Tag Archives: IO2014

Material design in the 2014 Google I/O app

By Roman Nurik, lead designer for the Google I/O Android App

Every year for Google I/O, we publish an Android app for the conference that serves two purposes. First, it serves as a companion for conference attendees and those tuning in from home, with a personalized schedule, a browsing interface for talks, and more. Second, and arguably more importantly, it serves as a reference demo for Android design and development best practices.

Last week, we announced that the Google I/O 2014 app source code is now available, so you can go check out how we implemented some of the features and design details you got to play with during the conference. In this post, I’ll share a glimpse into some of our design thinking for this year’s app.

On the design front, this year’s I/O app uses the new material design approach and features of the Android L Developer Preview to present content in a rational, consistent, adaptive and beautiful way. Let’s take a look at some of the design decisions and outcomes that informed the design of the app.

Surfaces and shadows

In material design, surfaces and shadows play an important role in conveying the structure of your app. The material design spec outlines a set of layout principles that helps guide decisions like when and where shadows should appear. As an example, here are some of the iterations we went through for the schedule screen:

First iteration
Second iteration
Third iteration

The first iteration was problematic for a number of reasons. First, the single shadow below the app bar conveyed that there were two “sheets” of paper: one for the app bar and another for the tabs and screen contents. The bottom sheet was too complex: the “ink” that represents the contents of a sheet should be pretty simple; here ink was doing too much work, and the result was visual noise. An alternative could be to make the tabs a third sheet, sitting between the app bar and content, but too much layering can also be distracting.

The second and third iterations were stronger, creating a clear separation between chrome and content, and letting the ink focus on painting text, icons, and accent strips.

Another area where the concept of “surfaces” played a role was in our details page. In our first release, as you scroll the details screen, the top banner fades from the session image to the session color, and the photo scrolls at half the speed beneath the session title, producing a parallax effect. Our concern was that this design bent the physics of material design too far. It’s as if the text was sliding along a piece of paper whose transparency changed throughout the animation.

A better approach, which we introduced in the app update on June 25th, was to introduce a new, shorter surface on which the title text was printed. This surface has a consistent color and opacity. Before scrolling, it’s adjacent to the sheet containing the body text, forming a seam. As you scroll, this surface (and the floating action button attached to it) rises above the body text sheet, allowing the body text to scroll beneath it.

This aligns much better with the physics in the world of material design, and the end result is a more coherent visual, interaction and motion story for users. (See the code: Fragment, Layout XML)

Color

A key principle of material design is also that interfaces should be “bold, graphic, intentional” and that the foundational elements of print-based design should guide visual treatments. Let’s take a look at two such elements: color and margins.

In material design, UI element color palettes generally consist of one primary and one accent color. Large color fields (like the app bar background) take on the main 500 shade of the primary color, while smaller areas like the status bar use a darker shade, e.g. 700.

The accent color is used more subtly throughout the app, to call attention to key elements. The resulting juxtaposition of a tamer primary color and a brighter accent, gives apps a bold, colorful look without overwhelming the app’s actual content.

In the I/O app, we chose two accents, used in various situations. Most accents were Pink 500, while the more conservative Light Blue 500 was a better fit for the Add to Schedule button, which was often adjacent to session colors. (See the code: XML color definitions, Theme XML)

And speaking of session colors, we color each session’s detail screen based on the session’s primary topic. We used the base material design color palette with minor tweaks to ensure consistent brightness and optimal contrast with the floating action button and session images.

Below is an excerpt from our final session color palette exploration file.

Session colors, with floating action button juxtaposed to evaluate contrast
Desaturated session colors, to evaluate brightness consistency across the palette

Margins

Another important “traditional print design” element that we thought about was margins, and more specifically keylines. While we’d already been accustomed to using a 4dp grid for vertical sizing (buttons and simple list items were 48dp, the standard action bar was 56dp, etc.), guidance on keylines was new in material design. Particularly, aligning titles and other textual items to keyline 2 (72dp on phones and 80dp on tablets) immediately instilled a clean, print-like rhythm to our screens, and allowed for very fast scanning of information on a screen. Gestalt principles, for the win!

Grids

Another key principle in material design is “one adaptive design”:

A single underlying design system organizes interactions and space. Each device reflects a different view of the same underlying system. Each view is tailored to the size and interaction appropriate for that device. Colors, iconography, hierarchy, and spatial relationships remain constant.

