Google Data

By Monica Tran, Head of Developer Marketing

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

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

DESIGN

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

DEVELOP

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

DISTRIBUTE

• Building successful global app businesses — Scalable solutions to help you find more users, understand and engage them, and effectively convert your active users into buyers.

By Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

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

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

Android L Developer Preview

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

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

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

Google Play Services 5.0

Along with the L Developer Preview, we also announced a new version of Google Play services that brings new capabilities and the latest optimizations to devices across the Android ecosystem. Google Play services ensures that you can build on the latest features from Google for your users, with the confidence that those services will work properly everywhere. The latest version has begun rolling out and here are some of the highlights:

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

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

Join us at the Google I/O sessions

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

By Greg Hartrell, Product Manager, Google Play games

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

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

Google Play Games

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

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

Game Profile

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

Quests and Saved Games

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

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

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

–>

More tools for game developers

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

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

Game enhancements for the Android Platform

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

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

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

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

Play Games on Android TV

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

Updates rolling out soon

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

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

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

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

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

Build an engaging app

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

Scale operations

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

Actionable insights

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

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

Enhance discovery and engagement

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

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

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

New services for game developers

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

New monetization tools

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

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

Join us

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

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

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

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

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

Get started with Android TV

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

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

Help more users find your Google Cast app

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

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

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

Posted by Manfred Zabarauskas, Product Manager on Google Cloud Platform

Many Android developers like Snapchat or Pulse build and host their app backends on the Google Cloud Platform, and enjoy automatic management, with simple expansion to support mil…

By Wouter van Oortmerssen, Fun Propulsion Labs at Google

Game developers, we’ve just released FlatBuffers, a C++ serialization library that allows you to read data without unpacking or allocating additional memory, as an open source project.

FlatBuffers stores serialized data in buffers in a cross-platform way, supporting format evolution that is fully forwards and backwards compatible through a schema. These buffers can be stored in files or sent across the network as-is, and accessed in-place without parsing overhead.

The FlatBuffers schema compiler and runtime is written in platform independent C++ with no library dependencies outside the STL, which makes it possible to use on any platform that has a C++ compiler. We have provided methods to build the FlatBuffers library, example applications, and unit tests for Android, Linux, OSX and Windows.
The schema compiler can generate code to read and write FlatBuffers binary files for C++ and Java. It can additionally parse JSON-formatted data into type-safe binaries.

Game developers can use this library to store game data with less overhead than alternative solutions (e.g. Protocol Buffers or JSON). We’re excited about the possibilities, and want to hear from you about how we can make this even better!

Download the latest release from the FlatBuffers page in GitHub and join our discussion list!

Fun Propulsion Labs is a team within Google that’s dedicated to advancing gaming on Android and other platforms.

By Roman Nurik and Timothy Jordan, Design and Developer Advocates on Android Wear

A few weeks ago, Timothy and I were chatting about designing apps for wearables to validate some of the content we’re planning for Google I/O 2014¹. We talked a lot about how these devices require scrutiny to preserve user attention while exposing some unique new surface areas for developers. We also discussed user context and how the apps we make should be opportunistic, presenting themselves in contexts where they’re useful; it’s more important than ever to think of apps on wearable devices not as icons on a grid but rather as functional overlays on the operating system itself.

But while I’d designed a number of touch UIs for Android in the past and Timothy had a ton of experience with Glass, neither of us had really gone through the exercise of actually designing an app for Android Wear. So we set out to put our ideas in practice and see what designing for this new platform is like.

Before we got started, we needed an idea. Last year, I participated in an informal Glass design sprint in NYC run by Nadya Direkova, and my sprint team came up with a walking tour app. The idea was you’d choose from a set of nearby tours, walk between the stops, and at each stop on the tour, learn about the destination.

While the design sprint ended at rough mocks, the idea stuck around in my mind, and came up again during this exercise. It seemed like a perfect example of a contextually aware app that could enhance your Android Wear experience.

