Tag Archives: Web

Home APIs: Enabling all developers to build for the home

Posted by Matt Van Der Staay – Engineering Director, Google Home

This blog was originally posted on Google for Developers.

As the saying goes, “home is where the heart is.” It’s where we spend the most time; it’s your space to be comfortable, where you can truly relax, connect and make memories. Our homes have gotten more helpful with connected products, such as a smart door lock or Nest thermostat. Despite this momentum, it's still too hard to develop for the home.

We are changing all of that. Building on the foundation of Matter, we've re-envisioned Google Home as a platform for developers - all developers, not just those that build smart home devices. Google Home is the destination to create innovative experiences for the home.

Today, we’re announcing the Home APIs and Home runtime. With the Home APIs, app developers can access over 600M devices, Google’s hubs and Matter infrastructure, and an automation engine powered by Google intelligence - all available on both Android and iOS. Here are five things to know:

1. Any developer can now build an experience that works with Google Home.

The home offers a unique opportunity for developers to create seamless and deeper relationships with users, but developing for the smart home is harder than it needs to be. Building for the smart home means integrations with many device makers, operating hubs and Matter fabrics, and operating automations engines driven by intelligent signals.

Whether you build an app specifically for smart home devices or build apps that have nothing to do with the smart home – like a fitness app or delivery app - the Home APIs will let you create app experiences that offer your customers delightful and differentiated experiences on both Android and iOS.

2. Access 600 million connected devices from your app

The new Device and Structure APIs let you access over 600M devices with a single integration. Control and manage the devices already connected to Google Home, such as Matter light bulbs or the Nest Learning Thermostat, whether at home, or on the go. You can build a complex app to manage any aspect of a smart home, or simply integrate with a smart device to solve pain points - like turning on the lights automatically before the food delivery driver arrives.

The Home APIs have been designed with privacy and security in mind, leveraging industry standard best practices. Users are always in control and need to explicitly grant access to their structure and smart home devices before an app can access it. And they can easily revoke access at any time from the Google Home app. To ensure quality experiences, developers who adopt the Home APIs must pass certification before launching their app.

The Device and Structure APIs provide all of the foundational building blocks to create a smart home experience.

The new Commissioning API lets you setup Matter devices in your app or the Home app or directly with Fast Pair on Android, without the need to create a new Matter fabric, saving you time and resources.

The Commissioning API provides all of the customer experience to set up a Matter device.

3. Automate with Google’s unique intelligence about the home

As people add more devices to their home, it becomes challenging to make them all work in unison. Over the past year, we have added new signals and allowed those with advanced skills to script their home using generative AI. With the new Automation API, you can create and manage home automations in your app, using Google Home’s new automation engine and intelligent signals.

Automations can be triggered by device signals from the home such as occupancy events from motion sensors, mode changes from appliances, or media events from a smart TV. For example, Yale is using the Automation API to turn on the foyer lights when the front door is unlocked at night. Automations can also use Google’s intelligence signals like home and away, which fuses together signals from devices across the home to create a more accurate presence detection.

The Automations API provides all of the tools for creating and managing automations.

4. Expanding hubs for Google Home to the TV

A hub for Google Home is a device that enables remote access and local control of their Matter devices across Wifi and Thread. The Home APIs use the network of hubs for Google Home to control Matter devices whether the user is in the home or away.

Later this year, we’re upgrading our hubs and introducing the Home runtime, so other devices, including Chromecast with Google TV, select panel TVs with Google TV running Android 14, or higher and eligible LG brand TVs will also become hubs for Google Home.

Home APIs make controlling lights and switches locally over a hub feel snappy. We are adopting these APIs in the Google Home app, and our early tests show device control operating up to three times faster than before. Developers using the Home APIs can see faster and more responsive local control in their apps as well.

5. Delightful new experiences from a diverse set of apps

We are working with a broad range of brands across lighting, security, automotive, energy, and entertainment to build seamless smart home experiences that help get more usefulness from the smart home.

Partners from every major smart home category are building on the Home APIs.

Here are how some of our first partners are using the Home APIs:

ADT’s new Trusted Neighbor will revolutionize the universal practice of “giving a trusted neighbor a key to your home,” enabling users to easily grant secure and temporary access to their homes for neighbors, friends or helpers.