Now, many of the screens in the I/O app represent collections of sessions. For presenting collections, material design offers a number of containers: cards, lists, and grids. We originally thought to use cards to represent session items, but since we’re mostly showing homogenous content, we deemed cards inappropriate for our use case. The shadows and rounded edges of the cards would add too much visual clutter, and wouldn’t aid in visually grouping content. An adaptive grid was a better choice here; we could vary the number of columns on screen size (see the code), and we were free to integrate text and images in places where we needed to conserve space.

Delightful details

Two of the little details we spent a lot of time perfecting in the app, especially with the L Developer Preview, were touch ripples and the Add to Schedule floating action button.

We used both the clipped and unclipped ripple styles throughout the app, and made sure to customize the ripple color to ensure the ripples were visible (but still subtle) regardless of the background. (See the code: Light ripples, Dark ripples)

But one of our favorite details in the app is the floating action button that toggles whether a session shows up in your personalized schedule or not:

We used a number of new API methods in the L preview (along with a fallback implementation) to ensure this felt right:

  1. View.setOutline and setClipToOutline for circle-clipping and dynamic shadow rendering.
  2. android:stateListAnimator to lift the button toward your finger on press (increase the drop shadow)
  3. RippleDrawable for ink touch feedback on press
  4. ViewAnimationUtils.createCircularReveal for the blue/white background state reveal
  5. AnimatedStateListDrawable to define the frame animations for changes to icon states (from checked to unchecked)

The end result is a delightful and whimsical UI element that we’re really proud of, and hope that you can draw inspiration from or simply drop into your own apps.

What’s next?

And speaking of dropping code into your own apps, remember that all the source behind the app, including L Developer Preview features and fallback code paths, is now available, so go check it out to see how we implemented these designs.

We hope this post has given you some ideas for how you can use material design to build beautiful Android apps that make the most of the platform. Stay tuned for more posts related to this year’s I/O app open source release over the coming weeks to get even more great ideas for ways to deliver the best experience to your users.

Google I/O 2014 App Source Code Now Available

By Bruno Oliveira, Tech Lead of the I/O app project

The source code for the 2014 version of the Google I/O app is now available. Since its first release on Google Play a few weeks before the conference, the I/O app was downloaded by hundreds of thousands of people, including on-site attendees, I/O Extended event participants and users tuning in from home. If one of the goals of the app is to be useful to conference attendees, the other primary goal is to serve as a practical example of best practices for Android app design and development.

In addition to showing how to implement a wide variety of features that are useful for most Android apps, such as Fragments, Loaders, Services, Broadcast Receivers, alarms, notifications, SQLite databases, Content Providers, Action Bar and the Navigation Drawer, the I/O app source code also shows how to integrate with several Google products and services, from the Google Drive API to Google Cloud Messaging. It uses the material design approach, the Android L Preview APIs and full Android Wear integration with a packaged wearable app for sending session feedback.

To simplify the process of reusing and customizing the source code to build apps for other conferences, we rewrote the entire sync adapter to work with plain JSON files instead of requiring a server with a specific API. These files can be hosted on any web server of the developer's choice, and their format is fully documented.

Storing and syncing the user's data (that is, the personalized schedule) is crucial part of the app. The source code shows how user data can be stored in the Application Data folder of the user's own Google Drive account and kept in sync across multiple devices, and how to use Google Cloud Messaging to trigger syncs when necessary to ensure the data is always fresh.

The project includes the source code to the App Engine app that can be reused to send GCM messages to devices to trigger syncs, as well as a module (called Updater) that can be adapted to read conference data from other backends to produce the JSON files that are consumed by the I/O app.

We are excited to share this source code with the developer community today, and we hope it will serve as a learning tool, a source of reusable snippets and a useful example of Android app development in general. In the coming weeks we will post a few technical articles with more detailed information about the IOSched source code to help bring some insight into the app development process. We will continue to update the app in the coming months, and as always, your pull requests are very welcome!

Android L Developer Preview and Android Studio Beta

By Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

At the Google I/O keynote yesterday we announced the L Developer Preview — a development version of an upcoming Android release. The Developer Preview lets you explore features and capabilities of the L release and get started developing and testing on the new platform. You can take a look at the developer features and APIs in the API Overview page.

Starting today, the L Developer Preview is available for download from the L Developer Preview site. We're also announcing that Android Studio is now in beta, and making great progress toward a full release.