Designing a walking tour app for Android Wear

We started fleshing out the idea by thinking through the app’s entry points: how will users “launch” this app? While exposing a “start XYZ walking tours app” voice command is pretty standard, it’d be interesting to also suggest nearby walking tours as you go about your day by presenting notifications in the user’s context stream. These notifications would be “low priority,” so you’d only see them after addressing the more important stuff like text messages from friends. And with today’s geofencing and location functionality in Google Play services, this type of contextual awareness is possible in a battery-friendly way.

At this point we were pretty excited and decided to begin mocking up the UI. Rather than starting from scratch, we used Taylor Ling’s excellent Android Wear 0.1 design template as a baseline, which includes templates for both square and round devices. We started with square since we were most familiar with rectangle UI design:

I’ve got to admit, it was pretty thrilling designing in such a constrained environment. 140×140 dp (280×280 px @ XHDPI) isn’t a lot of space to work with, so you need to make some tough choices about when and how to present information. But these are exactly the types of problems that make design really, really fun. You end up spending more time thinking and less time actually pushing pixels around in Photoshop or Sketch.

We pretty quickly fleshed out the rest of the app for square devices. They included just a handful of additional screens: a dynamic notification showing the distance to your next stop, and a 4-page detail screen when you arrive at the tour stop, where you can spend a few moments reading about where you’re standing.

Seeing our design in real life

Here’s the thing—there’s only so much you can do in Photoshop. To truly understand a platform as a designer, you really need to use (and ideally live with) a real device, and see your work on that device. Only then can you fully evaluate the complexity of your flows, the size of your touch targets, or the legibility of your text.

Luckily, Timothy and I both had test devices—I sported an LG G Watch prototype and Timothy carried a Moto 360 prototype. We then needed a way to quickly send screens to our devices so we could iterate on the design. A few years ago I’d published the Android Design Preview tool that lets you mirror a part of your screen to a connected Android device. Much to our delight, the tool worked great with Android Wear! After seeing our mocks show up on my LG G Watch, we made a few small tweaks and felt much more confident that the overall idea “felt right” on the wrist.

Designing for round devices

We’d never designed round UIs before, so we weren’t sure what this new adventure would be like. Quite frankly, it ended up being unbelievably easy: tweaking all 8 of our screen mocks for round took under an hour. When you’re only showing the most important 2 or 3 pieces of information on screen at a time, that’s only 2 or 3 pieces of information you need to optimize for round devices. All in all, there were only a few types of minor tweaks we made:

• Scaled up backgrounds to 160×160 dp (320×320 px @ XHDPI)
• Bumped up content margins from 12dp on square to 26dp on round; this means content was 116×116 dp on square and only a little smaller at 108×108 dp on round
• Pushed down circular actions like “Continue tour” to better vertically center with the watch frame
• Center-aligned certain short snippets of text on round devices as opposed to left-aligning on square
• Dropped the side padding for context stream cards (the platform automatically does this for notifications, so there isn’t any actual work to do here)

It’s hard to articulate the excitement we felt when we mirrored the mocks to Timothy’s Moto 360 prototype with Android Design Preview. To put it lightly, our minds were blown.

And that was it—with round and square mocks complete, and mirrored on our devices, we’d gotten our first glimpse at designing apps for this exciting new platform. Below are our completed mocks for the tour discovery and engagement flows, not a grid of app icons in sight. You can download the full PSDs here.

An eye-opening experience

Designing for Android Wear is pretty different from designing for the desktop, phones or tablets. Just like with Glass, you really need to think carefully about the information and actions you present to the user, and even more so about the contexts in which your app will come to the surface.

As a designer, that’s the fun part—working with constraints involving scarce resources like device size and user attention means it’s more important than ever to think deeply about your ideas and iterate on them early and often. The actual pixel-pushing part of the process is far, far easier.

So there we were, putting our ideas into practice, on real actual device prototypes that we could’ve only dreamed about only a few years ago. It was the most fun I’ve had designing UIs in a long time. Remember that feeling when you first dreamed up an app, mocked or even coded it up, and ran it on your Android phone? It was that same feeling all over again, but amplified, because you were actually wearing your app. I can’t wait for you all to experience it!

