Tag Archives: mobile

Kotlin and the Google Mobile Ads SDK

One of the biggest cheers from the crowd at I/O '17 came in response to Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson's announcement that Kotlin would be an officially supported language for Android development starting with Android Studio 3.0. If you're an AdMob or Doubleclick publisher who's been eager to make the leap to a new language, we've got another announcement you might like: now that the new version of Android Studio has launched, we've released bunch of new mobile ads resources to support the Kotlin community.

If you haven't seen Kotlin yet, it's a statically typed language developed by JetBrains that compiles down to the same JVM bytecode that Java does, but includes a number of new features that can make Android development faster and easier. Things like dedicated data classes with less boilerplate, the Elvis operator, lambdas, SAM conversion, explicit nullability for references, and lots of other modern language features come built-in. For more information, see Introduction to Kotlin (also from I/O '17) in which Andrey Breslav and Hadi Hariri code up examples of the language's best features:

When you're done, you can see those same features in action in our new developer resources, which are now available to the AdMob and Doubleclick publisher community.

Samples

The Mobile Ads DevRel team maintains a GitHub repository of Android samples covering our API, and we've pushed Kotlin versions for each ad format. If you been wondering how Kotlin's Android extensions work with AdMob's banner ad layouts, for example, we've got a new sample app that'll show you. If you're curious how native ads work with all the new nullability stuff, we've got you covered with Kotlin samples for those formats as well.

In addition, we've included a new version of our API Demo app, which features a navigation drawer full of individual API demos for things like banner sizes, category exclusions, and more, all in Kotlin.

Implementation Guides

We've also updated our publisher guides with Kotlin snippets wherever code is shown. Similar to the mobile ads guides for iOS (which show either Swift or Objective-C syntax with a click of a tab), the Android guides now let developers easily switch back and forth between Java and Kotlin implementations.

Questions?

If you take a look at the Kotlin guides and samples and find you've got questions about the best way to implement something in Android's first ever new language, stop by our support forum. Our staff there will be happy to help.

 - , Mobile Ads Developer Relations

Kotlin and the Google Mobile Ads SDK

One of the biggest cheers from the crowd at I/O '17 came in response to Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson's announcement that Kotlin would be an officially supported language for Android development starting with Android Studio 3.0. If you're an AdMob or Doubleclick publisher who's been eager to make the leap to a new language, we've got another announcement you might like: now that the new version of Android Studio has launched, we've released bunch of new mobile ads resources to support the Kotlin community.

If you haven't seen Kotlin yet, it's a statically typed language developed by JetBrains that compiles down to the same JVM bytecode that Java does, but includes a number of new features that can make Android development faster and easier. Things like dedicated data classes with less boilerplate, the Elvis operator, lambdas, SAM conversion, explicit nullability for references, and lots of other modern language features come built-in. For more information, see Introduction to Kotlin (also from I/O '17) in which Andrey Breslav and Hadi Hariri code up examples of the language's best features:

When you're done, you can see those same features in action in our new developer resources, which are now available to the AdMob and Doubleclick publisher community.

Samples

The Mobile Ads DevRel team maintains a GitHub repository of Android samples covering our API, and we've pushed Kotlin versions for each ad format. If you been wondering how Kotlin's Android extensions work with AdMob's banner ad layouts, for example, we've got a new sample app that'll show you. If you're curious how native ads work with all the new nullability stuff, we've got you covered with Kotlin samples for those formats as well.

In addition, we've included a new version of our API Demo app, which features a navigation drawer full of individual API demos for things like banner sizes, category exclusions, and more, all in Kotlin.

Implementation Guides

We've also updated our publisher guides with Kotlin snippets wherever code is shown. Similar to the mobile ads guides for iOS (which show either Swift or Objective-C syntax with a click of a tab), the Android guides now let developers easily switch back and forth between Java and Kotlin implementations.

Questions?

If you take a look at the Kotlin guides and samples and find you've got questions about the best way to implement something in Android's first ever new language, stop by our support forum. Our staff there will be happy to help.

 - , Mobile Ads Developer Relations

Introducing the Mobile Excellence Award to celebrate great work on Mobile Web

Posted by Shane Cassells, mSite Product Lead, EMEA

We recently partnered with Awwwards, an awards platform for web development and web design, to launch a Mobile Excellence Badge on awwwards.comand a Mobile Excellence Award to recognize great mobile web experiences.

Starting this month, every agency and digital professional that submits their website to Awwwards can be eligible for a Mobile Excellence Badge, a guarantee of the performance of their mobile version. The mobile website's performance will be evaluated by a group of experts and measured against specific criteria based on Google's mobile principles on speed and usability. When a site achieves a minimum score, it will be recognized with the new Mobile Excellence Badge. All criteria are listed at the Mobile Guidelines.

The highest scoring sites with the Mobile Excellence Badge will be nominated for Mobile Site of the Week. One of them will then go on to win Mobile Site of the Month.

