Posted by Peter Lubbers, Head of Google Developer Training
Grow with Google in partnership with Udacity, is awarding 5,000 Nanodegree program scholarships to help aspiring developers in the US continue their digital skills training and prepare for jobs as Android or Mobile Web developers.
As part of the Grow with Google Developer Scholarship program, scholars completed an initial challenge course at Udacity - completing on average over 100 hours of coursework, building coding project portfolios and engaging with their local developer community. Today, Google and Udacity are excited to recognize the 5,000 top performers in the challenge course, and offer them a chance to continue their training through a Nanodegreeprogram with a full scholarship.
By successfully completing a Nanodegree program, scholars earn an industry-recognized credential helping to create a path for increased job opportunities as well as prepare for one of Google's Developer Certifications: Associate Android Developer or Mobile Web Specialist. These developer training programs offer scholars the opportunity to build their skills and become job-ready, helping to close the gap in the more than 500,000 open computing jobs in the US.
We are incredibly inspired by the hard work and passion shown by all our Grow with Google developer scholars -- including these stellar scholars:
This scholarship effort is part of the Grow with Google initiative, which is aimed at helping create economic opportunities for Americans by offering free tools, training, and events. Udacity is excited to partner with Google on this powerful effort and together we look forward to seeing what these scholars will achieve in the coming year.
Until now, G Suite users with company-owned Android devices and those with work profiles could only install mobile apps that had been specifically whitelisted by their admin. In some organizations, however, such restrictions weren’t critical, and whitelisting required unnecessary time and effort. That’s why, going forward, we’re giving admins the option to allow their users to install any app in the managed Google Play store on Android devices that are corporate-owned or have work profiles.
Admins can select this option in the Admin console under Device management > App Management > Manage apps for Android devices.
If an admin selects “Allow all apps,” he or she can still whitelist specific apps. These whitelisted apps will appear on the managed Google Play homepage, but users will be able to find any app using the search tool.
Today we’re announcing that after a year and a half of careful experimentation and testing, we’ve started migrating sites that follow the best practices for mobile-first indexing.
To recap, our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have typically used the desktop version of a page's content, which may cause issues for mobile searchers when that version is vastly different from the mobile version. Mobile-first indexing means that we'll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they're looking for.
We continue to have one single index that we use for serving search results. We do not have a “mobile-first index” that’s separate from our main index. Historically, the desktop version was indexed, but increasingly, we will be using the mobile versions of content.
To understand more about how we determine the mobile content from a site, see our developer documentation. It covers how sites using responsive web design or dynamic serving are generally set for mobile-first indexing. For sites that have AMP and non-AMP pages, Google will prefer to index the mobile version of the non-AMP page.
Sites that are not in this initial wave don’t need to panic. Mobile-first indexing is about how we gather content, not about how content is ranked. Content gathered by mobile-first indexing has no ranking advantage over mobile content that’s not yet gathered this way or desktop content. Moreover, if you only have desktop content, you will continue to be represented in our index.
Having said that, we continue to encourage webmasters to make their content mobile-friendly. We do evaluate all content in our index -- whether it is desktop or mobile -- to determine how mobile-friendly it is. Since 2015, this measure can help mobile-friendly content perform better for those who are searching on mobile. Related, we recently announced that beginning in July 2018, content that is slow-loading may perform less well for both desktop and mobile searchers.
To recap:
Mobile-indexing is rolling out more broadly. Being indexed this way has no ranking advantage and operates independently from our mobile-friendly assessment.
Having mobile-friendly content is still helpful for those looking at ways to perform better in mobile search results.
Having fast-loading content is still helpful for those looking at ways to perform better for mobile and desktop users.
As always, ranking uses many factors. We may show content to users that’s not mobile-friendly or that is slow loading if our many other signals determine it is the most relevant content to show.
We’ll continue to monitor and evaluate this change carefully. If you have any questions, please drop by our Webmaster forums or our public events.
We recently introduced several features for G Suite to help keep your data secure. As described in our earlier post, this includes basic mobile management that’s on by default. Keep reading for more information on this new setting configuration and how it’ll be rolled out to your organization.
If your users bring their Android and iOS devices to work, you have the option to turn on mobile device management for additional security.
If you’ve never enabled this option, we will automatically turn on basic mobile management for your domain by the end of the year. This means that any user who doesn’t currently have a passcode or screen lock on their device will be required to set one up before accessing their G Suite apps.
To control the timing of this change, you can do one of three things:
If you do any of the above, passcodes and screen locks will not be automatically enforced at any point in the future.
A few important things to keep in mind:
If your organization has previously enabled basic, advanced, or custom mobile management, your users won’t be impacted by this launch.
This launch applies even if your organization uses a third-party Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) provider. It won’t impact the way your EMM works in any way.
Mobile devices syncing via Google Sync won’t be impacted by this change and won’t have a passcode or screen lock enforced.
Users who sync their mail via IMAP and who don’t use native G Suite apps (e.g. Gmail) won’t be impacted by this change, and their devices won’t have a passcode or screen lock enforced.
For more information on Google Mobile Management, please visit the Help Center.