¹ Have we mentioned #io14 will have tons of great content around both design and wearable computing? Make sure to tune in June 25th and 26th!

Join the discussion on

+Android Developers

By Ben Frenkel, Google Play Games team

Hey game developers, back in March you may remember we added new game statistics in the Google Play Developer Console for those of you who had implemented Google Play Games: our cross-platform game services for Android, iOS and the web.

Starting today, we’re providing more insights into how your games are being used by adding country, age, and gender dimensions to the existing set of reports available in the Developer console. You’ll see demographics integrated into Overview stats as well as the Players reports for New and Active users.

In the Overview stats you can now see highlights of activity by age group, most active countries, and gender.

With a better understanding of your users’ demographic composition, you’ll be able to make more effective decisions to improve retention and monetization. Here a few ways you could imagine using these new stats:

• You just launched your new game globally, and expected it do particularly well in Germany. Using country demographic data, you see that Germany is much less active than expected. After some digging, you realize that your tutorial was not properly translated to German. Based on this insight, you immediately roll out a fix to see if you can improve active users in Germany.

In the Players stats section the new metrics reveal trends in how your app is doing across age groups, countries, and gender.

• After Looking at your new demographics report you realize that your game is really popular with women in their mid-20s. Your in-app purchase data corroborates this, showing that the one female hero character is the most popular purchase. Empowered by this data, you race to add female hero characters to your game.

Additionally, if you’re already using Google Play game services, there’s no extra integration needed! By logging in to the Google Play Developer Console you can start using demographics to better inform your decisions today.

Join the discussion on

+Android Developers

Today’s post on #AndroidWear is from +Wayne Piekarski.

Stacking notifications with the Android Wear Developer Preview is really simple—it requires only a few lines of extra notification code:

Notification wearableNotification =
    new WearableNotifications.Builder(
        notificationCompatBuilder)
    .setGroup(“messages”)
    .build();

A few weeks ago, I published a new DevBytes video which covered how to implement stacking notifications with Android Wear:

In the video, I included a demonstration of what these notifications look like in the emulator, and thought it would be useful to share the code for the demo. If you’re just getting started with stacked notifications, this should be all you need to get up and running right away. So here it is, with some additional instructions below. The wearable-specific code is highlighted and in bold.

Bitmap bitmapMila = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(), R.drawable.mila128);

// Nuke all previous notifications and generate unique ids
NotificationManagerCompat.from(this).cancelAll();
int notificationId = 0;

// String to represent the group all the notifications will be a part of
final String GROUP_KEY_MESSAGES = "group_key_messages";

// Group notification that will be visible on the phone
NotificationCompat.Builder builderG = new NotificationCompat.Builder(this)
    .setContentTitle("2 Pet Notifications")
    .setContentText("Mila and Dylan both sent messages")
    .setSmallIcon(R.drawable.ic_launcher)
    .setLargeIcon(bitmapMila);
Notification summaryNotification = new WearableNotifications.Builder(builderG)
    .setGroup(GROUP_KEY_MESSAGES, WearableNotifications.GROUP_ORDER_SUMMARY)
    .build();

// Separate notifications that will be visible on the watch
Intent viewIntent1 = new Intent(this, MainActivity.class);
PendingIntent viewPendingIntent1 =
    PendingIntent.getActivity(this, notificationId+1, viewIntent1, 0);
NotificationCompat.Builder builder1 = new NotificationCompat.Builder(this)
    .addAction(R.drawable.ic_action_done, "Treat Fed", viewPendingIntent1)
    .setContentTitle("Message from Mila")
    .setContentText("What's for dinner? "
                    + "Can we have steak?")
    .setSmallIcon(R.drawable.ic_launcher);
Notification notification1 = new WearableNotifications.Builder(builder1)
    .setGroup(GROUP_KEY_MESSAGES)
    .build();