Let’s take a deeper dive into what’s included in the preview and what it means for you as a developer as you prepare your apps for the next Android release.

What’s in the L Developer Preview

The L Developer Preview includes updated SDK tools, system images for testing on an emulator, and system images for testing on a Nexus 5 or Nexus 7 device.

You can download these components through the Android SDK Manager:

  • L Developer Preview SDK Tools
  • L Developer Preview Emulator System Image - 32-bit (64-bit experimental emulator image coming soon)
  • L Developer Preview Emulator System Image for Android TV (32-bit)

(Note: the full release of Android Wear is a part of Android KitKat, API Level 20. Read more about Android Wear development here.)

Today, we are also providing system image downloads for these Nexus devices to help with your testing as well:

  • Nexus 5 (GSM/LTE) “hammerhead” Device System Image
  • Nexus 7 [2013] - (Wifi) “razor” Device System Image

You can download both of these system images from the L Developer Preview site.

With the SDK Tools, and Nexus device images, you can get a head start on testing out your app on the latest Android platform months before the official launch. You can use the extra lead time to take advantage of all the new app features and APIs in your apps. The Nexus device images can help you with testing, but keep in mind that they are meant for development purposes only and should not be used on a production device.

Notes on APIs and publishing

The L Developer Preview is a development release and does not have a standard API level. The APIs are not final, and you can expect minor API changes over time.

To ensure a great user experience and broad compatibility, you can not publish versions of your app to Google Play that are compiled against L Developer Preview. Apps built for L Developer Preview will have to wait until the full official launch to publish on Google Play.

Android Studio Beta

To help you develop your apps for the upcoming Android version and for new Android device types, we’re also happy to announce Android Studio Beta. Android Studio Beta helps you develop apps by enabling you to:

  • Incorporate the new material design and interaction elements of the L Developer Preview SDK
  • Quickly create and build apps with a new app wizard and layout editor support for Android Wear and Android TV

Building on top of the build variants and flavors features we introduced last year, the Android Studio build system now supports creating multiple apks, such as for devices like Android Wear. You can try out all the new features with the L Developer Preview by downloading the Android Studio Beta today.

How to get started

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

  1. Try out Android Studio Beta
  2. Visit the L Developer Preview site
  3. Explore the new APIs
  4. Enable the material theme and try out material design on your apps
  5. Get the emulator system images through the SDK Manager or download the Nexus device system images.
  6. Test your app on the new Android Runtime (ART) with your device or emulator
  7. Give us feedback

As you use the new developer features and APIs in the L Developer Preview, we encourage you to give us your feedback using the L Developer Preview Issue Tracker. During the developer preview period, we aim to incorporate your feedback into our new APIs and adjust features as best as we can.

You can get all the latest downloads, documentation, and tools information from the L Developer Preview site on developer.android.com. You can also check our Android Developer Preview Google+ page for updates and information.

We hope you try the L Developer Preview as you start building the next generation of amazing Android user experiences.

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Google I/O: Design, Develop, Distribute

By Monica Tran, Head of Developer Marketing

Today at Moscone, we kicked off our 7th annual Google I/O. This year, we’re focusing on three key themes: design, develop, distribute, helping you build your app from start to finish.

It’s been amazing to see how far you’ve come: in fact, since the last Google I/O, we’ve paid developers more than $5 billion, a testament to the experiences you’re creating. In the keynote, we had a number of announcements geared towards meeting the user wherever they go: on the TV, in the car and on your wrist. Below is a taste of some of the goodies we unveiled to help you along the way.

DESIGN

  • Material design — we introduced material design, which uses tactile surfaces, bold graphic design, and fluid motion to create beautiful, intuitive experiences.
  • L-Release of Android, with material design — Bringing material design to Android is a big part of the L-Release of Android: we’ve added the new Material theme (which you can apply to your apps for a new style) and the ability to specify a view’s elevation, allowing you to cast dynamic, real-time shadows in your apps.
  • Bringing material design to Polymer — As a developer, you’ll now have access to all the capabilities of material design via Polymer, bringing tangibility, bold graphics, and animations to your applications on the web, all at 60fps.

