Android Developers Blog: Android

Updating your games for modern Android

20 July 2018

Posted by Tom Greenaway, Senior Partner Developer Advocate Last year we announced that starting from August 2018 Google Play will require all new apps and games to target a recent Android API level – set to API level 26 (Android 8.0 Oreo), or higher. Additionally, this requirement will extend to updates for existing apps and games starting from November 2018. Every new Android version introduces changes that bring significant security and performance improvements – and enhance the user experience of Android overall. Updating your games to target the latest API level ensures that your users can benefit from these improvements, while still allowing your games to run on older Android versions. Simple next steps:

Install the Android 8.0 Oreo SDK (API level 26) via Android Studio by navigating to (Tools > Android > SDK Manager > Android SDK > SDK Platforms).

Update your game to target API level 26 and see whether your game has any incompatibilities or issues as soon as possible. Update any external dependencies as necessary. Learn more about the incremental changes between versions of Android here.

If you are using an advertising network, SDK or plugin which is incompatible with API level 26, reach out to your contacts and find out their timeline for supporting target API level 26. The sooner they're aware of these changes the better.

If you build your game with Unity, support for target API 26 is built into Unity 5.6.6 and beyond. Simply ensure the latest target API level is selected in your Android build settings for Unity (Build Settings > Android > Player Settings). For versions of Unity 5.6.5 and prior, consult this documentation which includes a workaround for versions dating back to 4.3.

For games built with Unreal, check your Android platform settings has the "Target SDK Version" set to 26.

If you use Cocos2D-X, check the target API level in the gradle.properties file that is generated.

Significant changes to be aware of:

Since API 23, we have required permissions be requested at runtime which helps streamline the app install process.

Since API 24, apps can no longer dynamically link against non-NDK libraries. If your app (including third-party static libraries) contains native code, you should only be using public NDK APIs.

If your game uses Android push notifications, the Google Play Services SDK in your game will need to be updated to version 10.2.1 or above for your game to support API level 26.

If your game uses opaque binary blobs (OBB), then your game must check if it can access the directory before attempting to access the OBB files themselves. We recommend explicitly requesting permission for access using the Runtime Permissions API, and gracefully handling cases wherein the permission is not granted. Additionally, add an entry in the manifest for the external storage access:

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE" />

Moving ahead Remember, updating the target API level is just the first step – make sure your game is compatible with the behavior changes between your current target API level and API level 26. Check out further guidance on the changes in past versions of Android to help in your migration process. These policy changes are important for moving the Android ecosystem forward and keeping it healthy for our users – and yours.

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How creating an Action can complement your Android app

10 July 2018

Posted by Neto Marin - Actions on Google Developer Advocate There are millions of apps in the Android ecosystem, so helping yours get discovered can require some investment. Your app needs to offer something that differentiates it from other similar apps to stand out to users. Building a companion Action is a fast and simple way to increase your Android app's potential reach by creating a new entrypoint from devices covered by the Google Assistant. This lets you bring your services to users without needing to install anything through voice, and can bring people into your app when it can provide more value. Your companion Action complements your Android app's experience by offering some of your services through the Google Assistant, which is available on more than 500 million devices including speakers, phones, cars, headphones, and more. Creating an Action provides a frictionless way for users to start engaging with your services wherever the Google Assistant is available. Creating an Action for the Assistant will extend your brand presence, bringing your services to new devices and contexts as users interact with the Google Assistant. Feature what your app does better It is probably a mistake to try to rewrite all of your Android app as a conversational Action, since voice is a different modality with different constraints and usage patterns. Instead, you should start by selecting the most important or popular features in your app that translate well into a voice context and can be more easily accomplished there. Then, you can create your conversational experience to offer these features on Google Assistant devices. Check out the Conversation design site, which has several articles and guides about how to create a great voice UI. Let's take a look at a hypothetical example. Imagine you have a mobile commerce app. Some features include searching for products, navigating to different categories, adding payment information, and checking out. You could build an Action for the Assistant with most of the same functionality, but we encourage you to look for what makes the most sense in a conversational experience. In this case, your Action could focus on everything that a user would want to know after they've purchased a product through your Android app or web page. You could offer a quick way to get updates about a purchase's status (if you provide different states for payment/purchase process) and shipment information, or provide an interface for re-ordering a user's favorite products. Then, your users would be able to ask something like, "Hey Google, ask Voice Store about my last purchase." Or, to reach users who have never made a purchase before, you could create an Action to offer exciting deals for common products. For example, you could create an Action that is invoked with, "Hey Google, ask Voice Store what are the deals on TVs today". As you can see, starting with a "hero" use case for your Action is an exciting way to introduce conversational features that complement your Android app, and it will take less time than you think. At Google I/O 2018, we presented a talk, "Integrating your Android apps with the Google Assistant" which contains more details and examples for developers. Delivering user's purchases across surfaces In-app purchases, subscriptions, and one-time products have proven successful for Android developers when it comes to monetization, allowing developers to offer different kinds of digital goods and additional value for paying users. These types of monetization are proven to drive user conversion and make the app more profitable. Google Play Billing offers a series of tools, APIs, and documentation to help developers manage the subscription life-cycle, build server-side validation, and much more. If you are new to in-app billing, check out the Google Play Billing Overview page. Now, Android developers can expand where users can access these goods or upgraded experiences by offering them through Actions, as well. This expansion is accomplished by honoring the user's entitlements on Google Play across different surfaces and devices, reaching users when they can't (or don't want to) use an app, like while cooking or driving. For non-Android platforms, you'll need to ask your users to link their accounts. You can then use your user's account history to identify what purchases they've made on other surfaces. Check the Accessing Digital Purchases page for a step-by-step guide on how to enable access to the user's purchases and request and parse the purchase data. What's next? If you are not familiar with Actions on Google yet, start by checking out our overview page, which describes the platform in detail and tells you all you need to know to create your Actions for the Google Assistant. Stay tuned for more posts about how to improve your Android app experience with Actions on Google. Thanks for reading!