All Mobile Sites of the Month will be candidate for Mobile Site of the Year, with the winner receiving a physical award at the Awwwards Conference in Berlin, 8-9 February 2018.

In a time where mobile is playing a dominant role in how people access the web, it is necessary that web developers and web designers build websites that meet users' expectations. Today, 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load1 and despite the explosion of mobile usage, performance and usability of existing mobile sites remain poor and are far from meeting those expectations. At the moment, the average page load time is 22s globally2, which represents a massive missed opportunity for many companies knowing the impact of speed on conversion and bounce rates3.

If you created a great mobile web experience and want it to receive a Mobile Excellence Badge and compete for the Mobile Excellence Award submit your request here.

Notes

  1. Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=3.7K, Global, March 2016 ↩

  2. Google Research, Webpagetest.org, Global, sample of more than 900,000 mWeb sites across Fortune 1000 and Small Medium Businesses. Testing was performed using Chrome and emulating a Nexus 5 device on a globally representative 3G connection. 1.6Mbps download speed, 300ms Round-Trip Time (RTT). Tested on EC2 on m3.medium instances, similar in performance to high-end smartphones, Jan. 2017. ↩

  3. Akamai.com, Online Retail Experience Report 2017 ↩

Turning down the in-app passcode feature in Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides on iOS

In the past, we’ve heard feedback that customers want more security for the files on their iOS devices, which led us to enable an in-app passcode feature specifically for the Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides iOS apps. Over time, however, we’ve come to learn that it’s not just the content within Google Drive that’s valuable to you. Your contacts, calendars, and emails—it's important that all of this is secure as well.

As a result, we began putting particular emphasis on supporting mobile device management (MDM) on iOS. For example, recent launches give G Suite admins greater visibility and control over enterprise-deployed iOS devices. In fact, with MDM, admins can enforce a passcode on all iOS devices that access corporate data, and they can wipe account data on a device if it’s compromised.

Owing to this increased investment in security on iOS devices, we’re ending support for the in-app passcode feature in Google Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides on iOS devices signed in with G Suite accounts. Support will end on December 4th, 2017, and we’ll remove the feature entirely no earlier than January 8th, 2018.

We highly recommend that administrators use MDM to deploy passcode requirements at the system level on all of their iOS devices by following these instructions. This will provide better security than the in-app passcode feature in two key ways:
  • These passcode policies protect all of the content on your managed devices, including photos, contacts, and other content besides Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides content.
  • These passcode policies give you more control over passcode type, strength, expiration, and failure cases. See this Help Center article for more details.

Beginning on December 4th, 2017, any user signed in with a G Suite account who has this feature will see a message asking them to either acknowledge and turn off the functionality, or to ignore the message temporarily. Beginning on January 8th, 2018, all new versions of the Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides iOS apps will no longer contain in-app passcode functionality.


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How to move from m-dot URLs to responsive site

With more sites moving towards responsive web design, many webmasters have questions about migrating from separate mobile URLs, also frequently known as "m-dot URLs", to using responsive web design. Here are some recommendations on how to move from separate urls to one responsive URL in a way that gives your sites the best chance of performing well on Google's search results.

Moving to responsive sites in a Googlebot-friendly way

Once you have your responsive site ready, moving is something you can definitely do with just a bit of forethought. Considering your URLs stay the same for desktop version, all you have to do is to configure 301 redirects from the mobile URLs to the responsive web URLs.

Here are the detailed steps:

  1. Get your responsive site ready
  2. Configure 301 redirects on the old mobile URLs to point to the responsive versions (the new pages). These redirects need to be done on a per-URL basis, individually from each mobile URLs to the responsive URLs.
  3. Remove any mobile-URL specific configuration your site might have, such as conditional redirects or a vary HTTP header.
  4. As a good practice, setup rel=canonical on the responsive URLs pointing to themselves (self-referential canonicals).

If you're currently using dynamic serving and want to move to responsive design, you don't need to add or change any redirects.

Some benefits for moving to responsive web design

Moving to a responsive site should make maintenance and reporting much easier for you down the road. Aside from no longer needing to manage separate URLs for all pages, it will also make it much easier to adopt practices and technologies such as hreflang for internationalization, AMP for speed, structured data for advanced search features and more.

As always, if you need more help you can ask a question in our webmaster forum.

Posted by Cherry Prommawin, Webmaster Relations

Control mobile app settings at the organizational unit and group levels

We know that companies, especially large enterprises, are organized in complex ways, and different employees need different things. With that in mind, we’re giving G Suite Business and Enterprise admins more granular control over mobile app management, allowing them to assign different settings for different organizational units (OUs) and groups. This means that an admin can, among other things, whitelist certain apps for their executive team and others for their marketing org, or prohibit their sales team from disabling specific apps. Previously, admins could only do these things for an entire domain.


Both Android and iOS apps can be distributed at the OU and group level. For more information, check out the Help Center.

