Tag Archives: latest

Price in-app products with confidence by running price experiments in Play Console

Posted by Phalene Gowling, Product Manager, Google Play

At this year’s Google I/O, our “Boost your revenue with Play Commerce” session highlights the newest monetization tools that are deeply integrated into Google Play, with a focus on helping you optimize your pricing strategy. Pricing your products or content correctly is foundational to driving better user lifetime value and can result in reaching new buyers, improving conversion, and encouraging repeat orders. It can be the difference between a successful sale and pricing yourself out of one, or even undervaluing your products and missing out on key sales opportunities.

To help you price with confidence, we’re excited to announce price experiments for in-app products in Play Console, allowing you to test price points and optimize for local purchasing power at scale. Price experiements will launch in the coming weeks - so read on to get the details on the new tool and learn how you can prepare to take full advantage when it's live.

  • A/B test to find optimal local pricing that’s sensitive to the purchasing power of buyers in different markets. Adjusting your price to local markets has already been an industry-wide practice amongst developers, and at launch you will be able to test and manage your global prices, all within Play Console. An optimized price helps reach both new and existing buyers who may have previously been priced out of monetized experiences in apps and games. Additionally, an optimized price can help increase repeat purchases by buyers of their favorite products.
    • Image of two mobile devices showing A/B price testing in Google Play Console
    Illustrative example only. A/B test price points with ease in Play Console 
  • Experiment with statistical confidence: price experiments enables you to track how close you are to statistical significance with confidence interval tracking, or for a quick summary, you can view the top of the analysis when enough data has been collected in the experiment to determine a statistically significant result. To help make your decision on whether to apply the ‘winning’ price easier, we’ve also included support for tracking key monetization metrics such as revenue uplift, revenue derived from new installers, buyer ratio, orders, and average revenue per paying user. This gives you a more detailed understanding of how buyers behave differently for each experiment arm per market. This can also inspire further refinements towards a robust global monetization strategy.
  • Improve return on investment in user acquisition. Having a localized price and a better understanding of buyer behavior in each market, allows you to optimize your user acquisition strategy having known how buyers will react to market-specific products or content. It could also inform which products you chose to feature on Google Play.

Set up price experiments in minutes in Play Console

Price experiments will be easy to run with the new dedicated section in Play Console under Monetize > Products > Price experiments. You’ll first need to determine the in-app products, markets, and the price points you’d like to test. The intuitive interface will also allow you to refine the experiment settings by audience, confidence level and sensitivity. And once your experiment has reached statistical significance, simply apply the winning price to your selected products within the tool to automatically populate your new default price point for your experiment markets and products. You also have the flexibility to stop any experiment before it reaches statistical significance if needed.

You’ll have full control of what and how you want to test, reducing any overhead of managing tests independently or with external tools – all without requiring any coding changes.

Learn how to run an effective experiment with Play Academy

Get Started

You can start preparing now by strategizing what type of price experiment you might want to run first. For a metric-driven source of inspiration, game developers can explore strategic guidance, which can identify country-specific opportunities for buyer conversion. Alternatively, start building expertise on running effective pricing experiments for in-app products by taking our new Play Academy course, in
preparation for price experiments rolling out in the coming weeks.



Build smarter Android apps with on-device Machine Learning

Posted by Thomas Ezan, Developer Relations

In the past year, the Android team made significant improvements to on-device machine learning to help developers create smarter apps with more features to process images, sound, and text. In the Google I/O talk Build smarter Android apps with on-device Machine Learning, David Miro-Llopis PM on ML Kit and Thomas Ezan Android Developer Relation Engineer review new Android APIs and solutions and showcase applications using on-device ML.

Running ML processes on-device enables low-latency, increases data-privacy, enables offline support and potentially reduces cloud bill. Applications such as Lens AR Translate or the document scanning feature available in Files in India, benefit from the advantages of on-device ML.

To deploy ML features on Android, developers have two options:

  • ML Kit: which offers production-ready ML solutions to common user flows, via easy-to-use APIs.
  • Android’s custom ML stack: which is built on top of Tensorflow Lite, and provides control over the inference process and the user experience.

ML Kit released new APIs and improved existing features

Over the last year, the ML Kit team worked on both improving existing APIs and launching new ones: face mesh and document scanner. ML Kit is launching a new document scanner API in Q3 2023, that will provide a consistent scanning experience across apps in Android. Developers will be able to use it only with a few lines of code, without needing camera permission and with low apk size impact (given that it will be distributed via Google Play Services. In a similar fashion, Google code scanner is now generally available and provides a consistent scanning experience across apps, without needing camera permission, via Google Play Services.

Image a series of three photos of two girls smiling to show how face mesh improves facial recognition

Additionally, ML Kit improved the performance of the following APIs: barcode detection (by 17%), text recognition, digital ink recognition, pose detection, translation, and smart reply. ML Kit also integrated some APIs to Google Play Services so you don’t have to bundle the models to your application. Many developers are using ML Kit to easily integrate machine learning into their apps; for example, WPS uses ML Kit to translate text in 43 languages and save $65M a year.


Acceleration Service in Android’s custom ML stack is now in public beta

To support custom machine learning, the Android ML team is actively developing Android’s custom ML stack. Last year, TensorFlow Lite and GPU delegates were added to the Google Play Services which lets developers use TensorFlow Lite without bundling it to their app and provides automatic updates. With improved inference performance, hardware acceleration can in turn also significantly improve the user experience of your ML-enabled Android app. This year, the team is also announcing Acceleration Service, a new API enabling developers to pick the optimal hardware acceleration configuration at runtime. It is now in public beta and developers can learn more and get started here.