Android Emulator - AMD Processor & Hyper-V Support

09 July 2018

Posted by Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

Since the major revamp of the Android Emulator two years ago, we have focused on delivering a fast and feature-rich emulator to help you build great app experiences for users. Today, the Android Emulator is the top device deployed to from Android Studio — more than 2x over physical Android devices. We are humbled to hear from many of you that the Android Emulator has come a long way, but we are not done yet. Making the Android Emulator faster is one of the top priorities for the Android Studio team. Over the last few releases, we have launched quick boot & emulator snapshots for quickly starting and resuming emulator sessions in under 2 seconds. Up until now, our emulator experience has almost universally worked on macOS^® and Linux computers. But for users of Microsoft^® Windows^® or the Microsoft^® Hyper-V^™ platform, our hardware accelerated speed enhancements for the Android Emulator only worked with computers with Intel^® processors. Support for AMD^® processors and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor are two long-standing user requests from the Android developer community that we are happy to address with this Android Emulator update. Today, you can download the latest Android Emulator release, which is enabled to run x86 based Android Virtual Devices (AVD) on computers that use AMD processors. This exciting update makes the Android Emulator more accessible to a new set of Android app developers that were previously limited to software emulation, but can now have hardware accelerated performance. Moreover, for those of you who use Hyper-V to run your local app backend, the Android Emulator can now also coexist with other Hyper-V-backed applications on Windows^® 10. Thanks to a new Microsoft Windows Hypervisor Platform (WHPX) API and recent open-source contributions from Microsoft, even more Android app developers can take advantage of all the speed improvements and features in the Android Emulator.

Android Emulator running on Windows 10 with AMD Processor Screenshot Configuration: Asus ROG Strix GL 702ZC, Processor: AMD^® Ryzen^™ 7 1700 Processor, Chipset: AMD 5350, Graphics: AMD^® Radeon^™ RX580 Support for these technologies was initially available in the v27.3.8 Android Emulator canary release and today we are releasing this set of preview features (AMD processor & Hyper-V support) on the stable channel for more feedback. Alongside this update, we have added additional speed improvements in loading emulator snapshots for those developers using the Intel^® Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM). How to use Linux If you use Linux for Android app development, the Android Emulator will continue to use the native Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor for both Intel and AMD based computers for a fast and performant virtualization solution. An update to the v27.3.8 Android Emulator will offer you the new snapshots UI along with improvements to performance, reliability and resource usage. macOS For OS X v10.10 Yosemite and higher, the Android Emulator uses the built-in Hypervisor.Framework by default, and falls back to using the Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM) if Hypervisor.Framework fails to initialize (such as when running on OS X v10.9 or earlier). Once you update to the latest Android Emulator on macOS, you will also have access to the new snapshots UI along with under the hood performance and reliability improvements.

Android Emulator - Snapshots Extended Controls Microsoft Windows On Intel x86-based computers, the Android Emulator will continue to use Intel HAXM by default. Intel HAXM is a mature and open-sourced hypervisor solution developed by Intel. Thanks to on-going development by Intel, the fastest emulator performance on Windows is still with Intel HAXM. To download the latest Intel HAXM v7.2.0, check for updates in the Android SDK Manager. If you have an AMD processor in your computer you need the following setup requirements to be in place:

AMD Processor - Recommended: AMD^® Ryzen^™ processors

Android Studio 3.2 Beta or higher - download via Android Studio Preview page

Android Emulator v27.3.8+ - download via Android Studio SDK Manager

x86 Android Virtual Device (AVD) - Create AVD

Windows 10 with April 2018 Update

Enable via Windows Features: "Windows Hypervisor Platform"

Windows Hypervisor Platform setting in Windows 10 If you want to use Hyper-V at the same time as the Android Emulator on your Intel processor-based computer, you will also need the same Android Studio and Android Emulator versions as listed above, but with the additional requirements:

Enable via Windows Features: "Hyper-V" - Only available for Windows 10 Professional/Education/Enterprise

Intel Processor : Intel^® Core^™ processor that supports Virtualization Technology (VT-x), Extended Page Tables (EPT), and Unrestricted Guest (UG) features. Additionally VT-x needs to be enabled in the BIOS.