LG will enable millions of TVs to be hubs for Google Home, allowing seamless control of devices from any app built using Home APIs. You will also be able to use the ThinQ mobile app or the Home Hub on the LG TV to control devices.

Eve Systems will bring their experience to Android for the first time and build helpful automations like lowering the blinds when the temperature drops at night.

Google Pixel is bridging the digital and physical worlds so that bedtime mode can not only dim your screen, but can also automatically dim your bedroom lights, lower the shades and lock the front door.

And this is just the beginning. With the Home APIs, a workout app could keep you cool while you are burning calories by turning on the fan before you begin working out. Or a vacation rental app could make sure that the lights are on and the temperature is just right when a guest arrives. With the Home APIs, now anyone can bridge digital experiences and physical devices.

Sign Up to Build with the Home APIs

Do you have a great idea or feature that you'd like to build into your app with the Home APIs? Tell us about it and join the waitlist for access to the Home APIs or Home runtime. We will expand access on a rolling basis and the first apps built on the Home APIs will come to the Play Store and App Store starting this fall. Learn more about what’s included in the Home APIs from our I/O session on the Google Home Developer Center.

Source: Android Developers Blog

Android Support for Kotlin Multiplatform to Share Business Logic Across Mobile, Web, Server, and Desktop Platforms

Posted by Maru Ahues Bouza – Director, Product Management, and Jeffrey van Gogh – Director, Engineering

Traditionally, developers must either write code individually for each platform they want to target, or make a number of compromises in order to reuse code across platforms. Android has been actively supporting Kotlin since 2017, and today we are excited to announce we are supporting Kotlin Multiplatform on Android, which enables sharing code across mobile, web, server, and desktop platforms. This helps increase productivity for developers, and fits great with Android's Kotlin-first approach, resulting in higher quality Android apps. Our focus is to support sharing business logic (the parts that are most agnostic to the user interfaces) because we've seen Android developers get the most value in not having to maintain duplicate copies of this code.

Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) has been a long-standing investment for the team behind Google Workspace, allowing for flexibility and speed in delivering valuable cross-platform experiences. The Google Workspace team is enthusiastic about KMP's potential as the direction for its multi-platform architecture investment, confident in its ability to meet performance expectations for various workloads.

The initial step in this journey is the rollout of the Google Docs app for Android, iOS, and Web, which leverages KMP for shared business logic, validating its readiness for production use at Google scale. The Google Workspace team is thrilled to continue exploring the possibilities of KMP across its product suite, aiming to enhance productivity and deliver seamless experiences to users on all platforms.

We see a lot of companies successfully leveraging Kotlin Multiplatform for cross-platform development of their apps, learn how they apply different code-sharing strategies here.

Kotlin Multiplatform, developed by JetBrains, provides a novel approach to sharing code across platforms by compiling Kotlin to platform-native binaries. Kotlin is able to provide the full, modern, memory managed language to native platforms enabling native interoperability and incremental adoption. Kotlin on Android, combined with Kotlin Multiplatform on other platforms, provides a great way to increase productivity and quality, without compromising on performance or interoperability.

Architecture overview for Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP)

Kotlin Multiplatform Architecture

Current Status of Support

Many widely-used libraries offer built-in support for Kotlin Multiplatform, streamlining your cross-platform development experience. These libraries work seamlessly together. For example, Ktor simplifies networking tasks by handling REST service consumption, while kotlinx.serialization converts data to formats like JSON, and Okio manages essential file I/O. Additionally, SKIE facilitates the use of modern types and coroutines on iOS, and CocoaPods integration enables the use of iOS-specific dependencies.

We've worked with JetBrains and the Kotlin developer community to add Kotlin Multiplatform support to a number of Jetpack libraries and in some cases provide the iOS platform targets, while in others, JetBrains and the community provide the multiplatform distributions.

Today, the Annotations, Collections, and DataStore libraries all have support for Kotlin Multiplatform in stable versions. We are also adding support to validate binary compatibility for the iOS platform targets, bringing them on a par with the quality standards for Android. In addition to the libraries above, we've also begun working on Kotlin Multiplatform support for Room, Lifecycle, and ViewModels with alpha versions now available. To better understand which classes and functions are available where, the library reference documentation now indicates "common" and platform support.