To learn more, watch the video:

What’s new with Android for Cars: I/O 2023

Posted by Jennifer Tsau, Product Management Lead and David Dandeneau, Engineering Lead

For more than a decade, Google has been committed to bringing safe and seamless connected experiences to cars. We’re continuing to see strong momentum and adoption across Android for Cars. Android Auto is supported by nearly every major car maker, and will be in nearly 200 million cars by the end of this year. And the number of cars powered by Android Automotive OS with Google built-in — which includes top brands like Chevrolet, Volvo, Polestar, Honda, Renault and more — is expected to nearly double by the end of this year.

With cars becoming more connected and equipped with immersive displays, there’s more opportunities for developers to bring app experiences to cars. We’re excited to share updates and new ways for developers to reach more users in the car.


Apps designed for driving experiences

Helping drivers while on the road - whether they are navigating, listening to music, or checking the weather - is a top priority. We’re continuing to invest in tools and resources, including the Android for Cars App Library, to make it even easier for developers to build new apps or port existing Android apps over to cars.

New capabilities for navigation apps

Today, we announced Waze rolling out globally on the Google Play Store for all cars with Google built-in, expanding its availability beyond Android Auto. As a part of this launch, we created more templates in Android for Cars App Library to help speed up development time across a number of app categories, including navigation.

For navigation apps, it’s also now possible to integrate with the instrument cluster, providing turn-by-turn directions right in the driver's line of sight. And developers can also access car sensor data to surface helpful information like range, fuel level, and speed to provide more contextual assistance to drivers.

A car dashboard shows the Waze app open on the display panel
The Waze app is coming to all cars with Google built-in, including the first-ever Chevrolet Blazer EV launching this year.

Tools to easily port your media apps across Android for Cars

Media apps continue to be a top use case in the car, and it’s quicker than ever to bring your media apps to Android Auto and Android Automotive OS. Audible recently joined popular streaming audio apps like Deezer, Soundcloud, and Spotify to offer their apps across both Android Auto and cars with Google built-in. If you have a media app on mobile, port it over to reach new users in the car.

New app categories for driving experiences

The Android for Cars App Library now allows developers to bring new apps to cars including internet of things (IoT) and weather apps to cars. The IoT category is available for all developers, while weather is in an early access program. In the weather category, The Weather Channel app will join other weather apps like Weather & Radar later this year.

We’re also working with messaging apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Webex by Cisco to allow you to join meetings by audio from your car display in the coming months.

A car display shows a Zoom meeting schedule next to a route in Google Maps.
Coming soon, join meetings by audio from your car display.

Apps designed for parked and passenger experiences

With screens expanding in size and more being added for passengers, there is growing demand for parked and passenger experiences in cars.

Video, gaming, and browsing in cars

Now, video and gaming app categories are available in the car, with an early access program for browsing apps coming soon. YouTube is now available for car makers to offer in cars with Google built-in. And drivers of cars with Google built-in will soon have access to popular titles like Beach Buggy Racing 2, Solitaire FRVR, and My Talking Tom Friends from publishers like Vector Unit, FRVR and Outfit7 Limited. Developers can now port their large screen optimized apps to cars to take advantage of this opportunity.

A car display shows a YouTube video of an animated character singing.
YouTube is coming to cars with Google built-in, like the Polestar 2.

More screens in cars allows for new experiences between drivers and passengers, including individual and shared entertainment experiences. We're excited to announce multi-screen support is coming to Android Automotive OS 14 — stay tuned for more updates.

A car with a panoramic front display and screens in headrests showing apps and video content.
Support for multiple screens is coming to Android Automotive OS 14.

Start developing apps for cars today

To learn how to bring your apps to cars, check out the technical session, codelab and documentation on the Android for Cars developer site. With all the opportunities across car screens, there has never been a better time to bring your apps and experiences to cars. Thanks for all the contributions to the Android ecosystem. See you on the road!

Android Studio Flamingo is stable

Posted by Steven Jenkins, Product Manager, Android Studio

Today, we are thrilled to announce the stable release of Android Studio Flamingo🦩: The official IDE for building Android apps!

This release includes improvements to help you build pixel-perfect UI with Live Edit, new features that assist with inspecting your app, IntelliJ updates, and more. Read on or watch the video to learn more about how Android Studio Flamingo🦩 can help supercharge your productivity and download the latest stable version today!

  

UI Tools

Jetpack Compose and Material 3 templates – Jetpack Compose is now recommended for new projects so the templates use Jetpack Compose and Material 3 by default.

Live Edit (Compose) experimental – Iteratively build an app using Compose by pushing code changes directly to an attached device or emulator. Push changes on file save or automatically and watch your UI update in real time. Live Edit is experimental and can be enabled in the Editor Settings. There are known limitations. Please send us your feedback so that we can continue to improve it. Learn more.

Moving image illustrating a live edit
Live edit

Themed app icon Preview support – You can now use the System UI Mode selector on the toolbar to switch wallpapers and see how your themed app icons react to the chosen wallpaper. (Note: required in apps targeting API level 33 and higher.)

Moving image illustrating preview of themed app icons across different wallpapers
Previewing Themed app icons across different wallpapers
Dynamic color Preview

Enable dynamic color in your app and use the new wallpaper attribute in an @Preview composable to switch wallpapers and see how your UI reacts to different wallpapers. (Note: you must use Compose 1.4.0 or higher.)