For more setup tips and troubleshooting details, check out the documentation page. Again, for existing Windows users who have an Intel-based processor, the Android Emulator will continue to use the faster and recommended Intel HAXM configuration. For those using AMD processors, and those who use Hyper-V hypervisors, this should be an exciting step forward to start using the Android Emulator. Next Steps & Feedback Download the latest Android Emulator from the Android Studio 3.2 Beta SDK Manager for the latest performance updates across all supported platforms that you are using. We are going to continue to invest in performance improvements for each of the platforms and we look forward to your feedback and feature requests. If you find a bug or issue, feel free to file an issue. Connect with us -- the Android Studio development team ‐ on our Google+ page or on Twitter.

Compiler-based security mitigations in Android P

27 June 2018

Posted by Ivan Lozano, Information Security Engineer Android's switch to LLVM/Clang as the default platform compiler in Android 7.0 opened up more possibilities for improving our defense-in-depth security posture. In the past couple of releases, we've rolled out additional compiler-based mitigations to make bugs harder to exploit and prevent certain types of bugs from becoming vulnerabilities. In Android P, we're expanding our existing compiler mitigations, which instrument runtime operations to fail safely when undefined behavior occurs. This post describes the new build system support for Control Flow Integrity and Integer Overflow Sanitization. Control Flow Integrity A key step in modern exploit chains is for an attacker to gain control of a program's control flow by corrupting function pointers or return addresses. This opens the door to code-reuse attacks where an attacker executes arbitrary portions of existing program code to achieve their goals, such as counterfeit-object-oriented and return-oriented programming. Control Flow Integrity (CFI) describes a set of mitigation technologies that confine a program's control flow to a call graph of valid targets determined at compile-time. While we first supported LLVM's CFI implementation in select components in Android O, we're greatly expanding that support in P. This implementation focuses on preventing control flow manipulation via indirect branches, such as function pointers and virtual functions—the 'forward-edges' of a call graph. Valid branch targets are defined as function entry points for functions with the expected function signature, which drastically reduces the set of allowable destinations an attacker can call. Indirect branches are instrumented to detect runtime violations of the statically determined set of allowable targets. If a violation is detected because a branch points to an unexpected target, then the process safely aborts.

Figure 1. Assembly-level comparison of a virtual function call with and without CFI enabled. For example, Figure 1 illustrates how a function that takes an object and calls a virtual function gets translated into assembly with and without CFI. For simplicity, this was compiled with -O0 to prevent compiler optimization. Without CFI enabled, it loads the object's vtable pointer and calls the function at the expected offset. With CFI enabled, it performs a fast-path first check to determine if the pointer falls within an expected range of addresses of compatible vtables. Failing that, execution falls through to a slow path that does a more extensive check for valid classes that are defined in other shared libraries. The slow path will abort execution if the vtable pointer points to an invalid target. With control flow tightly restricted to a small set of legitimate targets, code-reuse attacks become harder to utilize and some memory corruption vulnerabilities become more difficult or even impossible to exploit. In terms of performance impact, LLVM's CFI requires compiling with Link-Time Optimization (LTO). LTO preserves the LLVM bitcode representation of object files until link-time, which allows the compiler to better reason about what optimizations can be performed. Enabling LTO reduces the size of the final binary and improves performance, but increases compile time. In testing on Android, the combination of LTO and CFI results in negligible overhead to code size and performance; in a few cases both improved. For more technical details about CFI and how other forward-control checks are handled, see the LLVM design documentation. For Android P, CFI is enabled by default widely within the media frameworks and other security-critical components, such as NFC and Bluetooth. CFI kernel support has also been introduced into the Android common kernel when building with LLVM, providing the option to further harden the trusted computing base. This can be tested today on the HiKey reference boards. Integer Overflow Sanitization The UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer's (UBSan) signed and unsigned integer overflow sanitization was first utilized when hardening the media stack in Android Nougat. This sanitization is designed to safely abort process execution if a signed or unsigned integer overflows by instrumenting arithmetic instructions which may overflow. The end result is the mitigation of an entire class of memory corruption and information disclosure vulnerabilities where the root cause is an integer overflow, such as the original Stagefright vulnerability. Because of their success, we've expanded usage of these sanitizers in the media framework with each release. Improvements have been made to LLVM's integer overflow sanitizers to reduce the performance impact by using fewer instructions in ARM 32-bit and removing unnecessary checks. In testing, these improvements reduced the sanitizers' performance overhead by over 75% in Android's 32-bit libstagefright library for some codecs. Improved Android build system support, such as better diagnostics support, more sensible crashes, and globally sanitized integer overflow targets for testing have also expedited the rollout of these sanitizers. We've prioritized enabling integer overflow sanitization in libraries where complex untrusted input is processed or where there have been security bulletin-level integer overflow vulnerabilities reported. As a result, in Android P the following libraries now benefit from this mitigation:

libui

libnl

libmediaplayerservice

libexif

libdrmclearkeyplugin

libreverbwrapper

Future Plans Moving forward, we're expanding our use of these mitigation technologies and we strongly encourage vendors to do the same with their customizations. More information about how to enable and test these options will be available soon on the Android Open Source Project. Acknowledgements: This post was developed in joint collaboration with Vishwath Mohan, Jeffrey Vander Stoep, Joel Galenson, and Sami Tolvanen

Android Studio 3.2 Beta

21 June 2018

Posted by Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

Starting today, you can download Android Studio 3.2 Beta. Previewed at Google I/O 2018, the latest release of the official Android IDE is focused on helping onboard you to all the new features launched around Google I/O -- Android JetPack, Android P Developer Preview, and the new Android App Bundle format. There are also several other exciting new features included in Android Studio 3.2 to accelerate your app development, such as Emulator Snapshots and the Energy Profiler. As the usage of Android Studio has grown in the 3.5 years since version 1.0, we have also become increasingly obsessed with quality. We continue to invest in quality because we know that millions of app developers spend almost everyday in Android Studio and need a reliable set of tools. Stability, build times, and other quality work will be the primary focus for our next release once we finish Android Studio 3.2. We also did not want to wait, so we have made checkins to address memory leaks and performance issues as well as fixed more than 450 bugs. Thank you for the continued feedback and please keep it coming so we can focus on the areas you care about most in the next version of Android Studio. If want to try out the latest features, and assess the improvements in quality, you can download Android Studio on the beta release channel. What is inside of Android Studio 3.2 Building on the canary release of Android Studio 3.2, the Beta release includes:

Android App Bundle support - The Android App Bundle is a new publishing format that uses the Google Play's Dynamic Delivery, which delivers a smaller, optimized APK that only contains the resources needed for a specific device. Without any code changes, you can take advantage of the app size savings of an Android App Bundle by navigating to Build → Build Bundle / APK or Build → Generate Signed Bundle / APK.

Build Android App Bundle

Emulator Snapshots - With Android Studio 3.2 you can create snapshots at any emulator state and then start a snapshot in under 2 seconds. You can pre-configure an Android Virtual Device (AVD) snapshot with the apps, data and settings that you want and then repeatedly go back to the same snapshot. Learn more.

Android Emulator Snapshots

Energy Profiler - The new Energy Profiler in the performance profiler suite can help you understand the energy impact of your app on an Android device. You can now visualize the estimated energy usage of system components, plus inspect background events that may contribute to battery drain.

Energy Profiler Check out the full write-up of all the major features organized by development flow listed below and on the canary blog:

Develop

Navigation Editor
AndroidX Refactoring
Sample Data
Material Design Update
Android Slices
CMakeList editing
What's New Assistant
New Lint Checks
Intellij Platform Update

Build

Android App Bundle
D8 Desugaring
R8 Optimizer

Test

Android Emulator Snapshots
Screen Record in Android Emulator
Virtual Scene Android Emulator Camera
ADB Connection Assistant

Optimize

Energy Profiler
System Trace
Profiler Sessions
Automatic CPU Recording
JNI Reference Tracking

Sessions at Google I/O '18 With the release of Android Studio 3.2 at Google I/O '18, the Android Studio team also presented a series of sessions about Android Studio. Watch the following videos to see the latest features in action and to get tips & tricks on how to use Android Studio:

What's new in Android development tools

An overview of all the recent features in Android Studio for Android app developers. The session includes demos and a tour de force presentation of relevant features that will accelerate developers' workflow on the latest Android APIs.

What's new with the Android build system

A deep dive into the new features of the Android build system.

What's new with ConstraintLayout and Android Studio design tools

This session covers the new features in ConstraintLayout 2.0, as well as the latest functionality added in Android Studio design tools, highlighting how to effectively take advantage of them for designing, prototyping, and building a graphical user interface application.

Improve app performance with Android Studio Profilers

This talk demonstrates how to diagnose and troubleshoot performance problems with your app using Android Studio Profilers. It covers examples of how to use the CPU, memory, network profilers, and highlight what's new.