DEVELOP

  • Android L Developer Preview — Get extra lead time to make great apps for the next version of Android, with lots of new APIs to make Android simpler and more consistent on screens everywhere
  • Google Play services 5.0 is rolling out worldwide with great new features for developers.
  • Android TV SDK — Explore, learn and build apps and games for the biggest screen in the home. Your hard work will pay off in the fall when Asus, Razer and other partners launch their first Android TV devices.
  • Google Cast SDK — Help users find your content more easily with the improved Google Cast SDK developer console, which lets your app get discovered on chromecast.com/apps and on Google Play.
  • Android Auto SDK coming — Bring your app experience to the car by extending your existing app with Android Auto APIs. Be in millions of cars — with just one app.
  • Google Fit — An open fitness platform giving users control of their fitness data so that developers can focus on building smarter apps and manufacturers can focus on creating amazing devices.
  • Gaming — Learn what's new about Google Play Games and the Android platform to take games to the next level.
  • Google Cloud Platform — Get help with debugging, tracing, and monitoring applications in with new developer productivity tooling. Also, try Cloud Dataflow, a new fully managed service that simplifies the process of creating data pipelines.
  • The new Gmail API — Add Gmail features to your app with RESTful access to threads, messages, labels, drafts and history.
  • Android features for Enterprise — Secure apps and data without complicating the user experience. Build for the enterprise with no changes to the apps you're already developing. Learn more here.

DISTRIBUTE

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New in Android: L Developer Preview and Google Play Services 5.0

By Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

Earlier today, at Google I/O, we showed a number of projects we’ve been working on to the thousands of developers in the audience and the millions more tuning in on the livestream. These projects extend Android to the TV (Android TV), to the car (Android Auto) and to wearables (Android Wear), among others.

At Google, our focus is providing a seamless experience for users across all of the screens in their lives. An important component to that is making sure that you as developers have all of the tools necessary to easily deploy your apps across to those screens. Increasingly, Android is becoming the fabric that weaves these experiences together, which is why you’ll be excited about a number of things we unveiled today.

Android L Developer Preview

For the first time since we launched Android, we’re giving you early access to a development version of an upcoming release. The L Developer Preview, available starting tomorrow, lets you explore many of the new features and capabilities of the next version of Android, and offers everything you need to get started developing and testing on the new platform. This is important because the platform is evolving in a significant way — not only for mobile but also moving beyond phones and tablets. Here are a few of the highlights for developers:

  • Material design for the multiscreen world — We’ve been working on a new design language at Google that takes a comprehensive approach to visual, motion, and interaction design across a number of platforms and form factors. Material design is a new aesthetic for designing apps in today’s multi-device world. The L Developer Preview brings material design to Android, with a full set of tools for your apps. The system is incredibly flexible, allowing your app to express its individual character and brand with bold colors and a variety of responsive UI patterns and themeable elements.
  • Enhanced notifications — New lockscreen notifications let you surface content, updates, and actions to users at a glance, without unlocking. Visibility controls let you manage the types of information shown on the lockscreen. Heads-up notifications display content and actions in a small floating window that’s managed by the system, no matter which app is in the foreground. Notifications are material themed and you can express your brand through accent colors and more.
  • Document-centric Recents — Now you can organize your app by tasks and present these concurrently as individual “documents” in the Recents screen. Users can flip through Recents to find the specific task they want and then jump deep into your app with a single tap.
  • Project Volta — New tools and APIs help your app run efficiently and conserve power. Battery Historian is a new tool that lets you visualize power events over time and understand how your app is using battery. A job scheduler API lets you set the conditions under which your background tasks and other jobs should run, such as when the device is idle or connected to an unmetered to a charger, to minimize battery impact.
  • BLE Peripheral Mode — Android devices can now function in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) peripheral mode. Apps can use this capability to broadcast their presence to nearby devices — for example, you can now build apps that let a device to function as a pedometer or health monitor and transmit data to another BLE device.
  • Multi-networking — Apps can work with the system to dynamically scan for available networks with specific capabilities and then automatically connect. This is useful when you want to manage handoffs or connect to a specialized network, such as a carrier-billing network.
  • Advanced camera capabilities — A new camera API gives you new capabilities for image capture and processing. On supported devices, your app can capture uncompressed YUV capture at full 8 megapixel resolution at 30 FPS. The API also lets you capture raw sensor data and control parameters such as exposure time, ISO sensitivity, and frame duration, on a per-frame basis.
  • New features for game developers — Support for OpenGL ES 3.1, gives you capabilities such as compute shaders, stencil textures, and texture gather for your games. Android Extension Pack (AEP) is a new set of extensions to OpenGL ES that bring desktop-class graphics to Android. Games will be able to take advantage of tessellation and geometry shaders, and use ASTC texture compression across multiple GPU techonolgies.
  • Android Runtime (ART) — The L Developer Preview introduces the Android Runtime (ART) as the system default. ART offers ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation, more efficient garbage collection, and improved development and debugging features. In many cases it improves performance of the device with no action required by the developer.
  • 64-bit support — The L Developer Preview adds support for 64-bit ABIs, for additional address space and improved performance with certain compute workloads. Apps written in the Java language can run immediately on 64-bit architectures with no modifications required. To support apps using native code, we’re also releasing an updated NDK that includes 64-bit support.