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions:
Available to G Suite Business and Enterprise editions only

Rollout pace:
Extended rollout (potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
Admins only

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Manage apps on mobile devices

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Managing Android Wear 2.0 devices with Google Mobile Management

When we launched Android Wear 2.0, we launched more than a platform for notifications on a watch—we launched an extension of your phone. With Android Wear 2.0, you can write emails, manage calendar appointments, chat with coworkers, make calls, and more.

As a G Suite administrator, we believe that you should be able to manage any device—not just smartphones and tablets, but watches as well. That’s why we’ve made it possible to manage Android Wear 2.0 devices with Google Mobile Management. Now you can enforce policies (like requiring a PIN or a password) and remove corporate data if a user’s Android Wear 2.0 watch is lost or stolen.


If you’re already managing devices with Google Mobile Management, there’s nothing more you need to do. If an employee adds her corporate account to a watch with Android Wear 2.0, she'll be automatically prompted to download the Google Apps Device Policy app and set up her watch accordingly.

If you’re not managing devices with Google Mobile Management, we’ve now made it easier than ever. Check out our guide on the Help Center for steps to get started.

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:
Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
Admins only

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Manage your business's mobile devices
Help Center: Set up mobile device management automatically
Help Center: Get G Suite apps on your Android Wear smartwatch


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Anti-phishing security checks in the Gmail app for iOS

In May of this year, we introduced anti-phishing security checks in the Gmail Android app. We’re now bringing similar checks to the Gmail app on your iOS device. Going forward, when you click on a suspicious link in a Gmail message on your iPhone or iPad, we’ll show the warning below. We recommend that you use caution before proceeding, because the link is likely unsafe. Only proceed if you’re confident there’s no risk.
If you click on a link we know to be dangerous, we’ll show you a page like the one below and warn you against visiting the original URL.


These warnings are intended to prevent harmful phishing attacks and help you keep your account safe.

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:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Avoid and report phishing emails


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Set automated rules for mobile devices to protect your data

Protecting your organization’s data should be easy, regardless of what device your employees use. This is especially true if many of them use mobile devices at work. Today, we’re introducing new device rules for Mobile Management that provide better proactive management of mobile devices within your domain.

G Suite admins can now define custom rules that trigger on device events, and have associated actions. When an event specified in a rule occurs on a device within your organization with a G Suite Enterprise license, the corresponding action you have set will automatically be executed by Mobile Management.





Some examples of event/action-based rules you can set include:

  • Approve select mobile devices at the time of device enrollment.
  • Block access to corporate data if user installs a specific app.
  • Block access to/Account wipe the device if user has more than five failed screen unlock attempts.
  • Block access to/Account wipe the device if there is suspicious activity found on the device.
If you’re looking for a device rule that isn’t covered in an existing template, you can customize your own rule. Previously, you would have needed to create a custom script and leverage our APIs to automate any mobile device actions.



Our goal with this launch is to automate the manual, repetitive tasks you often execute as mobile administrators while also keeping your organization’s data protected. Get started today with the instructions in this Help Center article.

Launch Details

Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions:
Available to G Suite Enterprise editions only

Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
Admins only

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Automate Mobile Management tasks with rules

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Fast mobile sites get more customers. Let’s help get yours up to speed.


How long does it take for your mobile site to load? Five seconds? Ten seconds? These few seconds could be the difference between keeping visitors on your site or losing them – because people aren’t willing to wait. In fact, most sites lose half their visitors while loading.1 And 46% of people say that the most frustrating thing about browsing on their phone is waiting for slow pages to load.2


With a little help, we believe every business can have a fast mobile site. That’s why we’re launching a new set of features to test your site’s speed on Test My Site, which will show you:

  • Your site’s mobile speed: 50% of people expect a site to load in less than two seconds.3 Find out how fast your site loads.
  • The number of visitors you may be losing: When it comes to mobile speed, every second matters – for each additional second it takes a mobile page to load, conversions can drop by up to 20%.4 Learn how many people may be leaving your site during the time it takes to load.
  • How you compare to the competition: See how your business stacks up against others in your industry.
  • How to make your site faster: We’ll email you a personalized assessment with specific recommendations on how to speed up your site.




Taking a few steps to improve your site speed can make a big difference. Yard Dog Fence Company, a Nashville fencing company that specializes in pet-friendly and child-safe fences, took the recommendations from Test My Site to significantly improve their mobile speed. They reduced the file sizes of the images on their site and now their mobile site loads in 5 seconds compared to 26 seconds. For Michael Casper, the owner of Yard Dog, it’s made a real difference: “90% of our business comes from our mobile site. Since we improved our mobile speed, we doubled our sales.”


Making changes like these can help you see a real impact on your business, too – get started now with Test My Site.





Posted by Yong Su Kim, VP Americas, Google Marketing Solutions



2. Google Webmaster Central Blog, #MobileMadness: a campaign to help you go mobile-friendly, 2015.
3. DoubleClick by Google, The need for mobile speed, 2016.