Best practices using compilers in Android Studio

This session discusses in-depth what is happening to the various compilers used in Android: Java 8 language feature desugaring, the new dexer (D8) and shrinker (R8), and work done on the Kotlin compiler for Android use.

Android Jetpack: manage UI navigation with Navigation Controller

This session discusses how to use the Navigation Editor in Android Studio, XML or the Java API to define your navigation graph, and how that simplifies navigating around your app and handling deep linking.

Download & Feedback Download the latest version of Android Studio 3.2 from the beta channel download page. If you are using a previous versions of Android Studio, make sure you update to Android Studio Beta 1 or higher. If you also want to maintain a stable version of Android Studio, you can run the stable release version and beta release versions of Android Studio at the same time. Learn more. To use the mentioned Android Emulator features make sure you are running at least Android Emulator v27.3+ downloaded via the Android Studio SDK Manager. Please note, to ensure we maintain product quality, some of the features you saw in the canary channel like Navigation Editor are not enabled by default. To turn on canary release channel features go to File → Settings → Experimental → Editor → Enable Navigation Editor. If you find a bug or issue, feel free to file an issue. Connect with us -- the Android Studio development team ‐ on our Google+ page or on Twitter.

Wear OS developer preview reenabling alarms and jobs for background apps

11 June 2018

Posted by Hoi Lam, Lead Developer Advocate, Wear OS by Google

From the outset of the Wear OS by Google developer preview, battery life has been a major focus area. When we talked to the developer community, the update that attracted the most feedback was the disabling of alarms and jobs for background apps. After listening to developer feedback and reviewing the battery statistics, we are reversing this change. This should be reflected in all connected Wear OS preview devices, so there is no need to reflash your device. App Standby Buckets The decision came as we reviewed the feedback and saw that a strict on/off setting prevents reasonable usage and promotes anti-patterns. Going forward, we plan to leverage the App Standby Buckets feature in Android P to fine-tune a suitable setting for Wear OS devices. The exact setting for alarms and jobs for background apps is still being iterated on. Developers are advised to follow the best practices to make sure their apps behave well, whichever bucket the apps are in. Input and data privacy in background apps Another area that developers should pay attention to is the strengthening of input and data privacy for background apps in Android P. Depending on an app's requirements, developers may need to use a foreground service to enable access to the device sensor throughout the day. Please give us your feedback We expect to provide more updates to this preview before the final production release. Please submit any bugs you find via the Wear OS by Google issue tracker. The earlier you submit them, the higher the likelihood that we can include the fixes in the final release.

Project Capillary: End-to-end encryption for push messaging, simplified

05 June 2018

Posted by Giles Hogben, Privacy Engineer and Milinda Perera, Software Engineer Developers already use HTTPS to communicate with Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). The channel between FCM server endpoint and the device is encrypted with SSL over TCP. However, messages are not encrypted end-to-end (E2E) between the developer server and the user device unless developers take special measures. To this end, we advise developers to use keys generated on the user device to encrypt push messages end-to-end. But implementing such E2E encryption has historically required significant technical knowledge and effort. That is why we are excited to announce the Capillary open source library which greatly simplifies the implementation of E2E-encryption for push messages between developer servers and users' Android devices. We also added functionality for sending messages that can only be decrypted on devices that have recently been unlocked. This is designed to support decrypting messages on devices using File-Based Encryption (FBE): encrypted messages are cached in Device Encrypted (DE) storage and message decryption keys are stored in Android Keystore, requiring user authentication. This allows developers to specify messages with sensitive content, that remain encrypted in cached form until the user has unlocked and decrypted their device. The library handles:

Crypto functionality and key management across all versions of Android back to KitKat (API level 19).

Key generation and registration workflows.

Message encryption (on the server) and decryption (on the client).

Integrity protection to prevent message modification.

Caching of messages received in unauthenticated contexts to be decrypted and displayed upon device unlock.

Edge-cases, such as users adding/resetting device lock after installing the app, users resetting app storage, etc.

The library supports both RSA encryption with ECDSA authentication and Web Push encryption, allowing developers to re-use existing server-side code developed for sending E2E-encrypted Web Push messages to browser-based clients. Along with the library, we are also publishing a demo app (at last, the Google privacy team has its own messaging app!) that uses the library to send E2E-encrypted FCM payloads from a gRPC-based server implementation. What it's not

The open source library and demo app are not designed to support peer-to-peer messaging and key exchange. They are designed for developers to send E2E-encrypted push messages from a server to one or more devices. You can protect messages between the developer's server and the destination device, but not directly between devices.

It is not a comprehensive server-side solution. While core crypto functionality is provided, developers will need to adapt parts of the sample server-side code that are specific to their architecture (for example, message composition, database storage for public keys, etc.)

You can find more technical details describing how we've architected and implemented the library and demo here.