Moving image illustrating dynamic color wallpaper in Compose Preview
Compose Preview: dynamic color wallpaper

Build

Build Analyzer task categorization – Build Analyzer now groups tasks by categories such as Manifest, Android Resources, Kotlin, Dexing and more. Categories are sorted by duration and can be expanded to display a list of the corresponding tasks for further analysis. This makes it easy to know which categories have the most impact on build time.

Image of Build Analyzer Task Categorization
Build Analyzer Task Categorization

One-click automated profileable build and run – When you are profiling your app, you want to avoid profiling a debuggable build. These are great during development, but the results can be skewed. Instead, you should profile a non-debuggable build because that is what your users will be running. This is now more convenient with one-click automated profileable build and run. Easily configure a profileable app and profile it with one click. You can still choose to profile your debuggable build by selecting Profile app with complete data. Read more on the blog.

Image illustrating One-click Automated Profileable Build and Run
One-click Automated Profileable Build and Run

Lint support for SDK extensions – SDK extensions leverage modular system components to add APIs to the public SDK for previously released API levels. Now, you can scan for and fix SDK extension issues with lint support. Android Studio automatically generates the correct version checks for APIs that are launched using SDK extensions.

Image showing Lint Support for SDK Extensions
Lint Support for SDK Extensions

Android Gradle Plugin 8.0.0 – Android Studio Flamingo ships with a new, major version of the Android Gradle plugin. The plugin brings many improvements, but also introduces a number of behavior changes and the Transform API removal. Please make sure to read about the required changes before you upgrade the AGP version in your projects.

Inspect

Updates to App Quality Insights – Discover, investigate, and reproduce issues reported by Crashlytics with App Quality Insights. You can filter by app version, Crashlytics signals, device type, or operating system version. In the latest update you can now close issues or add useful annotations in the Notes pane.

Image showing how you can annotate and close issues inside the notes pane
Annotate and close issues inside the notes pane

Network Inspector traffic interception – Network Inspector now shows all traffic data for the full timeline by default. Create and manage rules that help test how your app behaves when encountering different responses such as status codes, and response headers and bodies. The rules determine what responses to intercept and how to modify these responses before they reach the app. You can choose which rule to enable or disable by checking the Active box next to each rule. Rules are automatically saved every time you modify them.

Image showing Network Inspector Traffic Interception
Network Inspector Traffic Interception

Auto-connect to foreground process in Layout Inspector – Layout Inspector now automatically connects to the foreground process. You no longer have to click to attach it to your app.

IntelliJ

IntelliJ Platform Update – Android Studio Flamingo (2022.2.1) includes the IntelliJ 2022.2 platform release, which comes with IDE performance improvements, enhanced rendering performance on macOS thanks to the Metal API and more. It also improves the IDE performance when using Kotlin, which positively impacts code highlighting, completion, and find usages. Read the IntelliJ release notes here.

Summary

To recap, Android Studio Flamingo (2022.2.1) includes these new enhancements and features:

UI Tools
  • Live Edit (Compose) - Experimental
  • Themed app icon Preview support
  • Dynamic color Preview
  • Jetpack Compose and Material 3 Templates

Build
  • Build Analyzer Task Categorization
  • One-click Automated Profileable Build and Run
  • Lint Support for SDK Extensions
  • Breaking changes in Android Gradle Plugin 8.0

Inspect
  • Updates to App Quality Insights
  • Network Inspector Traffic Interception
  • Auto-connect to foreground process in Layout Inspector

IntelliJ
  •  IntelliJ Platform 2022.2 Update

Check out the Android Studio release notes, Android Gradle plugin release notes, and the Android Emulator release notes for more details.

Download Studio Today!

Now is the time to download Android Studio Flamingo (2022.2.1) to incorporate the new features into your workflow. As always, we appreciate any feedback on things you like and issues or features you would like to see. If you find a bug or issue, please file an issue and also check out known issues. Remember to also follow us on Twitter, Medium, or YouTube for more Android development updates!

Android 14 Beta 1

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering

Illustration of badge style Android 14 logo

Today we're releasing the first Beta of Android 14, building around our core themes of privacy, security, performance, developer productivity, and user customization while continuing to improve the large-screen device experience on tablets, foldables, and more. We've been making steady progress refining the features and stability of Android 14, and it's time to open the experience up to both developers and early-adopters.

Android delivers enhancements and new features year-round, and your feedback on the Android beta program plays a key role in helping Android continuously improve. The Android 14 developer site has lots more information about the beta, including downloads for Pixel and the release timeline. We’re looking forward to hearing what you think, and thank you in advance for your continued help in making Android a platform that works for everyone.


Working across form factors

Android 14 builds on the work done in past releases to support tablets and foldable form factors, and we've been building tools and resources to help polish your app experience, including design inspiration and development guides.


Smarter System UI

In the Android operating system, features are implemented by two separate yet equally important packages: the framework, which provides services, and the System UI, which gives the user control of those services. Each Android release brings new refinements to the system UI, and here are some that you might notice in Beta 1.


New back arrow

Image showing the back arrow indicating gesture navigation on a mobile device

The gesture navigation experience includes a more prominent back arrow while interacting with your app to help improve back gesture understanding and usefulness. The back arrow also compliments the user's wallpaper or device theme.



A superior system sharesheet

Screen image of custom sharesheet with direct share targets


In Android 14, apps can now add custom actions to system sharesheets they invoke. Create your custom ChooserAction using ChooserAction.Builder and specify a list of your ChooserActions as the Intent.EXTRA_CHOOSER_CUSTOM_ACTIONS of the Intent created with Intent.createChooser.

In addition, the system now uses more app signals to determine the ranking of the direct share targets. You provide the signal by calling pushDynamicShortcut to report shortcut usage with the corresponding capability bindings.






