Learn about the ways Google products are embracing equity and celebrating women in honor of International Women’s Day.
Learn about the ways Google products are embracing equity and celebrating women in honor of International Women’s Day.
Posted by the Stripe and Android teams
Stripe Terminal is a set of tools for accepting in-person payments, including developer
interfaces, card readers, and logistics management. Android developers can build in-person commerce experiences with the Terminal Android SDK and the Tap to Pay on Android SDK. The Terminal Android SDK allows users to go to market with Stripe’s pre-certified card readers, and the Tap to Pay on Android SDK enables merchants to accept contactless payments on their existing compatible Android devices. The Tap to Pay on Android SDK eliminates the need for additional hardware, allowing POS providers and their users to quickly scale, increase revenue, and reach new markets. Both SDKs integrate seamlessly with the Stripe platform, so businesses can manage online and in-person payments in one place. Existing Terminal users have integrated Tap to Pay on Android with the Stripe Terminal SDK in just a couple of weeks.
 |
Stripe has used Google Play SDK Console since the product’s launch in 2020 to monitor the performance of our SDKs, including the Terminal Android SDK and Android SDK for online payments. Google Play SDK Console is a platform for widely-used commercial SDKs to share important updates with developers—such as critical issues related to recent releases—and provide precise mitigation instructions for out-of-date SDK versions. Features of Google Play SDK Console such as usage statistics, crash reporting, and version reporting make it possible for SDK providers such as Stripe to streamline communication with customers and help keep a pulse on the health of their SDKs.
Security was key to the development of the Tap to Pay on Android SDK due to the need to secure sensitive card data for the acceptance of contactless payments on a broad range of consumer devices. We originally incorporated the SafetyNet Attestation API into our broader security strategy for Terminal to address the need for device attestation. Looking ahead to 2023, we plan to use the new Play Integrity API, which replaced SafetyNet Attestation and offers device attestation and other integrity services. The Play Integrity API will also help us meet the recently published PCI MPoC (Mobile Payments on COTS) standard for mobile payment acceptance solutions. This standard requires Stripe to verify that Android applications using the Tap to Pay on Android SDK are unmodified, and that those applications have been installed from a trusted source like the Google Play Store. The Play Integrity API will not only help us meet industry standards, but will also mitigate the risk that a compromised device or application could be used to collect payments, which protects Stripe users and upholds the security of payments made using the Tap to Pay on Android SDK.
 |
In addition to security, ubiquity across Android devices has also been a driving force in the development of the Tap to Pay on Android SDK. A fundamental goal for Stripe was to build a solution that would work on a wide range of consumer and enterprise Android devices. The decision to use the Play Integrity API was therefore also largely influenced by the appeal of Google Mobile Services and the wide range of functionality afforded by its associated APIs and applications.
We’re excited to partner with Google as an early adopter of the Play Integrity API for SDKs. This will allow the Stripe SDK to access the Play Integrity API with an API key, streamlining the experience for developers using the SDK as they won’t have to separately integrate with the Integrity API. Google plans to offer this to more SDKs in 2023.
Where can I learn more about Stripe’s Tap to Pay on Android SDK?
Visit our Tap to Pay page for more information. Tap to Pay on Android is currently available through the Stripe Terminal Android SDK in the US, Canada, the UK, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. Reach out here to start building.
Posted by Harini Chandrasekharan, Staff Software Engineer, Google Play
The Google Play Store, launched 10 years ago in 2012 sits at the heart of Android, connecting billions of users with an equally staggering and ever-growing collection of apps and games worldwide.
Let's take a peek behind the curtains to learn what it takes to design the serving infrastructure of the worlds largest Android marketplace. In the world of consumer facing software, it's not a surprise that out of box engineering solutions fail to meet the requirements that Google scale demands. Therefore every system at Google is carefully crafted and honed with iterative enhancements to meet the unique availability, quality and latency demands of the Google Play Store.
In the domain of consumer facing features, users’ opinions and choices, developer ecosystem and demand often changes faster than infrastructure can. In such an environment, the biggest challenge engineers face is how to be nimble and design infrastructure that’s not only future-proof but also meets the needs of the consumer space within the constraints of scalability and performance. Let’s take a deeper look at some engineering challenges in such a dynamic space.
In a data driven organization such as the Play store, metrics are built for measuring anything and everything of importance. Here are some of the dimensions that come in handy when measuring and tracking success:
Designing backend systems that scale to the requirements of the Play Store that also meet the performance criteria required to make user interactions feel fluid and responsive is paramount. From an engineering perspective, infrastructure needs to continuously evolve to meet the needs of the business. The Play store is no different—the store infrastructure has evolved several times in the last decade to not only support the needs of new features that are available to users today, but also to modernize, eliminate tech debt and most of all reduce latency.
Optimizing for time to market i.e getting the feature to the user and measuring how it impacts app installs and other store business metrics using A/B experiments is of prime importance. Iterating fast based on data helps tune the final feature to the desired end state. Google has several home grown technologies for running A/B experiments at worldwide scale with seamless integration with metric presentation tools that make running these experiments smooth and easy, so developers can spend more time coding and less in analysis.
Deciding what to build, whether it meets Google quality standards, understanding engineering costs and the user needs it solves are all important questions that need to be answered before designing anything. Feature Engineering is therefore often done in close collaboration with Product Managers. Aligning on the perfect MVP that can be built in a reasonable amount of engineering time that meets the user journey is the key to a successful product.