Launch Details Release track: Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release by the end of 2018
Editions: Available to all G Suite editions
Rollout pace: Extended rollout (potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility)
We can all use a little help organizing our email. Gmail makes it easy, offering web and iOS users various options for sorting their inboxes, including unread first, important first, starred first, and priority inbox. Because many of you rely on your phones for email, we’re now bringing these same options to the Gmail app for Android.
Going forward, if you’ve selected a specific inbox type for your Gmail account on the web, you’ll see that same email configuration in your Android app. For instance, if you’ve chosen to see unread emails at the top of your inbox and everything else below, you’ll see your emails sorted the same way in Gmail for Android.
You’ll also be able to change your inbox type directly from the Gmail app on your Android phone (under Settings > Inbox type). This inbox type will then be reflected across web and iOS as well.
We hope this helps you stay on top of your email—no matter where (and on what device) you read it.
Launch Details Release track: Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release
Editions: Available to all G Suite editions
Rollout pace: Extended rollout (potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility)
Today, as part of Mobile World Congress 2018, we are excited to announce the first beta release of Flutter. Flutter is Google's new mobile UI framework that helps developers craft high-quality native interfaces for both iOS and Android. Get started today at flutter.io to build beautiful native apps in record time.
Flutter targets the sweet spot of mobile development: performance and platform integrations of native mobile, with high-velocity development and multi-platform reach of portable UI toolkits.
Designed for both new and experienced mobile developers, Flutter can help you build beautiful and successful apps in record time with benefits such as:
High-velocity development with features like stateful Hot Reload, a new reactive framework, rich widget set, and integrated tooling.
Expressive and flexible designs with composible widget sets, rich animation libraries, and a layered, extensible architecture.
High-quality experiences across devices and platforms with our portable, GPU-accelerated renderer and high-performance, native ARM code runtime, and platform interop.
Since our alpha release last year, we delivered, with help from our community, features such as screen reader support and other accessibility features, right-to-left text, localization and internationalization, iPhone X and iOS 11 support, inline video, additional image format support, running Flutter code in the background, and much more.
Our tools also improved significantly, with support for Android Studio, Visual Studio Code, new refactorings to help you manage your widget code, platform interop to expose the power of mobile platforms to Flutter code, improved stateful hot reloads, and a new widget inspector to help you browse the widget tree.
Thanks to the many new features across the framework and tools, teams across Google (such as AdWords) and around the world have been successful with Flutter. Flutter has been used in production apps with millions of installs, apps built with Flutter have been featured in the App Store and Play Store (for example, Hamilton: The Musical), and startups and agencies have been successful with Flutter.
For example, Codemate, a development agency in Finland, attributes Flutter's high-velocity dev cycle and customizable UI toolkit to their ability to quickly build a beautiful app for Hookle. "We now confidently recommend Flutter to help our clients perform better and deliver more value to their users across mobile," said Toni Piirainen, CEO of Codemate.
Apps built with Flutter deliver quality, performance, and customized designs across platforms.
Flutter's beta also works with a pre-release of Dart 2, with improved support for declaring UI in code with minimal language ceremony. For example, Dart 2 infers new and const to remove boilerplate when building UI. Here is an example:
// Before Dart 2 Widget build(BuildContext context) { return new Container( height: 56.0, padding: const EdgeInsets.symmetric(horizontal: 8.0), decoration: new BoxDecoration(color: Colors.blue[500]), child: new Row( ... ), ); }
Now is the perfect time to try Flutter. You can go from zero to your first running Flutter app quickly with our Getting Started guide. If you already have Flutter installed, you can switch to the beta channel using these instructions.
We want to extend our sincere thanks for your support, feedback, and many contributions. We look forward to continuing this journey with everyone, and we can't wait to see what you build!
From buying new shoes to booking weekend getaways, mobile can make life more convenient for consumers — and create big wins for marketers. While 40% of consumers will leave a web page that takes longer than three seconds to load, 89% of people are likely to recommend a brand after a positive brand experience on mobile.1 That's why getting your mobile site in shape is more important than ever.
To create the seamless and responsive mobile site that consumers expect, you need the right tools, like Google Optimize. Optimize makes it easy to test different elements of your site to find the winning combination for the best mobile site possible. Now it’s even easier with our new responsive visual editor – and be sure to read on and learn how two of our clients found mobile success with Optimize 360, our enterprise version.
New! Preview your mobile site on any screen size
While almost everyone has a mobile device, there are so many variations and screen sizes that it’s hard to take a one-size-fits-all approach to optimizing your mobile site. Now, once you’ve created your test page, you can use the new responsive editor to immediately preview what it looks like on any screen size. Or, if you want to see how it appears on a specific device, like a Nexus 7 or iPad, we’ve added more devices that you can select to preview. Learn more about the visual editor here.
Turn ideas to tests quickly
The responsive visual editor in Optimize is just one solution to help marketers succeed on mobile. Our enterprise version, Optimize 360, makes it easy to make improvements to mobile sites efficiently and rapidly.