All the (Android) Things at Google I/O

25 May 2018

Melissa Daniels, Program Manager for Android Things Android Things enables you to build and maintain IoT devices at scale. We recently released Android Things 1.0 with long-term support for production devices, so you can easily take an IoT device from prototype to commercial product. We packed Google I/O this year with Android Things content to inspire and empower the developer community, from talks and codelabs to interactive demos and a scavenger hunt. Here's a closer look at the fun stuff we had on display that you won't see on the shelves of retail stores. Demos We introduced a handful of new interactive Android Things demos across I/O, showcasing the AI and ML capabilities of the platform, so if you didn't get an opportunity to attend this year, here's a few of our favorites-- perfect for exploring from wherever you are in the world! Smart Flowers: Flos Mobilis

What do you get when you combine machine learning, Android Things and robotics? Flos Mobilis, a continuum robot where each flower is backed by an i.MX7D development board and a camera to run an embedded neural net model that controls the motion of the flower. This is all done offline with no data stored or transmitted. Smart Flowers: Flos Affectus

What if a robot could respond to the way you feel? Flos Affectus is a cluster of robotic flowers that "bloom" and "un-bloom" depending on the expression detected on the user's face. The 4 broad expressions Flos Affectus is trained to detect are: happy, sad, angry, surprised. Using a camera embedded in the head of the alpha flower, the flower cluster is able to detect the user's face and infer the facial emotion. The flower cluster runs offline with no data stored or transmitted and demonstrates movement capabilities and on-device machine learning models. Rosie the Android

Initially designed by a team of Google engineers for the annual Grace Hopper conference, Rosie the Android is a 5 foot selfie-taking Android, complete with machine-learning capabilities. Inspired by Rosie the Riveter, she's a fully controllable robot that can take photos, respond to commands, wheel around and interact with those around her. Did you take a selfie with Rosie at I/O? Redeem your unique access code at g.co/rosie Smart Projector

Smart Projector is built on Lantern, an Android Things project exploring the relationship between surfaces and content — augmenting real-world objects and environments with glanceable, meaningful data. It leverages the Google Experiments project known as Quick Draw, using the world's largest doodling data set that has been shared publicly to help with machine learning research. To learn more about Lantern or to start building your own, start here. 3D Printer

This modified Printrbot Smalls 3D Printer uses a real-time subsystem that showcases the flexibility of Android Things-- a microcontroller does the low-latency motor control, while Android Things handles OpenGL rendering. By keeping most of the logic on a high-level platform like Android you make development and debugging much easier, thanks to Android's great tooling. The future of 3D printing? Making real-time control as easy and portable as the rest of Android Things. Codelabs Phew! That was just the tip of the demo iceberg. With so many demos and so many ways to use Android Things, it's easy to start imagining all the things you can build! At I/O, we helped a lot of developers get started building their first Android Things device using the Android Things Starter Kit. We're making these codelabs available, so you can get to them whenever you need, or build your own. Videos Missed the I/O talks? Catch the recordings of each Android Things talk, so you can start, pause, and rewind at your own leisure. Or, just lean back and watch them all. What's new in Android Things Build effective OEM-level apps on Android Things Build real consumer devices with Android Things Electronic design for Android Things System on Modules Women Techmakers panel: experiences developing on Android Things Product design: how to build better products with Android Things Device provisioning and authentication with Android Things Update production devices in the field with the Android Things Console Start building! On top of all the resources we just mentioned, we have a corpus of information on our developer documentation, and our new community website where you can see more inspiring projects and even submit your own. So, what are you waiting for? Pick up an Android Things Starter Kit and start building something today!

Keeping 2 billion Android devices safe with machine learning

24 May 2018

Posted by Sai Deep Tetali, Software Engineer, Google Play Protect At Google I/O 2017, we introduced Google Play Protect, our comprehensive set of security services for Android. While the name is new, the smarts powering Play Protect have protected Android users for years. Google Play Protect's suite of mobile threat protections are built into more than 2 billion Android devices, automatically taking action in the background. We're constantly updating these protections so you don't have to think about security: it just happens. Our protections have been made even smarter by adding machine learning elements to Google Play Protect. Security at scale

Google Play Protect provides in-the-moment protection from potentially harmful apps (PHAs), but Google's protections start earlier. Before they're published in Google Play, all apps are rigorously analyzed by our security systems and Android security experts. Thanks to this process, Android devices that only download apps from Google Play are 9 times less likely to get a PHA than devices that download apps from other sources. After you install an app, Google Play Protect continues its quest to keep your device safe by regularly scanning your device to make sure all apps are behaving properly. If it finds an app that is misbehaving, Google Play Protect either notifies you, or simply removes the harmful app to keep your device safe. Our systems scan over 50 billion apps every day. To keep on the cutting edge of security, we look for new risks in a variety of ways, such as identifying specific code paths that signify bad behavior, investigating behavior patterns to correlate bad apps, and reviewing possible PHAs with our security experts. In 2016, we added machine learning as a new detection mechanism and it soon became a critical part of our systems and tools. Training our machines