Intent viewIntent2 = new Intent(this, MainActivity.class);
PendingIntent viewPendingIntent2 =
     PendingIntent.getActivity(this, notificationId+2, viewIntent2, 0);
NotificationCompat.Builder builder2 = new NotificationCompat.Builder(this)
    .addAction(R.drawable.ic_action_done, "Water Filled", viewPendingIntent2)
    .setContentTitle("Message from Dylan")
    .setContentText("Can you refill our water bowl?")
    .setSmallIcon(R.drawable.ic_launcher);
Notification notification2 = new WearableNotifications.Builder(builder2)
    .setGroup(GROUP_KEY_MESSAGES)
    .build();

// Issue the group notification
NotificationManagerCompat notificationManager = NotificationManagerCompat.from(this);
notificationManager.notify(notificationId+0, summaryNotification);

// Issue the separate wear notifications
notificationManager.notify(notificationId+2, notification2);
notificationManager.notify(notificationId+1, notification1);

Using the code is really simple:

1. First, make sure you’ve followed the Android Wear Developer Preview instructions to get your IDE set up correctly.
2. Once the IDE is ready, create a new Android project with all the defaults. Make sure it compiles and runs before you continue to make fixing any problems easier.
3. Add the necessary support libraries by following the installation instructions so that your project supports wearable notifications.
4. Create a method in your main activity called showTheNotifications(), and paste all the code into it.
5. Call showTheNotifications() from your activity’s onCreate method to show the notifications automatically at startup. Alternatively, add a button that calls the method on click.
6. Add the below imports, or just have your IDE auto-add the missing imports.

   import android.support.v4.app.NotificationCompat;
   import android.app.Notification;
   import android.app.PendingIntent;
   import android.content.Intent;
   import android.graphics.Bitmap;
   import android.graphics.BitmapFactory;
   import android.preview.support.v4.app.NotificationManagerCompat;
   import android.preview.support.wearable.notifications.WearableNotifications;
   

7. Add the images on the right to your drawable directories.
   
   res/drawable-xxhdpi/ic_action_done.png

res/drawable-nodpi/mila128.jpg
8. Build the project. If there are any compile issues try a clean build of the project.
9. You can now run the application on your phone, and see the results on the wearable.

And that’s basically it, it’s really simple! Once you have a good feel for how the code works, make sure to check out the stacking notifications documentation to learn more. Make sure to also familiarize yourself with the Android Wear Design Principles, which explain more about the types of icons that should be used for actions. For the picture of the dog, it’s important you use an image that is quite small, and not straight from a digital camera, since there are limits to the size of the images that can be handled by the API.

I hope this post is useful in helping you to get started with Android Wear notifications!

A new release of Google Play services has now been rolled out to the world, and as usual we have a number of features that can make your apps better than before. This release includes a major enhancement to Maps with the introduction of Street View, as well as new features in Location, Games Services, Mobile Ads, and Wallet API.

Here are the highlights of Google Play services release 4.4:

Google Maps Android API

Starting with a much anticipated announcement for the Google Maps Android API: Introducing Street View. You can now embed Street View imagery into an activity enabling your users to explore the world through panoramic 360-degree views. Programmatically control the zoom and orientation (tilt and bearing) of the Street View camera, and animate the camera movements over a given duration. Here is an example of what you can do with the API, where the user navigates forward one step:

We’ve also added more features to the Indoor Maps feature of the API. You can turn the default floor picker off – useful if you want to build your own. You can also detect when a new building comes into focus, and find the currently-active building and floor. Great if you want to show custom markup for the active level, for example.

Activity Recognition

And while we are on the topic of maps, let’s turn to some news in the Location API. For those of you that have used this API, you may have seen the ability already there to detect if the device is in a vehicle, on a bicycle, on foot, still, or tilting.

