existing view()/viewEnd() and action()/end() flows into a single start() and end() API.

Changes to GoogleApiClient

GoogleApiClient serves as the common entry point for accessing Google APIs. For this release, we’ve made retrieval of Google OAuth 2.0 tokens part of GoogleApiClient, making it much easier to request server auth codes to access Google APIs.

SDK Coming Soon!

We will be rolling out Google Play services 7.0 over the next few days. Expect an update to this blog post, published documentation, and the availability of the SDK once the rollout is completed.

To learn more about Google Play services and the APIs available to you through it, visit the Google Services section on the Android Developer site.

New Code Samples for Lollipop

Posted by Trevor Johns, Developer Programs Engineer

With the launch of Android 5.0 Lollipop, we’ve added more than 20 new code samples demonstrating how to implement some of the great new features of this release. To access the code samples, you can easily import them in Android Studio 1.0 using the new Samples Wizard.

Go to File > Import Sample in order to browse the available samples, which include a description and preview for each. Once you’ve made your selection, select “Next” and a new project will be automatically created for you. Run the project on an emulator or device, and feel free to experiment with the code.

Samples Wizard in Android Studio 1.0
Newly imported sample project in Android Studio

Alternatively, you can browse through them via the Samples browser on the developer site. Each sample has an Overview description, Project page to browse app file structure, and Download link for obtaining a ZIP file of the sample. As a third option, code samples can also be accessed in the SDK Manager by downloading the SDK samples for Android 5.0 (API 21) and importing them as existing projects into your IDE.


Sample demonstrating transition animations

Material Design

When adopting material design, you can refer to our collection of sample code highlighting material elements:

For additional help, please refer to our design checklist, list of key APIs and widgets, and documentation guide.

To view some of these material design elements in action, check out the Google I/O app source code.

Platform

Lollipop brings the most extensive update to the Android platform yet. The Overview screen allows an app to surface multiple tasks as concurrent documents. You can include enhanced notifications with this sample code, which shows you how to use the lockscreen and heads-up notification APIs.

We also introduced a new Camera API to provide developers more advanced image capture and processing capabilities. These samples detail how to use the camera preview and take photos, how to record video, and implement a real-time high-dynamic range camera viewfinder.

Elsewhere, Project Volta encourages developers to make their apps more battery-efficient with new APIs and tools. The JobScheduler sample demonstrates how you can schedule background tasks to be completed later or under specific conditions.

For those interested in the enterprise device administration use case, there are sample apps on setting app restrictions and creating a managed profile.

Android Wear

For Android Wear, we have a speed tracker sample to show how to take advantage of GPS support on wearables. You can browse the rest of the Android Wear samples too, and here are some highlights that demonstrate the unique capabilities of wearables, such as data synchronization, notifications, and supporting round displays:

Android TV

Extend your app for Android TV using the Leanback library described in this training guide and sample.

To try out a game that is specifically optimized for Android TV, download Pie Noon from Google Play. It’s an open-source game developed in-house at Google that supports multiple players using Bluetooth controllers or touch controls on mobile devices.

Android Auto

For the use cases highlighted in the Introduction to Android Auto DevByte, we have two code samples. The Media Browser sample (DevByte) demonstrates how easy it is to make an audio app compatible with Android Auto by using the new Lollipop media APIs, while the Messaging sample (DevByte) demonstrates how to implement notifications that support replies using speech recognition.

Google Play services

Since we’ve discussed sample resources for the Android platform and form factors, we also want to mention that there are existing samples for Google Play services. With Google Play services, your app can take advantage of the latest Google-powered APIs such as Maps, Google Fit, Google Cast, and more. Access samples in the Google Play services SDK or visit the individual pages for each API on the developer site. For game developers, you can reference the Google Play Games services samples for how to add achievements, leaderboards, and multiplayer support to your game.

Check out a sample today to help you with your development!