Watch for more details coming out tomorrow (26 June) on what’s in the L Developer Preview and how to get it.

Google Play Services 5.0

Along with the L Developer Preview, we also announced a new version of Google Play services that brings new capabilities and the latest 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 everywhere. The latest version has begun rolling out and here are some of the highlights:

  • Services for Android wearables — Your apps can more easily communicate and sync with code running on Android wearables through an automatically synchronized, persistent data store and a reliable messaging interface.
  • Play Games services — Build a great gaming experience with Quests, which allow event-based challenges for players to complete for rewards, Saved Games (a snapshot API allow synchronization of game data along with a cover-image and description), and Game Profile (providing experience points for players).
  • App Indexing API — Surface deep content in your native mobile applications on Google search and drive additional user engagement.
  • Google Cast — Use media tracks to enable closed-caption support for Chromecast.
  • Drive — Sort query results, create offline folders, and select any mime type in the file picker by default.
  • Wallet — Build a "Save to Wallet" button for offers directly into your app; use geo-fenced in-store notifications to prompt the user to show and scan digital cards. Split tender allows payment to be split between Wallet Balance and a credit/debit card in Google Wallet.
  • Analytics — Get insights into the full user journey and understand how different user acquisition campaigns are performing with Enhanced Ecommerce, letting you measure product impressions, product clicks, and more.
  • Mobile Ads — Use improved in-app purchase ads and integrations for the Play store in-app purchase API client.
  • Dynamic Security Provider — Offers an alternative to the platform's secure networking APIs that can be updated more frequently, for faster delivery of security patches.

We expect the rollout of Google Play services 5.0 to take several days, after which time you’ll be able to get started developing with these new APIs.

Join us at the Google I/O sessions

If you’d like to learn more, join us for sessions on Android development, material design, game development, and more. You’ll find the full session list on the Google I/O 2014 site, and you can filter the schedule to find livestreamed sessions of interest.

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Games at Google I/O ’14: Everyone’s Playing Games

By Greg Hartrell, Product Manager, Google Play games

With Google I/O ‘14 here, we see Android and Google Play as a huge opportunity for game developers: 3 in 4 Android users are playing games, and with over one billion active Android users around the world, games are reaching and delighting almost everyone.

At Google, we see a great future where mobile and cloud services bring games to all the screens in your life and connect you with others. Today we announced a number of games related launches and upcoming technologies across Google Play Games, the Android platform and its new form factors.

Google Play Games

At last year’s Google I/O, we announced Google Play Games -- Google’s online game platform, with services and user experiences designed to bring players together and take Android and mobile games to the next level.

Google Play Games has grown at tremendous speed, activating 100 million users in the past 6 months. It’s the fastest growing mobile game network, and with such an incredible response, we announced more awesome enhancements to Google Play Games today.

Game Profile

The Play Games app now gives players a Game Profile, where they earn points and vanity titles from unlocking achievements. Players can also compare their profile with friends. Developers can benefit from this meta-game by continuing to design great achievements that reward players for exploring all the content and depth of their game.

Quests and Saved Games

Two new game services will launch with the next update for Google Play Services on Android, and through the Play Games iOS SDK:

  • Quests is a service that enables developers to create online, time-based goals in their games without having to launch an update each time. Now developers can easily run weekend or daily challenges for their player community, and reward them in unique ways.
  • Saved Games is a service that stores a player’s game progress across many screens, along with a cover image, description and total time played. Players never have to play level 1 again by having their progress stored with Google, and cover images and descriptions are used in Play Games experiences to indicate where they left off and attract them to launch their favorite game again.

We have many great partners who have started integrating Quests and Saved Games, here are just a few current or upcoming games.