More graphics capabilities

Android 14 adds new graphics features that you can use to make your app really stand out.


Paths are now queryable and interpolatable

Android's Path API is a powerful and flexible mechanism for creating and rendering vector graphics. Starting in Android 14, you can query paths to find out what's inside of them. The API updates include functionality to interpolate between paths whose structures match exactly, enabling morphing effects, and an AndroidX library provides backwards compatibility back to API 21. More details here.


Personalization

 Per-app language preferences

Android 14 enhances per-app language preferences, allowing for dynamic customization of the set of languages displayed in the Android Settings per-app language list, and giving IMEs a way to know the UI language of the current app. Starting with Android Studio Giraffe Canary 7 and AGP 8.1.0-alpha07, you can configure your app to support per-app language preferences automatically. Based on your project resources, the Android Gradle plugin generates the LocaleConfig file and adds a reference to it in the generated manifest file, so you no longer have to create or update the file manually when your language support changes. See Automatic per-app language support for more information and leave feedback.


Privacy

 Limiting visibility to disability-focused accessibility services

Android 14 introduces the accessibilityDataSensitive attribute to allow apps to limit visibility of specified views only to accessibility services that claim to help users with disabilities. Play Protect ensures apps downloaded from the Play Store are truthful about these claims. TalkBack and other services that claim to help users with disabilities will not be affected by this attribute.

Apps can consider using accessibilityDataSensitive to:

  • Protect user data (such as personal details or plaintext passwords) 
  • Prevent critical actions from being executed unintentionally (such as transfering money or checking out in a shopping app)
    •  

App compatibility

If you haven't yet tested your app for compatibility with Android 14, now is the time to do it! With Android 14 now in beta, we're opening up access to early-adopter users as well as developers. In the weeks ahead, you can expect more users to be trying your app on Android 14 and raising issues they find.

To test for compatibility, install your published app on a device or emulator running Android 14 Beta and work through all of the app’s flows. Review the behavior changes to focus your testing. After you’ve resolved any issues, publish an update as soon as possible.

Image of Android 14 preview and release timeline indicating we are on target with Beta release in April

It’s also a good time to start getting ready for your app to target Android 14, by testing with the app compatibility changes toggles in Developer Options.

Partial screenshot of App Compatibility Changes in Developer Options
App compatibility toggles in Developer Options.

Get started with Android 14

Today's Beta release has everything you need to try the Android 14 features, test your apps, and give us feedback. For testing your app with tablets and foldables, the easiest way to get started is using the Android Emulator in a tablet or foldable configuration in the latest preview of the Android Studio SDK Manager. Now that we've entered the beta phase, you can enroll any supported Pixel device here to get this and future Android 14 Beta and feature drop Beta updates over-the-air. If you don’t have a Pixel device, you can use the 64-bit system images with the Android Emulator in Android Studio.

For the best development experience with Android 14, we recommend that you use the latest preview of Android Studio Giraffe (or more recent Giraffe+ versions). Once you’re set up, here are some of the things you should do:

  • Try the new features and APIs - your feedback is critical as we finalize the APIs. Report issues in our tracker on the feedback page. 
  • Test your current app for compatibility - learn whether your app is affected by default behavior changes in Android 14. Install your app onto a device or emulator running Android 14 and extensively test it. 
  • Test your app with opt-in changes - Android 14 has opt-in behavior changes that only affect your app when it’s targeting the new platform. It’s important to understand and assess these changes early. To make it easier to test, you can toggle the changes on and off individually.

We’ll update the preview and beta system images and SDK regularly throughout the Android 14 release cycle.

If you are already enrolled in the Android 13 QPR Beta program and your device is supported, Android 14 Beta 1 will be made available to you without taking any additional action.

For complete information on how to get the Beta, visit the Android 14 developer site.

Giving Users More Transparency and Control Over Account Data

Posted by Bethel Otuteye, Senior Director, Product Management, Android App Safety

Google Play has launched a number of recent initiatives to help developers build consumer trust by showcasing their apps' privacy and security practices in a way that is simple and easy to understand. Today, we’re building on this work with a new data deletion policy that aims to empower users with greater clarity and control over their in-app data.

For apps that enable app account creation, developers will soon need to provide an option to initiate account and data deletion from within the app and online. This web requirement, which you will link in your Data safety form, is especially important so that a user can request account and data deletion without having to reinstall an app.

While Play’s Data safety section already lets developers highlight their data deletion options, we know that users want an easier and more consistent way to request them. By creating a more intuitive experience with this policy, we hope to better educate our shared users on the data controls available to them and create greater trust in your apps and in Google Play more broadly.

As the new policy states, when you fulfill a request to delete an account, you must also delete the data associated with that account. The feature also gives developers a way to provide more choice: users who may not want to delete their account entirely can choose to delete other data only where applicable (such as activity history, images, or videos). For developers that need to retain certain data for legitimate reasons such as security, fraud prevention, or regulatory compliance, you must clearly disclose those data retention practices.

Moving image of a accessing account deletion from a mobile device.
Note: Images are examples and subject to change

While we’re excited about the greater control this will give people over their data, we understand it will take time for developers to prepare, especially those without an existing deletion functionality or web presence, which is why we’re sharing information and resources today.

As a first step, we’re asking developers to submit answers to new Data deletion questions in your app’s Data Safety form by December 7. Early next year, Google Play users will begin to see reflected changes in your app’s store listing, including the refreshed data deletion badge in the Data safety section and the new Data deletion area.

Developers who need more time can file for an extension in Play Console until May 31, 2024 to comply with the new policy.