In this release, two new activity detectors have been added: Running, and Walking. So a great opportunity to expand your app to be even more responsive to your users. And for you that have not worked with this capability earlier, we hardly need to tell the cool things you can do with it. Just imagine combining this capability with features in Maps, Games Services, and other parts of Location…

Games Services Update

In the 4.3 release we introduced Game Gifts, which allows you to request gifts or wishes. And although there are no external API changes this time, the default requests sending UI has been extended to now allow the user to select multiple Game Gifts recipients. For your games this means more collaboration and social engagement between your players.

Mobile Ads

For Mobile Ads, we’ve added new APIs for publishers to display in-app promo ads, which enables users to purchase advertised items directly. We’re offering app developers control of targeting specific user segments with ads, for example offering high-value users an ad for product A, or new users with an ad for product B, etc.

With these extensions, users can conveniently purchase in-app items that interest them, advertisers can reach consumers, and your app connects the dots; a win-win-win in other words.

Wallet Fragments

For the Instant Buy API, we’ve now reduced the work involved to place a Buy With Google button in an app. The WalletFragment API introduced in this release makes it extremely easy to integrate Google Wallet Instant Buy with an existing app. Just configure these fragments and add them to your app.

And that’s another release of Google Play services. The updated Google Play services SDK is now available through the Android SDK manager. Coming up in June is Google I/O, no need to say more…

For the release video, please see:
DevBytes: Google Play services 4.4

For details on the APIs, please see:
New Features in Google Play services 4.4

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By Austin Robison, Android Wear team

Android Wear extends the Android platform to wearables. These small, powerful devices give users useful information just when they need it. Watches powered by Android Wear respond to spoken questions and commands to provide info and get stuff done. These new devices can help users reach their fitness goals and be their key to a multiscreen world.

We designed Android Wear to bring a common user experience and a consistent developer platform to this new generation of devices. We can’t wait to see what you will build.

Getting started

Your app’s notifications will already appear on Android wearables and starting today, you can sign up for the Android Wear Developer Preview. You can use the emulator provided to preview how your notifications will appear on both square and round Android wearables. The Developer Preview also includes new Android Wear APIs which will let you customize and extend your notifications to accept voice replies, feature additional pages, and stack with similar notifications. Head on over to developer.android.com/wear to sign up and learn more.

For a brief introduction to the developer features of Android Wear, check out these DevBytes videos. They include demos and a discussion about the code snippets driving them.

What’s next?

We’re just getting started with the Android Wear Developer Preview. In the coming months we’ll be launching new APIs and features for Android Wear devices to create even more unique experiences for the wrist.

Join the Android Wear Developers community on Google+ to discuss the Preview and ask questions.

We’re excited to see what you build!

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Day 2 of Game Developers Conference 2014 is getting underway and today Google is hosting a special Developer Day at Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Join us at the sessions

Building on yesterday’s announcements for game developers, we’ll be presenting a series of sessions that walk you through the new features, services, and tools, explaining how they work and what they can bring to your games.

We’ll also be talking with you about how to reach and engage with hundreds of millions of users on Google Play, build Games that scale in the cloud, grow in-game advertising businesses with AdMob, track revenue with Google Analytics, as well as explore new gaming frontiers, like Glass.

If you’re at the conference, the Google Developer Day sessions are a great opportunity to meet the developer advocates, engineers, and product managers of the Google products that drive users, engagement and retention for your games. If you’re remote, we invite you to sit-in on the sessions by joining the livestream below or on Google Developers channel on YouTube.

The Developer Day sessions (and livestream) kick off at 10:00AM PDT (5:00PM UTC). A complete agenda is available on the GDC Developer Day page.

LiquidFun 1.0

Last December we announced the initial release of LiquidFun, a C++ library that adds particle physics, including realistic fluid dynamics, to the open-source Box2D.

To get Google Developer Day started, we’re releasing LiquidFun 1.0, an update that adds multiple particle systems, new particle behaviors, and other new features.

Check out the video below to see what Liquid Fun 1.0 can do, visit the LiquidFun home page, or join today’s LiquidFun session at Google Developer Day to learn how LiquidFun works and how to use particle physics in your games. The session starts at 4:35PM PDT (11:35PM UTC).

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