More tools for game developers

Other developer tools are now available for Play Games, including:

  • Play Games Statistics — Play Games adopters get easy effort game analytics through the Google Play Developer console today, including visualization of Player & Engagement statistics. What’s new is aggregated player demographic information for signed-in users, so you can understand the distribution of your player’s ages, genders and countries.
  • Play Games C++ SDK is updated with more cross-platform support for the new services and experiences we announced. Cocos2D-x, a popular game engine, is an early adopter of the Play Games C++ SDK bringing the power of Play Games to their developers.

Game enhancements for the Android Platform

With the announcement of the developer preview of the Android L-release, there are some new platform capabilities that will make Android an even more compelling platform for game development.

  • Support for OpenGL ES 3.1 in the L Developer Preview — Introducing powerful features like compute shaders, stencil textures, and texture gather, enables more interesting physics or pixel effects on mobile devices. Additional API and shading language improvements improve usability and reduce overhead.
  • Android Extension Pack (AEP) in the L Developer Preview — a new set of extensions to OpenGL ES that bring desktop class graphics to Android. Games will be able to take advantage of tessellation and geometry shaders, and use ASTC texture compression.

    We're pleased to be working with different GPU vendors to adopt AEP including Nvidia, ARM, Qualcomm, and Imagination Technologies.

  • Google Gamepad standards — We recently published a standard for gamepad input for OEMs and partners who create and enable these awesome input devices on Android. The standard makes this input mechanism compatible across Google platforms on Android, Chrome and Chromebooks. You can learn more here: Supporting Game Controllers.

Play Games on Android TV

And Google's game network is a part of the Android TV announcement — so think of Android on a TV, with a rich interface on a large screen, and fun games in your living room! Players will be able to earn achievements, climb leaderboards and play online with friends from an Android TV. This is only available through the developer preview, so game developers seeking a hardware development kit (the ADT-1) can make a request at http://developer.android.com/tv.

Updates rolling out soon

That’s a lot of games announcements! Our Play Games changes will roll out over the next few weeks with the update of Google Play Services and the Play Games App, and Android L-release changes are part of the announced developer preview. This gets us a big step closer to a world where Android and our cloud services enable games to reach all the screens in your life and connect you with others.

Greg Hartrell is the lead product manager for Google Play Games: Google's game platform that helps developers reach and unite millions of players. Before joining Google, he was VP of Product Development at Capcom/Beeline, and prior to that, led product development for 8 years at Microsoft for Xbox Live/360 and other consumer and enterprise product lines. In his spare time, he enjoys flying birds through plumbing structures, boss battles and pulling rare objects out of mystery boxes.

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Building Successful Global App Businesses

By: Purnima Kochikar, Director, Google Play Apps & Games

With over 1 billion active Android users, an increasing number of developers like you are building successful global businesses on Google Play. Since the last Google I/O, we’ve also paid out more than $5 billion to developers.

This week at Google I/O, we announced new ways to help you build a successful business. These solutions work together at scale to help you find more users, understand and engage them, and effectively convert your active users into buyers.

Build an engaging app

Last year, Google Play became an even better place to try new ideas. Since May 2013, Google Play offers Alpha and Beta Testing so that you can engage users early to get feedback on your new app. Feedback provided by users is private, allowing you to fix issues before publicly launching the app, and without impacting your public ratings and reviews. Over 80,000 apps on Google Play are actively using beta testing. You can also ensure new versions get a positive response by updating through staged rollouts.

Scale operations

As your app business grows, you dedicate more time to release management. Today we announced the Google Play Developer Publishing API to help you scale your release operations. The new API will let you upload APKs, manage your in-app products and localized store listings. You will be able to integrate publishing operations with your release processes and toolchain through a RESTful API. With the Google Play Developer Publishing API you’ll spend less time managing your releases and more time managing your business. This API is currently in closed beta and we look forward to making it available to all developers.

Actionable insights

The Google Play Developer Console now offers more actionable insights into your app’s performance by sending you email notifications for Alerts and providing Optimization Tips. We’re also offering new revenue metrics including number of buyers and average revenue per paying user. You’ll also be able to export user reviews for further analysis. Click on Announcements in the Developer Console for a list of new features.

For game developers, we recently launched enhanced Play Games statistics on the Google Play Developer Console. You get a daily dashboard that visualizes player and engagement statistics for signed in users, including daily active users, retention analysis, and achievement and leaderboard performance.