In the most basic terms, machine learning means training a computer algorithm to recognize a behavior. To train the algorithm, we give it hundreds of thousands of examples of that behavior. In the case of Google Play Protect, we are developing algorithms that learn which apps are "potentially harmful" and which are "safe." To learn about PHAs, the machine learning algorithms analyze our entire catalog of applications. Then our algorithms look at hundreds of signals combined with anonymized data to compare app behavior across the Android ecosystem to find PHAs. They look for behavior common to PHAs, such as apps that attempt to interact with other apps on the device, access or share your personal data, download something without your knowledge, connect to phishing websites, or bypass built-in security features. When we find apps exhibit similar malicious behavior, we group them into families. Visualizing these PHA families helps us uncover apps that share similarities to known bad apps, but have yet remained under our radar.

After we identify a new PHA, we confirm our findings with expert security reviews. If the app in question is a PHA, Google Play Protect takes action on the app and then we feed information about that PHA back into our algorithms to help find more PHAs. Doubling down on security So far, our machine learning systems have successfully detected 60.3% of the malware identified by Google Play Protect in 2017. In 2018, we're devoting a massive amount of computing power and talent to create, maintain and improve these machine learning algorithms. We're constantly leveraging artificial intelligence and our highly skilled researchers and engineers from all across Google to find new ways to keep Android devices safe and secure. In addition to our talented team, we work with the foremost security experts and researchers from around the world. These researchers contribute even more data and insights to keep Google Play Protect on the cutting edge of mobile security. To check out Google Play Protect, open the Google Play app and tap Play Protect in the left panel. Acknowledgements: This work was developed in joint collaboration with Google Play Protect, Safe Browsing and Play Abuse teams with contributions from Andrew Ahn, Hrishikesh Aradhye, Daniel Bali, Hongji Bao, Yajie Hu, Arthur Kaiser, Elena Kovakina, Salvador Mandujano, Melinda Miller, Rahul Mishra, Damien Octeau, Sebastian Porst, Chuangang Ren, Monirul Sharif, Sri Somanchi, Sai Deep Tetali, Zhikun Wang, and Mo Yu.

Learn Kotlin Fast with new Kotlin Bootcamp course

21 May 2018

Posted by Aleks Haecky, Training Developer & Word Artist, Google+, LinkedIn, Medium The Kotlin Bootcamp Udacity course is a free, self-paced online course that teaches you the basics of the Kotlin programming language. This introduction to Kotlin was created by Google experts in collaboration with Udacity and is for people who already know how to program. The Kotlin language lets you create apps in less time, writing less code, and with fewer errors. This modern object-oriented language offers a strong type system, type inference, null safety, properties, lambdas, extensions, coroutines, higher-order functions, and many other features. Kotlin is so concise that you can create complete data classes with a single line of code. Kotlin is officially supported for building Android apps, fully interoperates with the Java programming language and libraries, and is included with IntelliJ and Android Studio. In this course you will learn everything you need to program in Kotlin, including:

Basics: Write Kotlin statements and expressions in the IntelliJ REPL Kotlin interpreter using nullable and non-nullable variables, data types, operators, and control structures.

Functions: Create a main() function, create and call functions with default and variable arguments, pass functions as arguments to filters, program simple lambdas, function types, and compact single-expression functions.

Classes: Create a class with methods and properties. Implement constructors and init(). Learn about inheritance, interfaces, and abstract classes. Use the special purpose classes data, object, enum, and sealed.

Beyond the Basics: Dive deeper into Pairs, collections, and constants. Learn how to write extensions, implement generics, apply annotations, and use labeled breaks.

Functional Manipulation: Explore more about lambdas, higher-order functions, and inline.

You'll learn how to use extension functions to add helpful functionality to existing classes. Extend built-in types: fun Int.print() = println(this) 5.print() // prints 5 Extend Android classes: fun Context.toast(text: CharSequence, duration: Int = Toast.LENGTH_SHORT): Toast { return Toast.makeText(this, text, duration).apply { show() } } toast("Hello Toast") Extend your own classes:

class AquariumPlant( val color: String) fun AquariumPlant.print() = println("Pretty Aquarium Plant") val plant = AquariumPlant("green") plant.print() // prints -> Pretty Aquarium Plant When you've completed the course, you will be able to create programs in Kotlin, taking advantage of the features and capabilities that make Kotlin unique. The course is available free, online at Udacity; take it in your own time at your own pace. Go learn how to build apps with less code at https://www.udacity.com/course/ud9011.