Indication of Common, Native and Android support in documentation

Android engineers have collaborated with JetBrains on the Kotlin compiler to improve runtime performance in Kotlin/Native (for iOS & native desktop operating systems), showing 18% runtime performance improvements in compiler benchmarks. In addition the Android team contributed to build time performance improvements for the Kotlin Native Compiler of up to 2x speed ups.

The Android Gradle Plugin now has official support for Kotlin Multiplatform, enabling a concise build definition for setting up Android as a platform target for shared code as shown below:

plugins {
    id("org.jetbrains.kotlin.multiplatform")
    id("com.android.library")
}

kotlin {
    androidTarget {
        compilations.all {
            kotlinOptions {
                jvmTarget = "11"
            }
        }
    }  
    listOf(
        iosX64(),
        iosArm64(),
        iosSimulatorArm64()
    ).forEach { iosTarget ->
        iosTarget.binaries.framework {
            baseName = "Shared"
            isStatic = true
        }
    }    
    sourceSets {
        commonMain.dependencies {
            // put your Multiplatform dependencies here
        }
    }
}

KMP Support in the Android Gradle Plugin DSL

As Android Studio is based on the IntelliJ Platform from JetBrains, it inherits support for Kotlin Multiplatform code editing and many other development features. Other Android development tools like Android Lint and Kotlin Symbol Processing (KSP) are also beginning to add more Kotlin Multiplatform support as well.

Google Chrome now has official support for WasmGC which is used by Kotlin Multiplatform's WebAssembly platform target to enable code sharing with the browser in an efficient and performant way.

Latest details on these projects are available on the updated Android Kotlin Multiplatform page.

Future Areas of Work

We've heard from many Android developers and Google engineering teams that they want expanded support for Kotlin Multiplatform so they can more easily share code with other platforms. Android plans to continue collaborating with JetBrains, Google engineering teams, and the community on a variety of projects, including:

Expanding and stabilizing Jetpack libraries with Kotlin Multiplatform support
Wasm platform target support in Jetpack libraries
Kotlin/Native build performance
Kotlin/Native debugging
Expanding Kotlin Multiplatform support in Android Studio

Learn More and Try It Out

Sharing code with Kotlin Multiplatform between Android and other platforms enables higher developer productivity and quality so we hope you will give it a try! You can use the Kotlin Multiplatform wizard to create a new KMP project. Learn more in the documentation.

Alternatively, explore one of these sample projects showcasing how to use some of the Jetpack libraries with Kotlin Multiplatform:

DiceRoller - DataStore on Android and iOS
Fruitties - Room, Datastore on Android and iOS

If there are additional areas you would like Android to work on let us know and also be a part of our vibrant Android Developer community on LinkedIn, Medium, YouTube, and X.

Source: Android Developers Blog

Get ready for Google I/O: Program lineup revealed

Posted by Timothy Jordan – Director, Developer Relations and Open Source

Developers, get ready! Google I/O is just around the corner, kicking off live from Mountain View with the Google keynote on Tuesday, May 14 at 10 am PT, followed by the Developer keynote at 1:30 pm PT.

But the learning doesn’t stop there. Mark your calendars for May 16 at 8 am PT when we’ll be releasing over 150 technical deep dives, demos, codelabs, and more on-demand. If you register online, you can start building your 'My I/O' agenda today.

Here's a sneak peek at some of the exciting highlights from the I/O program preview:

Unlocking the power of AI: The Gemini era unlocks a new frontier for developers. We'll showcase the newest features in the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, and Gemma. Discover cutting-edge pre-trained models from Kaggle, and delve into Google's open-source libraries like Keras and JAX.

Android: A developer's playground: Get the latest updates on everything Android! We'll cover groundbreaking advancements in generative AI, the highly anticipated Android 15, innovative form factors, and the latest tools and libraries in the Jetpack and Compose ecosystem. Plus, discover how to optimize performance and streamline your development workflow.

Building beautiful and functional web experiences: We’ll cover Baseline updates, a revolutionary tool that empowers developers with a clear understanding of web features and API interoperability. With Baseline, you'll have access to real-time information on popular developer resource sites like MDN, Can I Use, and web.dev.

The future of ChromeOS: Get a glimpse into the exciting future of ChromeOS. We'll discuss the developer-centric investments we're making in distribution, app capabilities, and operating system integrations. Discover how our partners are shaping the future of Chromebooks and delivering world-class user experiences.