Frequent iterations and a fast MVP development culture often comes with its set of cons, the biggest being tech debt. In optimizing for fast velocity, cutting corners results in obsolete code (due to unlaunchable metrics) or discarded experiment flags. These often make testing, maintaining and impact future development velocity if left unfixed. Additionally, using the latest and greatest frameworks to get to the last milliseconds of latency or making development easier yields great dividends in the long run. Frequently modernizing the infrastructure either via refactoring or full rewrites may traditionally spell signs of poorly designed code, but it's one of the bigger tradeoffs that feature engineers often have to make, because after all what use is all the fancy infrastructure if users don't interact with the feature in the first place!
Posted by Laura Nechita, Software Engineering at Google Play and Victor Chen, Product Specialist at Google Play
To further enhance the privacy of users and their multi-platform gaming experience, Play Games Services (PGS) is introducing next generation Player IDs. With this change, the first time a user plays a game, they will always be assigned a unique next generation Player ID that will remain consistent regardless of the device or platform a user plays a game on, but which will vary from game to game.
Existing users, or accounts that have already signed into your game using PGS retain their current PGS Player IDs and are not affected by this change. If you have multiple titles in your portfolio and need a way to identify users across your titles to offer cross-game user experiences, we are also introducing a developer player key. Learn more.
With next generation IDs, it will also enable better Play Games Services support for all accounts, including those under supervision.
Here is a timeline for the rollout:
How this affects your game
Posted by Leticia Lago, Developer Marketing
In our first batch of #WeArePlay stories for 2023, discover the inspiring app founders sharing their knowledge with millions around the world: from cooking up the best recipes, learning better ways to stay healthy, finding the best spots for photography or sharing tips to nail that next exam.
 |
 |
 |
Check out all the stories now at g.co/play/weareplay and stay tuned for even more coming soon.
How useful did you find this blog post?
Posted by Leticia Lago, Developer Marketing
In our first batch of #WeArePlay stories for 2023, discover the inspiring app founders sharing their knowledge with millions around the world: from cooking up the best recipes, learning better ways to stay healthy, finding the best spots for photography or sharing tips to nail that next exam.
Next, a few more stories from around the world:
|
|
|
Check out all the stories now at g.co/play/weareplay and stay tuned for even more coming soon.
How useful did you find this blog post?
Use different features from Google Books, Google Play, Android and more to read more books this year.
Posted by Steve Suppe, Product Manager, Google Play and Manuel Wang, Product Manager, Google Play; Ashley Marshall, UX Writing Lead, Google Play
Google Play Console is constantly evolving to improve how you manage and publish your apps. We know that launch moments are really important to you. Whether that's launching a new version of your app, or updating your store listing – you need the right tools to help you launch with confidence.
One challenge you’ve shared with us is a lack of predictability and control over the app review process. Previously, it was hard to predict which changes would be sent to Google for review, and which changes would be published immediately. There was also no way to send multiple changes for review together, for example, if you wanted to update your app at the same time as one of your store listing screenshots.
As a result of your feedback, we're making some changes to give you more flexibility and control over the app review process.
On the Publishing overview page in Play Console, you’ll soon see a new section called “Changes ready to send for review.” Whenever you save a change in Play Console that is subject to review, it will be listed here – instead of it being automatically sent for review. You can then send these changes for review together, whenever you’re ready.
.png) |
| On the Publishing overview page in Play Console, you’ll soon see a new “Changes ready to send for review” section where your changes will be saved for you to send for review. |
Once you send changes to Google for review, they'll appear in the “Changes in review” section on the Publishing overview page.
If you have managed publishing turned on, these changes will appear in the “Ready to publish” section as soon as they're approved. You can then publish these changes whenever you're ready.
If you have managed publishing turned off, changes will be published automatically as soon as they're approved. We recommend turning managed publishing on when you want more control over app changes or wish to push an app update live at a specific time.
To give you even more flexibility, we're also adding the ability for you to remove changes that have already been sent for review, or that are ready to publish.
Changes you remove will once again appear in the “Changes ready to send for review” section.
Here's an example of how we think these new changes will add predictability and control to your app publishing process, and how they will enable more flexible workflows.
Imagine you have a major update to your app that is due to go live and requires several changes to happen at the same time, such as publishing a new release, updating your store listing screenshots, and making changes to your Data safety form. Here's how this would look with all of the new improvements that we've made in Play Console.
1. Make changes to your app, store listing, and Data safety form in Play ConsoleYou can make changes to all of the different parts of your app at your own pace, with confidence that these changes won't be sent for review or published until you're ready.
2. Send changes for review when you're readyOn the Publishing overview page, you'll now see all of the changes that have been made. You can send them for review together when you decide you’re ready.
3. Remove changes if you've made a mistake
Imagine that you've made a change to something else by accident, or your marketing team has told you that some of the screenshots you originally uploaded need to be changed. On the Publishing overview page, you can now remove these changes from the review, make any necessary updates, and send the changes for review – again.
4. Publish according to your schedule with managed publishingPlans change all the time. Imagine that your marketing team tells you that your launch date has been delayed by a week. Or, what if you don't want your changes to go live on a weekend, when no one is in the office? You can choose to turn on managed publishing and control exactly when approved changes are published.
We’re really excited to share these upcoming features with you, and hope these changes give you more predictability and control over the app publishing process.