Enhance discovery and engagement

With AdWords, we're building a robust platform to help you promote your app and drive re-engagement. This week we are launching Installed App Category Targeting, a new way to promote your app to new users. It helps you reach potential customers across the AdMob network who have already installed apps from related categories on Google Play and other app stores. For example, an action-oriented game developer may wish to reach users who have previously installed apps from the category Action & Adventure Games.

Ads can also remind users about the apps they already have. Through Google mobile display and search ads deep linking, you can re-engage users who have already installed your Android app by taking them directly to specific pages in the app. Let’s say someone has the Hotel Tonight app installed on their phone. If they search Google for “hotels in San Francisco," they'll see an ad that will open Hotel Tonight app and take them directly to a list of San Francisco hotels.

This deep-linking is also available through search for all apps that implement app indexing. If a user with the Walmart Android app searches for “Chromecast where to buy”, they’ll go directly to the Chromecast page in the Walmart app. The new App Indexing API is now open to all Android developers, globally. Get started now.

New services for game developers

For game developers using Play Games, we announced a new Game Profile that is automatically customized based on the gameplay and achievements earned in those games. Since its launch last year, users have loved saving their game progress in the cloud. We’re now evolving this feature to Saved Games, where users can save up to 3 “bookmarks” of their progress in the Play Games app, complete with images and descriptions. Finally, we announced a new service called Quests — it you run online, time-based goals in your game; for example, players can collect bunch of in-game items on a specific day, and the quests services coordinates with your game to know who completed the goal. These APIs run events for your players, and reward them, without the need to update your game.

New monetization tools

Today, we announced that users who have set up Direct Carrier Billing on their smartphone can also make purchases on Google Play from their tablet, charging to the same mobile phone bill. In addition to our recent launch of payments through PayPal, these new user payment options expand monetization opportunities for your apps.

As announced earlier this year, Google Analytics is now directly available in the AdMob interface, giving you powerful segmentation tools to determine the best monetization strategy for each user. For example, you might want to display in-app purchase ads to users most interested in buying, while showing regular ads to those less likely to buy right now. Once you’ve segmented your audience in this way, you can use AdMob to build interstitial ads that promote in-app purchase items to users at a point in your app that’s useful to them. This creates a more customized experience for users, can help prolong engagement and grow in-app purchase revenue. Learn more.

Join us

If you're at Google I/O 2014, please join us at our breakout sessions today and tomorrow, where we'll be talking about these features in much more detail. (Add us to your calendar!) And if you can't make I/O, you can always join us on the livestream or watch the videos online later.

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Cast Away with Android TV and Google Cast

By Dave Burke and Majd Bakar, Engineering Directors and TV Junkies

Last summer, we launched Chromecast, a small, affordable device that lets you cast online video, music and anything from the web to your TV. Today at Google I/O, we announced Android TV, the newest form factor to the Android platform, and a way to extend the reach of Google Cast to more devices, like televisions, set-top boxes and consoles.

Check out Coming to a Screen Near You for some details on everything we’re doing to make your TV the place to be.

For developers though--sorry, you don’t get to unwind in front of the TV. We need you to get to work and help us create the best possible TV experience, with all of the new features announced at I/O today.

Get started with Android TV

In addition to Google Cast apps that send content to the TV, you can now build immersive native apps and console-style games on Android TV devices. These native apps work with TV remotes and gamepads, even if you don’t have your phone handy. The Android L Developer Preview SDK includes the new Leanback support library that allows you to design smoother, simpler, living room apps.

And this is just the beginning. In the fall, new APIs will allow you to cast directly to these apps, so users can control the app with the phone, the remote, or even their Android Wear watch. You’ll also start seeing Android TV set-top boxes, consoles and televisions from Sony, TP Vision, Sharp, Asus, Razer and more.

Help more users find your Google Cast app

We want to help users more easily find your content, so we’ve improved the Google Cast SDK developer console to let you upload your app icon, app name, and app category for Android, iOS and Chrome. These changes will help your app get discovered on chromecast.com/apps and on Google Play.

Additional capabilities have also been added to the Google Cast SDK. These include: Media Player Library enhancements, bringing easier integration with MPEG-DASH Smooth Streaming, and HLS. We’ve also added WebAudio & WebGL support, made the Cast Companion Library available, and added enhanced Closed Caption support. And coming soon, we will add support for queuing and ID delegation.

Ready to get started? Visit developer.android.com/tv and developers.google.com/cast for the SDKs, style guides, tutorials, sample code, and the API references. You can also request an ADT-1 devkit to bootstrap your Android TV development.

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