This is just a taste of what's in store at Google I/O. Stay tuned for more updates, and get ready to be a part of the future.

Don't forget to mark your calendars and register for Google I/O today!

Source: Android Developers Blog

Get ready for Google I/O: Program lineup revealed

Here's a sneak peek at some of the exciting highlights from the I/O program preview:

This is just a taste of what's in store at Google I/O. Stay tuned for more updates, and get ready to be a part of the future.

Don't forget to mark your calendars and register for Google I/O today!

Posted by Timothy Jordan – Director, Developer Relations and Open Source

Source: Google Open Source Blog

Achieving privacy compliance with your CI/CD: A guide for compliance teams

Posted by Fergus Hurley – Co-Founder & GM, Checks, and Evan Otero – Product Manager, Checks

In the fast-paced world of software development, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) have become cornerstones, enabling teams to deliver high-quality software faster than ever. However, the rise of rapid innovation, increasing use of third-party libraries, and AI-generated code have accelerated vulnerabilities and risks. Therefore, addressing these issues early in the development lifecycle is essential so that teams can launch their products quickly and confidently.

The introduction of Checks privacy compliance CI/CD tooling feature represents a significant stride towards addressing these concerns, by reducing manual intervention and automating compliance and privacy standards as part of a release cycle.

In this post, we explore the meaning of CI/CD for compliance team members unfamiliar with this technology and how Checks can weave privacy and compliance protection practices into that pipeline.

What is CI/CD?

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) are foundational practices in modern software development. They enable development teams to increase efficiency, improve quality, and accelerate delivery.

Continuous Integration (CI) automatically integrates code changes from multiple contributors into a software project. This practice enables teams to detect problems early by running automated tests on each change before it is merged into the main branch.

Continuous Deployment (CD) takes automation further by automatically deploying all code changes to a testing or production environment after the build stage. This means that, in addition to automated testing, automated release processes ensure that new changes are accessible to users as quickly as possible.

Shifting issue-spotting left with CI/CD pipelines

The automation of CI/CD processes is typically called “pipelines.” CI/CD pipelines automate the steps software changes go through, from development to deployment. These steps include compiling code, running tests (unit tests, integration tests, etc.), security scans, and more. If all automated tests pass, the changes go live without human intervention in a specific environment, such as testing or production.

These pipelines are designed to catch issues as early as possible, embodying the practice known as “shifting left.” The benefits of “shifting left”, particularly when applied through CI/CD pipelines, include:

Improved quality and security: Automated testing in CI/CD pipelines ensures that code is rigorously tested for functional and compliance issues before it reaches production. This early detection enables teams to address vulnerabilities and errors when they are generally easier and less costly to fix.

Faster release cycles: By catching and addressing issues early, teams avoid the bottlenecks associated with late-stage discovery of problems. This efficiency reduces the time from development to deployment, enabling faster release cycles and more responsive delivery of features and fixes.

Reduced costs: Detecting issues later in the development process can be significantly more expensive to resolve, especially if they're found after deployment. Early detection through CI/CD pipelines minimizes these costs by preventing complex rollbacks and the need for emergency fixes in production environments.

Increased reliability and trust: Software that undergoes thorough testing before release is generally more reliable and secure. This reliability builds trust among users and stakeholders, crucial for maintaining a positive reputation and ensuring user satisfaction.

Checks brings privacy and compliance tests to your CI/CD

TChecks CI/CD tooling seamlessly integrates app compliance scanning into CI/CD pipelines via plugins for GitHub, Jenkins, and FastLane. You can also use Checks in any other CI/CD system that supports custom scripts, such as GitLab, TeamCity, Bitbucket, and more.

image showing logos of CI/CD systems that support custom scripts - FastLane, Jenkins, GitHub, Atlassian BitBucket, GitLab, Azure DevOps, and Team City

When Checks scans an app, the binary undergoes dynamic and static analysis to understand your data collection and sharing practices, including app dependencies such as SDKs, permissions, and endpoints. This data is then tested against global regulatory requirements, store policies, your custom Checks policies, and your privacy policy to find potential issues and opportunities for improvement.

Top 5 benefits of integrating Checks into your CI/CD

image showing checks report highlighting potential issues

By adding Checks as a step in your CI/CD pipeline, you can automate app and code compliance scanning as part of the development lifecycle.