Dutch airline carrier Transavia Airlines turned to Optimize 360 to try out different ideas on its mobile site. In fact, the team runs about 10 A/B tests each month on the site, all without having to spend significant time or effort. And the best part? Time spent on analyzing the success of site tests has fallen by 50%. This allows Transavia to focus more on testing to improve its mobile site. Learn more in the full case study.
The path to mobile excellence starts with the customer journey
Need some help determining what should test on your mobile site? Google Analytics 360 is a great place to start. You’ll be able to analyze any customer interaction, from search to checkout, to figure out which points of your purchase process need help. Then, once you’ve determined where your site needs work, using Optimize 360 to take action is simple, since it’s natively integrated with Analytics 360.
This is exactly how fashion retailer Mango used Analytics 360 and Optimize 360 to tackle its mobile site: After discovering that mobile visits to its online store had skyrocketed 50% year over year, Mango decided to dig a little deeper. In Analytics 360 Mango discovered that while many consumers browsed product listing pages, few were taking the next step to add products to their shopping cart. To reduce steps to checkout, Mango used Optimize 360 to include an “Add” button to product listing pages. This increased the number of users adding products to their carts by 49%. Find out more in the full case study.
Ready to optimize your own mobile site?
Start testing new mobile experiences with the responsive visual editor in Optimize. This update is one that can help marketers do more on mobile — because whether it’s changing a button or fine-tuning a homepage with quick A/B tests, we’ve learned that small tweaks can make a big impact.
We know that to best protect your organizations and better serve your employees, you need increased control over the applications running on their mobile devices. With this launch, we’re doing just that. Going forward, G Suite admins can manage permissions that Android apps request at runtime, as opposed to at installation time (also known as “runtime permissions”). Note that this feature is only available for apps running in work profiles or on company-owned devices.
Generally, an app requests permission at runtime when it’s attempting to access sensitive data, like a user’s location, contacts, calendar, microphone, or storage. These permissions have to be explicitly granted by the user at that moment, and not just when the app is installed. See below for an example.
To help you better manage runtime permissions for Android apps*, we’re introducing two new settings in the Admin console for customers using Google Mobile Management.
The first will give G Suite admins three options for management of all runtime permissions on all Android apps: (1) allow runtime permissions automatically, (2) deny runtime permissions automatically, or (3) prompt the end user to choose whether to grant runtime permissions. The last setting is the default; it can be changed in the Admin console under Device Management > Android Settings > Apps and Data Sharing.
The second setting can be found under the App Distribution and Configuration options provided when an Android app is whitelisted. This setting will allow admins to manage runtime permissions for that specific app. For example, an admin can forbid the app to access the device’s location or contacts. Where there are conflicts, this setting will take priority over the app-wide setting mentioned above.
*IMPORTANT: Android apps will only request permissions at runtime if the device is running Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) or higher and the app itself targets API level 23 or higher. The second setting mentioned above will be greyed out in Admin console if the app doesn’t target API23+. If you’re unsure of whether an app will request runtime permissions, we recommend contacting the app developer.
Launch Details Release track: Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release
Editions: Available to all G Suite editions
Rollout pace: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility)
Posted by Sissie Hsiao, VP of Product, Mobile App Advertising at Google
Today, we're launching a new interactive education program for Universal App campaigns (UAC). UAC makes it easy for you to reach users and grow your app business at scale. It uses Google's machine learning technology to help find the customers that matter most to you, based on your business goals — across Google Play, Google.com, YouTube and the millions of sites and apps in the Display Network.
UAC is a shift in the way you market your mobile apps, so we designed the program's first course to help you learn how to get the best results from UAC. Here are a few reasons we encourage you take the course:
Learn from industry experts - The course was created by marketers who've been in your shoes and vetted by the team who built the Universal App campaign.
Learn on your schedule - Watch snackable videos at your own pace. The course is made up of short 3-minute videos to help you master the content faster.
Practice what you learn - Complete interactive activities based on real life scenarios like using UAC to help launch a new app or release an update for your app.
So, take the course today and let us know what you think. You can also read more about UAC best practices here and here.
Last year, we launched Basic Mobile Management for iOS—the ability to manage employees’ iOS devices, even if those employees don’t set up MDM agents or profiles. We’re now bringing this same feature to Android.
Starting today, G Suite admins can mandate basic security measures on the Android devices their employees bring to work, without requiring those employees to install the Google Apps Device Policy app on their devices. To do so, admins simply need to select “Basic” under Device management > Setup > Mobile Management > Enable Mobile Management in the Admin console.
When Basic Mobile Management is enabled, admins can:
Enforce a device screen lock.*
Wipe a corporate account (but not the entire device).
View, search, and manage their device inventory.
Basic Mobile Management makes life easier for end users as well, because it allows them to access their corporate accounts without risking their personal data being wiped.
*Please note that you can only enforce a screen lock on devices running Android L or earlier if those devices have the Google Apps Device Policy app installed.
Launch Details Release track: Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release
Editions: Available to all G Suite editions
Rollout pace: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) Impact: Admins only
Posted by Peter Lubbers, Head of Google Developer Training