For more information on data deletion and other policy changes announced today:

As always, thank you for your continued partnership in making Google Play a safe and trustworthy platform for everyone.

Mercari reduces 355K lines of code, a 69% difference, by rebuilding with Jetpack Compose

Posted by the Android team

In 2020, the Mercari team took on a big initiative to update its app’s technical infrastructure. At the time, its codebase was seven years old and hadn’t undergone any major architectural updates. This affected the team’s ability to develop new features and release timely app updates. To resolve this technical debt, Mercari launched what it called the GroundUP initiative—a complete rewrite of its application across platforms, including Android.

The goal was to create a completely modernized application with a scalable design. While retooling the app, Mercari developers turned to Jetpack Compose, Android’s modern declarative toolkit for creating native UI. During the evaluation, the team learned rewriting in Jetpack Compose would help clean up their codebase and have more control over how the app looks.

A rewrite with less code

The Mercari team completely rewrote the architecture and tech stack for its Android app using Jetpack Compose. Mercari developers created a new design system and completely integrated it using Compose, enabling them to easily test and implement new features. Using this new design system, the Mercari team rewrote more than 130 UI screens for its marketplace and modernized the look and feel of many of their components.

With the help of the Jetpack Libraries, Mercari’s team eliminated all legacy code during the rewrite, drastically reducing its codebase and making it more manageable for developers. “Virtually, it’s the same app with way less code,” said Allan Conda, Android technology lead at Mercari. “The rewritten app has about 355,000 fewer lines of code, which is about 69% less than what it had before.”

Moving image showing lines of code that appear and disappear on the leftmost panel of the screen. The spacing between the boxes in the center panel changes, and the overall app view reflects these changes in the rightmost panel.

Interoperability with Views as an early adopter

When the Mercari team first began its GroundUP initiative, Jetpack Compose was only available in developer preview. They wanted the app written completely in Jetpack Compose due to its new declarative approach to creating UI. However, because it was still so new, they found themselves having to solve for unique edge cases using both toolkits.

For example, on Mercari’s listing form screens, users are prompted to input details about the merchandise they want to list. Users were then supposed to be able to select photos from their device gallery and rearrange them on this screen using a drag gesture. Gesture APIs weren’t available in Jetpack Compose at the time, so the team took advantage of Compose's AndroidView to seamlessly integrate Views that handled gestures on the listing form screen. This provided a stable yet temporary solution to implementing drag gestures until the feature became available with Jetpack Compose.

The Mercari team was impressed by how easy it was to switch between the two toolkits, and having the option to use Views alongside Compose gave them better control of edge cases like this. Compose now supports gesture APIs, and Mercari developers have since completely written and integrated the drag gesture component solely using Compose.

Jetpack Compose has matured a lot since Mercari’s initial adoption, and most Android developers no longer need to worry about having to interoperate with both toolkits as Android apps can now be written completely in Compose.

Improving and monitoring performance with Compose

Using Compose, the Mercari team automated baseline profile generation for every stable release of the app and found it to be really helpful. The home screen renders frames up to 2x faster with the default Compose baseline profile compared to without a baseline profile. By providing a custom profile, there’s an additional improvement of up to 20% faster when Mercari users are scrolling compared to just having the default baseline profile.

The team also wrote automated performance tests based on the app’s core scenarios with Android Macrobenchmark. “Using Android Macrobenchmark, we can automatically test start-up, scroll, and screen load times performance,” said Allan. “Currently, we have six core scenarios covered by these tests, like search results and browsing items.”

Additionally, Mercari developers integrated Firebase Performance Monitoring, a real-time app performance monitoring tool, with custom code to calculate scrolling performance on Compose screens. With Firebase Performance Monitoring, the Mercari team detected a performance issue on its search result screen. Using the Android Profiler to pinpoint the problem, Mercari developers discovered there were poor frame rates when scrolling search results. This resulted in the slow rendering instances being reduced by around 23.6%.

The Mercari team solved this frame rate issue with guidance from Google’s Compose performance best practices and Compose stability. Mercari developers had the app skip its Composables and hoist the unused states on the search results screen, significantly improving the frame rates.

Headshot of Allan Conda, Android Tech Lead at Mercari, similing, with quote text reads 'Jetpack Compose helped us implement our Design System and rewrite 130+ screens and many of our components'

More opportunities with Jetpack Compose

With less code to maintain, it’s much easier for Mercari developers to test and implement features. “We have a ton of experiments we can finally conduct using our refreshed platforms. Our users can expect new features coming to the Mercari app at a faster rate,” said Allan.

Mercari’s developers are excited to further develop the app using Animation APIs. With Compose, it’s much easier to animate components, which can result in huge improvements for Android UXs.

Get started

Optimize your UI development with Jetpack Compose.

Concepts users spend 70% more time using the app on tablets than on phones

Posted by the Android team

Concepts is a digital illustration app created by TopHatch that helps creative thinkers bring their visions to life. The app uses an infinitely-large canvas format, so its users can sketch, plan, and edit all of their big ideas without limitation, while its vector-based ink provides the precision needed to refine and reorganize their ideas as they go.

For Concepts, having more on-screen real estate means more comfort, more creative space, and a better user experience overall. That’s why the app was specifically designed with large screens in mind. Concepts’ designers and engineers are always exploring new ways to expand the app’s large screen capabilities on Android. Thanks to Android’s suite of developer tools and resources, that’s easier than ever.

Evaluating an expanding market of devices

Large screens are the fastest growing segment of Android users, with more than 270 million users on tablets, foldables, and ChromeOS devices. It’s no surprise then that Concepts, an app that benefits users by providing them with more screen space, was attracted to the format. The Concepts team was also excited about innovation with foldables because having the large screen experience with greater portability gives users more opportunities to use the app in the ways that are best for them.