The top 5 benefits of integrating Checks in your CI/CD are:

Real-time, intelligent alerting: You can stay informed of new compliance issues or changes in data behavior across your product portfolio with instant notifications via email or Slack.

Understand data sharing & SDKs: Checks can help ensure secure third-party data sharing by gaining visibility into SDK integrations, permissions, and data flow analysis. By using Checks, you can be confident in your third-party dependencies before your public release.

Ensure new builds follow your company policies: Checks enables you to automate data governance with custom policies that let you set up safeguards against specific endpoints, SDKs, data types, and permissions, tailoring privacy to your specific needs. These policies help ensure all new releases comply with your company’s data policies.

Keep your Google Play Data safety section up-to-date: Checks can recommend Google Play Data safety section disclosures and alert you if you should make an update before releasing publicly, ensuring your declarations are always up-to-date.

Deploy quickly and with confidence: When Checks finds issues in the CI/CD, these vulnerabilities are caught and remedied early, significantly reducing the risk of compliance violations once you deploy the app. Checks helps you maintain high compliance standards without slowing down the release cycle, enabling teams to deploy with confidence and ensuring that user data is protected from the outset.

Next steps

Getting started is simple. Start by first signing up for Checks and then adding Checks to your CI/CD pipelines with these simple configuration steps. Once configured, Checks is ready to perform a variety of privacy and compliance verifications.

This proactive approach to privacy and compliance safeguards against potential risks and aligns with regulatory compliance requirements, making it an invaluable asset for any compliance and development team.

Source: Google for Developers Blog - News about Web, Mobile, AI and Cloud

Build with Google AI video series, Season 2: more AI patterns

Posted by Joe Fernandez – Google AI Developer Relations

We are off to another exciting year in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and it's time to build more applications with Google AI technology! The Build with Google AI video series is for developers looking to build helpful and practical applications with AI. We focus on useful code projects you can implement and extend in an afternoon to bring the power of artificial intelligence into your workflow or organization. Our first season received over 100,000 views in six weeks! We are glad to see that so many of you liked the series, and we are excited to bring you even more Google AI application projects.

Today, we are launching Season 2 of the Build with Google AI series, featuring projects built with Google's Gemini API technology. The launch of Gemini and the Gemini API has brought developers even more advanced AI capabilities, including advanced reasoning, content generation, information synthesis, and image interpretation. Our goal with this season is to help you put those capabilities to work for you and your organizations.

AI app patterns

The Build with Google AI series features practical application code projects created for you to use and customize. However, we know that you are the best judge of what you or your organization needs to solve day-to-day problems and get work done. That's why each application we feature in this series is also meant to be used as an AI pattern. You can extend the applications immediately to solve problems and provide value for your business, and these applications show you a general coding pattern for getting value out of AI technology.

For this second season of this series, we show how you can leverage Google's Gemini AI model capabilities for applications. Here's what's coming up:

AI Slides Reviewer with Google Workspace (3/20) - Image interpretation is one of the Gemini model's biggest new features. We show you how to make practical use of it with a presentation review app for Google Slides that you can customize with your organization's guidelines and recommendations.

AI Flutter Code Agent with Gemini API (3/27) - Code generation was the most popular episode from last season, so we are digging deeper into this topic. Build a code generation extension to write Flutter code and explore user interface designs and looks with just a few words of description.

AI Data Agent with Google Cloud (4/3) - Why write code to extract data when you can just ask for it? Build a web application that uses Gemini API's Function Calling feature to translate questions into code calls and data into plain language answers.

Season 1 upgraded to Gemini API: We've upgraded Season 1 tutorials and code projects to use the Gemini API so you can take advantage of the latest in generative AI technology from Google. Check them out!

Learn from the developers

Just like last season, we'll go back to the studio to talk with coders who built these projects so they can share what they learned along the way. How do you make the Gemini model review an entire presentation? What's the most effective way to generate code with AI? How do you get a database to answer questions with the Gemini API? Get insights into coding with AI to jump start your own development project.

New home for AI developer content

Developers interested in Google's AI offerings now have a new home at ai.google.dev. There you'll find a wealth of resources for building with AI from Google, including the Build with Google AI tutorials. Stay tuned for much more content through the rest of the year.

We are excited to bring you the second season of Build with Google AI – check out Season 2 right now! Use those video comments to let us know what you think and tell us what you'd like to see in future episodes.

Keep learning! Keep building!

Source: Google for Developers Blog - News about Web, Mobile, AI and Cloud

Google for Games is coming to GDC 2024

Posted by Aurash Mahbod – General Manager, Games on Google Play

Google for Games is coming to GDC in San Francisco! Join us on March 19 for the Game Developers Conference (GDC) at the Moscone Center, where game developers from across the world will gather to learn, network, problem-solve, and help shape the future of the industry. From March 18 to March 22, experience our comprehensive suite of multi-platform game development tools and explore the new features from Play Pass at the West Hall, Level 2 Lobby.

This year, we’re proud to host eight sessions for developers, designers, business and marketing teams, and everyone else in the gaming community with an interest to grow their game business. Take a look at this year’s sessions below and if you’re interested in learning more about topics from Google Play and Android, check out key product updates from the Google for Games Developer Summit.

Scaling your game development

We’re hosting three sessions designed to help scale your game development using tools from Firebase, Android, and Google Cloud. Learn more about building high quality games with case studies from industry experts.

Beyond "Set and Forget": Advanced Debugging with Firebase Crashlytics

Tuesday, March 19, 9:30 am - 10:00 am

Speaker: Joe Spiro (Developer Relations Engineer, Google)

Crashlytics has added a number of features that make detecting, tracking, and understanding bugs even easier, from high-level to native code. Take your fixes to another level with native stack traces, memory debugging, issue annotation, and the ability to log uncaught exceptions as fatal.

Enhancing Game Performance: Vulkan and Android Adaptability Technology

Tuesday, March 19, 10:50 am - 11:50 am

Speakers: Dohyun Kim (Developer Relations Engineer, Android Games, Google), Hak Matsuda (Developer Relations Engineer, Android Games, Google), Jungwoo Kim (Principal Engineer, Samsung), Syed Farhan Hassan (Software Engineer, ARM)

Learn how to leverage Vulkan graphics API to improve your graphics quality or performance, including performance tuning with dynamic upscaling. Find out how the Android Dynamic Performance Framework (ADPF) can enhance game performance and power in Unity and native C++, with easy integration through the Unreal Engine plugin. We're also sharing how NCSoft Lineage W improved thermal status and performance using ADPF.

Creating a global-scale game with Google Cloud

Tuesday, March 19, 4:40 pm - 5:10 pm

Speaker: Mark Mandel (Developer Advocate, Google)

This session will cover the best of Google Cloud's open source projects (Agones, Open Match, and more) and products (GKE, Spanner, Anthos Service Mesh, Cloud Build, Cloud Deploy, and more) to teach you how to build, deploy, and scale world-scale multiplayer games with Google Cloud.

Increasing user engagement

We’re hosting two sessions designed to help you increase engagement by creating dynamic gameplay experiences using generative AI and expanding opportunities on Google Play to grow your community of players with exclusive rewards.

Reimagine the Future of Gaming with Google AI

Tuesday, March 19, 10:50 am - 11:50 am

Speakers: Gus Martins (Developer Advocate, Google), Dan Zaratsian (AI/ML Solutions Architect, Google), Lei Zhang (Director, Play Partnerships, Global GenAI & Greater China Play Partnerships, Google), Jack Buser (Director, Game Industry Solutions), Simon Tokumine (Director of Product Management, Google AI), Giovane Moura Jr. (App Modernization Specialist, Google), Moonlit Beshinov (Head of Google for Games Partnerships and Industry Strategy, Google)

In our keynote session, senior executives from Google Cloud, Google Play, and Labs will share their unique perspectives on generative AI in the gaming landscape. Learn more about cutting-edge AI solutions from Google Cloud, Android, Google Play, and Labs designed to simplify game development, publishing, and business operations, plus actionable strategies to leverage AI for faster development, better player experiences, and sustainable growth.

Grow your community of loyal gamers with Google Play

Tuesday, March 19, 1:20 pm - 1:50 pm

Speaker: Tom Grinsted (Group Product Manager, Google Play Games, Google)

In this session, we’ll cover new features and insights from Google Play to create rewarding experiences for gamers using Play Pass, Play Points, and Play Games Services. Get a behind-the-scenes look at how Google Play rewards a growing community of passionate gamers, and how to use this to super-charge your business.