The team at Concepts spends a lot of time evaluating new large screen technologies and experiences, trying to find what hardware or software features might benefit the app the most. The team imagines and storyboards several scenarios, shares the best ones with a close-knit beta group, and quickly builds prototypes to determine whether these updates improve the UX for its larger user base.

For instance, Concepts’ designers recently tested the Samsung Galaxy Fold and found that users benefited from having more screen space when the device was folded. With help from the Jetpack WindowManager library, Concepts’ developers implemented a feature to automatically collapse the UI when the Galaxy’s large screen was folded, allowing for more on-screen space than if the UI were expanded.

Foldable UI

Concepts’ first release for Android was optimized for ChromeOS and, because of this, supporting resizable windows was important to their user experience from the very beginning. Initially, they needed to use a physical device to test for various screen sizes. Now, the Concepts team can use Android’s resizeable emulator, which makes testing for different screen sizes much easier.

Android’s APIs and toolkit carry the workload

The developers’ goal with Concepts is to make the illustration experience feel as natural as putting pen to paper. For the Concepts team, this meant achieving as close to zero lag as possible between the stylus tip and the lines drawn on the Concepts canvas.

When Concepts’ engineers first created the app, they put a lot of effort into creating low-latency drawing themselves. Now, Android’s graphical APIs eliminate the complexity of creating efficient inking.

“The hardware to support low-latency inking with higher refresh rate screens and more accurate stylus data keeps getting better,” said David Brittain, co-founder and CEO of TopHatch, parent company of Concepts. “Android’s mature set of APIs make it easy.”

Concepts engineers also found that the core Android View APIs take care of most of the workload for supporting tablets and foldables and make heavy use of custom Views and ViewGroups in Concepts. The app’s color wheel, for example, is a custom View drawing to a Canvas, which uses Animators for the reveal animation. View, Canvas, and Animator are all classes from the Android SDK.

“Android’s tools and platform are making it easier to address the variety of screen sizes and input methods, with well-structured APIs for developing and increasing the number of choices for testing. Plus, Kotlin allows us to create concise, readable code,” said David.


Concepts’ users prefer large screens

Tablets and foldables represent the bulk of Concepts’ investments and user base, and the company doesn’t see that changing any time soon. Currently, tablets deliver 50% higher revenue per user than smartphone users. Tablets also account for eight of the top 10 most frequently used devices among Concepts’ users, with the other two being ChromeOS devices.

Additionally, Concepts’ monthly users spend 70% more time engaging with the app on tablets than on traditional smartphones. The application’s rating is also 0.3 stars higher on tablets.

“We’re looking forward to future improvements in platform usability and customization while increasing experimentation with portable form factors. Continued efforts in this area will ensure high user adoption well into the future,” said David.

Start developing for large screens today

Learn how you can reach a growing audience of users by increasing development for large screens and foldables today.

What’s new in the Jetpack Compose March ’23 release

Posted by Jolanda Verhoef, Android Developer Relations Engineer

Today, as part of the Compose March ‘23 Bill of Materials, we’re releasing version 1.4 of Jetpack Compose, Android's modern, native UI toolkit that is used by apps such as Booking.com, Pinterest, and Airbnb. This release contains new features like Pager and Flow Layouts, and new ways to style your text, such as hyphenation and line-break behavior. It also improves the performance of modifiers and fixes a number of bugs.

Swipe through content with the new Pager composable

Compose now includes out-of-the-box support for vertical and horizontal paging between different content. Using VerticalPager or HorizontalPager enables similar functionality to the ViewPager in the view system. However, just like the benefits of using LazyRow and LazyColumn, you no longer need to create an adapter or fragments! You can simply embed a composable inside the Pager:

// Display 10 items HorizontalPager(pageCount = 10) { page -> // Your specific page content, as a composable: Text( text = "Page: $page", modifier = Modifier.fillMaxWidth() ) }

ALT TEXT

These composables replace the implementation in the Accompanist library. If you already use the Accompanist implementation, check out the migration guide. See the Pager documentation for more information.

Get your content flowing with the new Flow Layouts

FlowRow and FlowColumn provide an efficient and compact way to lay out items in a container when the size of the items or the container are unknown or dynamic. These containers allow the items to flow to the next row in the FlowRow or next column in the FlowColumn when they run out of space. These flow layouts also allow for dynamic sizing using weights to distribute the items across the container.

Here’s an example that implements a list of filters for a real estate app:

ALT TEXT

@Composable fun Filters() { val filters = listOf( "Washer/Dryer", "Ramp access", "Garden", "Cats OK", "Dogs OK", "Smoke-free" ) FlowRow( horizontalArrangement = Arrangement.spacedBy(8.dp) ) { filters.forEach { title -> var selected by remember { mutableStateOf(false) } val leadingIcon: @Composable () -> Unit = { Icon(Icons.Default.Check, null) } FilterChip( selected, onClick = { selected = !selected }, label = { Text(title) }, leadingIcon = if (selected) leadingIcon else null ) } } }

Performance improvements in Modifiers

The major internal Modifier refactor we started in the October release has continued, with the migration of multiple foundational modifiers to the new Modifier.Node architecture. This includes graphicsLayer, lower level focus modifiers, padding, offset, and more. This refactoring should bring performance improvements to these APIs, and you don't have to change your code to receive these benefits. Work on this continues, and we expect even more gains in future releases as we migrate Modifiers outside of the ui module. Learn more about the rationale behind the changes in the ADS talk Compose Modifiers deep dive.