Maximizing reach across screens

These sessions, from Google Play, Android, and Flutter, introduce ways to expand your mobile games to PC. Learn about the latest tools that will help you accelerate growth across large screens.

Bringing more users to your Google Play Games on PC game

Tuesday, March 19, 2:10 pm - 2:40 pm

Speakers: Aly Hung (Developer Relations Engineer, Android and Google Play, Google), Dara Monasch (Product Manager, Google), Justin Gardner (Partner Program Manager, App Attribution, Google)

Join us for an overview of Google Play Games on PC, how it has grown in the past year, and a walkthrough of how to optimize and attribute your PC advertisements for your Google Play Games on PC titles. Learn how to use Google Play Games to increase your reach and acquisition of PC users for your mobile game, as well as how to effectively use the Google Play Install Referrer API to attribute and optimize your ads across mobile and PC.

Android input on desktop: How to delight your users

Tuesday, March 19, 3:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Speakers: Shenshen Cui (Staff Developer Relations Engineer, Google), Patrick Martin (Developer Relations Engineer, Google)

Give your players a first-class gaming experience with our best practices for handling input between mobile and PC games, including technical details on how to implement these best practices across mobile, tablets, Chromebooks and Windows PCs¹. Learn how Android handles keyboard, mouse, and controller input across different form factors, with case studies for designing for both touch and hardware input.

Building Multiplatform Games with Flutter

Tuesday, March 19, 3:50 pm - 4:20 pm

Speakers: Zoey Fan (Senior Product Manager, Flutter, Google), Brett Morgan (Developer Relations Engineer, Google)

Learn why game developers are choosing Flutter to build casual games on mobile, desktop, and web browsers. We’ll cover the free, open-source tools and resources available through the Casual Games Toolkit, a collection of free and open-source tools, templates, and resources to make game dev more productive with Flutter.

Learn more about all of our sessions coming to you on March, 19, at GDC in San Francisco.

________________

¹Windows is a trademark of the Microsoft group of companies.

Source: Google for Developers Blog - News about Web, Mobile, AI and Cloud

Introducing Play Install Referrer for Google Play Games on PC

Posted by Arjun Dayal, Director – Google Play Games

Making informed marketing decisions relies on identifying your most valuable user acquisition channels for your games. By tracking referral data, you can understand which traffic sources send the most users to download your app from the Google Play store. These insights can help you make the most of your advertising spend and maximize ROI. That’s why in 2017, we launched the Play Install Referrer API, which gives you an easy, reliable way to track your apps’ referral information directly from the Play store.

Until now, this feature was only available for your games in the mobile Play store. Today, we’re pleased to announce support for Google Play Games on PC, allowing you to attribute conversions from your marketing activities on the Web¹. If you use the Google Play Install Referrer API to track your referral sources, you can now attribute conversions to specific campaigns directly from Google Play by manually retrieving referral information, or using third-party analytics tools from Google’s App Attribution Partners.

Getting started is easy. First, generate a Google Play URL for your game’s Google Play store listing page and add a referrer query parameter for your Web campaign. Then, when a PC user clicks the link, they will be redirected to your game’s listing page on the Google Play Web store, which will give them the option to “Install on Windows.” Once the user launches your game, you’ll be able to track the referral using the Google Play Install Referrer library.

“With integration support from Adjust, developers can quickly and efficiently measure marketing campaigns for their games on Google Play Games on PC. We’re excited about the opportunity this brings for developers to broaden their games’ reach and strengthen cross-platform measurement.”
- Gijsbert Pols, Director of Connected TV & New Channels, Adjust

Learn more about third-party referral codes for Google Play Games on PC and start optimizing your marketing performance today.

______________

¹Subject to device compatibility with Google Play Games on PC.

Source: Android Developers Blog

Embracing Android 14: Meta’s Early Adoption Empowered Enhanced User Experience

Posted by Terence Zhang – Developer Relations Engineer, Google; in partnership with Tina Ho - Partner Engineering, TPM and Kun Wang – Partner Engineering, Partner Engineer

With the first Developer Preview of Android 15 now released, another new Android release that brings new features and under-the-hood improvements for billions of users worldwide will be coming shortly. As Android developers, you are key players in this evolution; by staying on top of the targetSDK upgrade cycle, you are making sure that your users have the best possible experience.