Increased flexibility of Text and TextField

Along with various performance improvements, API stabilizations, and bug fixes, the compose-text 1.4 release brings support for the latest emoji version, including backwards compatibility with older Android versions 🎉🙌. Supporting this requires no changes to your application. If you’re using a custom emoji solution, make sure to check out PlatformTextStyle(emojiSupportMatch).

In addition, we’ve addressed one of the main pain points of using TextField. In some scenarios, a text field inside a scrollable Column or LazyColumn would be obscured by the on-screen keyboard after being focused. We re-worked core parts of scroll and focus logic, and added key APIs like PinnableContainer to fix this bug.

Finally, we added a lot of new customization options to Text and its TextStyle:

  • Draw outlined text using TextStyle.drawStyle.
  • Improve text transition and legibility during animations using TextStyle.textMotion.
  • Configure line breaking behavior using TextStyle.lineBreak. Use built-in semantic configurations like Heading, Paragraph, or Simple, or construct your own LineBreak configuration with the desired Strategy, Strictness, and WordBreak values.
  • Add hyphenation support using TextStyle.hyphens.
  • Define a minimum number of visible lines using the minLines parameter of the Text and TextField composables.
  • Make your text move by applying the basicMarquee modifier. As a bonus, because this is a Modifier, you can apply it to any arbitrary composable to make it move in a similar marquee-like fashion!
    • ALT TEXT
    Marquee text using outline with shapes stamped on it using the drawStyle API.

Improvements and fixes for core features

In response to developer feedback, we have shipped some particularly in-demand features & bug fixes in our core libraries:
  • Test waitUntil now accepts a matcher! You can use this API to easily synchronize your test with your UI, with specific conditions that you define.
  • animatedContent now correctly supports getting interrupted and returning to its previous state.
  • Accessibility services focus order has been improved: the sequence is now more logical in common situations, such as with top/bottom bars.
  • AndroidView is now reusable in LazyList if you provide an optional onReset lambda. This improvement lets you use complex non-Compose-based Views inside LazyLists.
  • Color.lerp performance has been improved and now does zero allocations: since this method is called at high frequency during fade animations, this should reduce the amount of garbage collection pauses, especially on older Android versions.
  • Many other minor APIs and bug fixes as part of a general cleanup. For more information, see the release notes.

Get started!

We’re grateful for all of the bug reports and feature requests submitted to our issue tracker - they help us to improve Compose and build the APIs you need. Continue providing your feedback, and help us make Compose better!

Wondering what’s next? Check out our updated roadmap to see the features we’re currently thinking about and working on. We can’t wait to see what you build next!

Happy composing!

Android 14 Developer Preview 2

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering

Today, we're releasing the second Developer Preview of Android 14, building on the work of the first developer preview of Android 14 from last month with additional enhancements to privacy, security, performance, developer productivity, and user customization while continuing to refine the large-screen device experience on tablets, foldables, and more.

Android delivers enhancements and new features year-round, and your feedback on the Android 14 developer preview and Quarterly Platform Release (QPR) beta program plays a key role in helping Android continuously improve. The Android 14 developer site has lots more information about the preview, including downloads for Pixel and the release timeline. We’re looking forward to hearing what you think, and thank you in advance for your continued help in making Android a platform that works for everyone.

Working across form factors

Android 14 builds on the work done in Android 12L and 13 to support tablets and foldable form factors. See get started with building for large screens and learn about foldables for a quick jumpstart on how to get your apps ready. Our app quality guidance for large screens contains detailed checklists to review your app. We've also recently released libraries supporting low latency stylus and motion prediction.

The large screen gallery contains design inspiration for social and communications, media, productivity, shopping, and reading app experiences.

Privacy and security

Privacy and security have always been a core part of Android's mission, built on the foundation of app sandboxing, open source code, and open app development. In Android 14, we’re building the highest quality platform for all by providing a safer device environment and giving users more controls to protect their information.

Selected photos access

We recommend that you use the Photo Picker if your app needs to access media that the user selects; it provides a permissionless experience on devices running Android 4.4 onwards, using a combination of core platform features, Google Play system updates, and Google Play services.

If you cannot use Photo Picker, when your app requests any of the visual media permissions (READ_MEDIA_IMAGES / READ_MEDIA_VIDEO) introduced in SDK 33, Android 14 users can now grant your app access to only selected photos and videos.

In the new dialog, the permission choices will be:

  • Allow access to all photos: the full library of all on-device photos & videos is available
  • Select photos: only the user's selection of photos & videos will be temporarily available via MediaStore
  • Don’t allow: access to all photos and videos is denied

Apps can prompt users to select media again by requesting the media permissions again and having the READ_MEDIA_VISUAL_USER_SELECTED permission declared in their app manifest.

Please test this new behavior with your apps and adapt your UX to handle the new permission and the media file reselection flow.

Credential manager

Android 14 adds Credential Manager as a platform API, and we're supporting it back to Android 4.4 (API level 19) devices through a Jetpack Library with a Google Play services implementation. It aims to make sign-in easier for users with APIs that retrieve and store credentials with user-configured credential providers. In addition to supporting passwords, the API allows your app to sign-in using passkeys, the new industry standard for passwordless sign-in. Passkeys are built on industry standards, can work across different operating systems and browser ecosystems, and can be used with both websites and apps. Developer Preview 2 features improvements in the UI styling for the account selector, along with changes to the API based upon feedback from Developer Preview 1. Learn more here.

Safer implicit intents

For apps targeting Android 14, creating a mutable pending intent with an implicit intent will throw an exception, preventing them from being able to be used to trigger unexpected code paths. Apps need to either make the pending intent immutable or make the intent explicit. Learn more here.

Background activity launching

Android 10 (API level 29) and higher place restrictions on when apps can start activities when the app is running in the background. These restrictions help minimize interruptions for the user and keep them more in control of what's shown on their screen. To further reduce instances of unexpected interruptions, Android 14 gives foreground apps more control over the ability of apps they interact with to start activities. Specifically, apps targeting Android 14 need to grant privileges to start activities in the background when sending a PendingIntent or when binding a Service.

Streamlining background work

Android 14 continues our effort to optimize the way apps work together, improve system health and battery life, and polish the end-user experience.

Background optimizations

Developer Preview 2 includes optimizations to Android’s memory management system to improve resource usage while applications are running in the background. Several seconds after an app goes into the cached state, background work is disallowed outside of conventional Android app lifecycle APIs such as foreground services, JobScheduler, or WorkManager. Background work is disallowed an order of magnitude faster than on Android 13.

Fewer non-dismissible notifications

Notifications on Android 14 containing FLAG_ONGOING_EVENT will be user dismissible on unlocked handheld devices. Notifications will stay non-dismissible when the device is locked, and notification listeners will not be able to dismiss these notifications. Notifications that are important to device functionality, like system and device policy notifications, will remain fully non-dismissible.

Improved App Store Experiences

Android 14 introduces several new PackageInstaller APIs which allow app stores to improve their user experience, including the requestUserPreapproval() method that allows the download of APKs to be deferred until after the installation has been approved, the setRequestUpdateOwnership() method that allows an installer to indicate that it is responsible for future updates to an app it is installing, and the setDontKillApp() method that can seamlessly install optional features of an app through split APKs while the app is in use. Also, the InstallConstraints API gives installers a way to ensure that app updates happen at an opportune moment, such as when an app is no longer in use.

If you develop an app store, please give these APIs a try and let us know what you think!

Personalization

Regional Preferences

Regional preferences enable users to personalize temperature units, the first day of the week, and numbering systems. A European living in the United States might prefer temperature units to be in Celsius rather than Fahrenheit and for apps to treat Monday as the beginning of the week instead of the US default of Sunday.

New Android Settings menus for these preferences provide users with a discoverable and centralized location to change app preferences. These preferences also persist through backup and restore. Several APIs and intents grant you read access to user preferences for adjusting app information display (getTemperatureUnit, getFirstDayOfWeek). You can also register a BroadcastReceiver on ACTION_LOCALE_CHANGED to handle locale configuration changes when regional preferences change.

App compatibility

We’re working to make updates faster and smoother with each platform release by prioritizing app compatibility. In Android 14 we’ve made most app-facing changes opt-in to give you more time to make any necessary app changes, and we’ve updated our tools and processes to help you get ready sooner.

Developer Preview 2 is in the period where we're looking for input on our APIs, along with details on how platform changes affect your apps, so now is the time to try new features and give us your feedback.

It’s also a good time to start your compatibility testing and identify any work you’ll need to do. You can test some of them without changing your app's targetSdkVersion using the behavior change toggles in Developer Options. This will help you get a preliminary idea of how your app might be affected by opt-in changes in Android 14.

Image of a partial screen shot of a device showing App compatibility toggles in Developer Options
App compatibility toggles in Developer Options.

Platform Stability is when we’ll deliver final SDK/NDK APIs and app-facing system behaviors. We’re expecting to reach Platform Stability in June 2023, and from that time you’ll have several weeks before the official release to do your final testing. The release timeline details are here.

Get started with Android 14

The Developer Preview has everything you need to try the Android 14 features, test your apps, and give us feedback. For testing your app with tablets and foldables, the easiest way to get started is using the Android Emulator in a tablet or foldable configuration in the latest preview of the Android Studio SDK Manager. For phones, you can get started today by flashing a system image onto a Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 7, Pixel 6a, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6, Pixel 5a 5G, Pixel 5, or Pixel 4a (5G) device. If you don’t have a Pixel device, you can use the 64-bit system images with the Android Emulator in Android Studio.

For the best development experience with Android 14, we recommend that you use the latest preview of Android Studio Giraffe (or more recent Giraffe+ versions). Once you’re set up, here are some of the things you should do:

  • Try the new features and APIs - your feedback is critical during the early part of the developer preview. Report issues in our tracker on the feedback page.
  • Test your current app for compatibility - learn whether your app is affected by default behavior changes in Android 14; install your app onto a device or emulator running Android 14 and extensively test it.
  • Test your app with opt-in changes - Android 14 has opt-in behavior changes that only affect your app when it’s targeting the new platform. It’s important to understand and assess these changes early. To make it easier to test, you can toggle the changes on and off individually.

We’ll update the preview system images and SDK regularly throughout the Android 14 release cycle. This preview release is for developers only and not intended for daily or consumer use, so it will only available by manual download for new Android 14 developer preview users. Once you’ve manually installed a preview build, you’ll automatically get future updates over-the-air for all later previews and Betas. Read more here.

If you intend to move from the Android 13 QPR Beta program to the Android 14 Developer Preview program and don't want to have to wipe your device, we recommend that you move to Developer Preview 2 now. Otherwise, you may run into time periods where the Android 13 Beta will have a more recent build date which will prevent you from going directly to the Android 14 Developer Preview without doing a data wipe.

As we reach our Beta releases, we'll be inviting consumers to try Android 14 as well, and we'll open up enrollment for the Android 14 Beta program at that time. For now, please note that the Android Beta program is not yet available for Android 14.

For complete information, visit the Android 14 developer site.

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