The way Meta, the parent company of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger, approached Android 14 provides a blueprint for both developer success and user satisfaction. Meta improved their velocity towards targetSDK adoption by 4x, and so to understand more about how they built this, we spoke to the team at Meta, with an eye towards insights that all developers could build into their testing programs.

Meta’s journey on A14: A blueprint for faster adoption

When Android 11 launched, some of Meta’s apps experienced challenges with existing features, such as Chat Heads, and with new requirements, like scoped storage integration. Fixing these issues was complicated by slow developer tooling adoption and a decentralized app strategy. This experience motivated Meta to create an internal Android OS Readiness Program which focuses on prioritizing early and thorough testing throughout the Android release window and accelerating their apps’ targetSDK adoption.

The program officially launched last year. By compiling apps against each Android 14 beta and conducting thorough automated and smoke tests to proactively identify potential issues, Meta was able to seamlessly adopt new Android 14 features, like Foreground Service types and send timely feedback and bug reports to the Android team, contributing to improvements in the OS.

Meta also accelerated their targetSDK adoption for Android 14—updating Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram within one to two months of the AOSP release, compared to seven to nine months for Android 12 (an increase of velocity of more than 4x!). Meta’s newly created readiness program unlocked this achievement by working across each app to adopt latest Android changes while still maintaining compatibility. For example, by automating and simplifying their SDK release process, Meta was able to cut rollout time from three weeks to under three hours, enhancing cooperation between individual app teams by providing immediate access to the latest SDKs and allowing for rapid testing of new OS features. The centralized approach also meant Threads adopted Android 14 support quickly despite the fast-growing new app being supported by a minimal team.

Reaping the rewards: The impact on users

Meta's early targetSDK adoption strategy delivers significant benefits for users as well. Here's how:

Improved reliability and compatibility: Early adoption of Android previews and betas prevented surprises near the OS launch, guaranteeing a smooth day-one experience for users upgrading to the latest Android version. For example, with partial media permissions, Meta's extensive experimentation with permission flows ensured “users felt informed about the change and in control over their privacy settings,” while maximizing the app's media-sharing functionality.

Robust experimentation with new release features: Early Android release adoption gave Meta ample time to collaborate across privacy, design, and content strategy teams, enabling them to thoughtfully integrate the new Android features that come with every release. This enhanced the collaboration on other features, allowing Meta to roll out Ultra HDR image experience on Instagram within 3 months of platform release in an “Android first” manner is a great example of this, delighting users with brighter and richer colors with a higher dynamic range in their Instagram posts and stories.

Meta's adoption of Ultra HDR in Android 14 brings brighter colors and dynamic range to Instagram posts and stories.

Embrace the latest Android versions

Meta's journey highlights the compelling reasons for Android developers to adopt a similar forward-thinking mindset in working with the Android betas:

Test your apps early: Anticipate Android OS changes, ensuring your apps are prepared for the latest target SDK as soon as they become available to create a seamless transition for users who update to the newest Android version.

Utilize latest tools to optimize user experience: Test your apps thoroughly against each beta to identify and address any potential issues. Check the Android Studio Upgrade Assistant to highlight major breaking changes in each targetSDKVersion, and integrate the compatibility framework tool into your testing process to help uncover potential app issues in the new OS version.

Collaborate with Google: Provide your valuable feedback and bug reports using the Google issue tracker to contribute directly to the improvement of the Android ecosystem.

We encourage you to take full advantage of the Android Developer Previews & Betas program, starting with the newly-released Android 15 Developer Preview 1.

The team behind the success

A big thank you to the entire Meta team for their collaboration in Android 14 and in writing this blog! We’d especially like to recognize the following folks from Meta for their outstanding contributions in establishing a culture of early adoption:

Tushar Varshney - Partner Engineering, Partner Engineer
Allen Bae - Partner Engineering, EM
Abel Del Pino - Facebook, SWE
Matias Hanco - Facebook, SWE
Summer Kitahara - Instagram, SWE
Tom Rozanski - Messenger, SWE
Ashish Gupta - WhatsApp, SWE
Daniel Hill - Mobile Infra, SWE
Jason Tang - Facebook, SWE
Jane Li - Meta Quest, SWE

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Embracing Android 14: Meta’s Early Adoption Empowered Enhanced User Experience

Meta’s journey on A14: A blueprint for faster adoption

Reaping the rewards: The impact on users

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The team behind the success

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