Faster Adoption with Project Treble

09 May 2018

Posted by Iliyan Malchev, Project Treble Architect Android P Beta available at android.com/beta As Android continues to evolve, each new release of the OS brings new features, new user experiences, and better security. It is important that these new releases find their way to mobile devices as fast as possible. Yesterday, we announced that the following devices, in addition to Pixel and Pixel 2, now support Android P Beta: Sony Xperia XZ2, Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, Nokia 7 Plus, Oppo R15 Pro, Vivo X21, OnePlus 6 and Essential PH‑1. Android P Beta provides an opportunity for developers and early adopters around the world to try the latest Android release, test their apps, and provide feedback. In this post, we provide an update to Project Treble and the technology that allowed us to bring Android Beta to more phones this year. Building the Foundation Bringing the new Android release quickly to the hands of users takes a combined effort between Google, silicon manufacturers (SM), device manufacturers (OEMs), and carriers. This process is technically challenging and requires aligning the schedules between our industry partners. To reduce the technical difficulties, we launched Project Treble as part of Android Oreo. The Silicon Manufacturers Next, to capitalize on the foundation we built, we collaborated closely with the silicon manufacturers, where the journey of making an Android device always begins. Any device with the latest version of Android must be based on an SoC with the proper software support for it. This software, commonly referred to as the Board Support Package (BSP), contains not only the chip-specific vendor implementation, but also all of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and pieces of the framework that are missing from AOSP itself (e.g., carrier-specific telephony functionality).

The life cycle of an Android Dessert release passes through Silicon Manufacturer Partners, Device Makers and Carriers, until it gets to the hands of the end-users.

These BSPs are the starting point for all device launches. OEMs adapt the vendor implementation to their hardware and add their own custom framework components. While silicon manufacturers always want the latest version of Android in their BSPs, the costs have been prohibitive. By making it possible for newer AOSP frameworks to run on older, already-released vendor implementations, Project Treble dramatically reduces the need for continuous investment in older silicon to support each Android release. Silicon manufacturers have to do all this work just once, rather than every time there is a new release of Android. Solving the Timing Problem However, that first time still has to happen. Below is a chart, which illustrates the effort the various actors expend over time as they go through each release. You can think of it as code churn or bug count over time.

Overlapping timelines and efforts for dessert adoption among Android, Chip Support and OEMs increase the overall effort to get the Android release out.

The chart shows how there is very little time in the year for Google, silicon manufacturers, and the OEMs to all this work. Any overlap between phases causes code churn and introduces significant schedule risk. For OEMs who target the holiday season, it is often safer to launch on an older BSP with a year-old or even older Android version. This dynamic has been at the heart of the slow uptake of the latest Android release, even on flagship devices.

Qualcomm, Samsung and MediaTek co-develop their BSP with Android.

To solve this, we've worked closely with Qualcomm, MediaTek and Samsung Electronics’ System LSI Business to co-develop their BSPs, starting with Android P. Their BSPs are now ready for Android P on a much-accelerated schedule, reducing the overall effort significantly. These silicon manufacturers are now able to provide a stable and high-quality release much earlier than before, allowing OEMs to bring the latest innovations of Android to their customers across the globe.

Devices can launch earlier with Project Treble as the timeline for developing Android and Chipset Support overlaps.

This is an important step in accelerating the adoption of Android releases that bring numerous benefits to our partners, users, and Android developers. We look forward to seeing many more partners launch or upgrade devices to Android P.

Wear OS by Google: AoG support and new enhanced battery saver mode

09 May 2018

Posted by Hoi Lam, Lead Developer Advocate, Wear OS by Google

At Google I/O, we launched the Wear OS by Google developer preview 2. This update added support for Actions on Google (AoG) and more power-related enhancements including a new battery saver mode.
This developer preview includes updated Android Emulator images and a downloadable system image for the Huawei Watch 2 Bluetooth or Huawei Watch 2 Classic Bluetooth. This preview release is intended for developers only and not for daily or consumer use. Therefore, the preview release is only available via manual download and flash. Please refer to the release notes for known issues before downloading and flashing your device.

Support for Actions on Google

We have revamped the Google Assistant on Wear OS to support features such as visual cards, follow-on suggestion chips, and text-to-speech. For developers, we added support for Actions on Google to Wear OS and existing Actions will work on Wear OS out of the box. Be sure to observe best practices for Actions on Google to get the best results such as short concise dialog and adopting to both visual and vocal feedback. This feature does not depend on Android P and is being rolled out to all Wear 2.0 users.

Enhanced battery saver mode

In this Android P developer preview, we are launching an enhanced battery saver mode. While the watch is in this mode, the watch shows a power-efficient watch face and turns off a set of services including radios, the touch screen, and tilt to wake. Users can get the time by pressing the side button. A long press allows the user to switch back to a fully-operational mode and perform tasks such as paying with NFC or replying to a message. Developers should assume that their apps, watch faces, and complication data providers are not available in enhanced battery saver mode.

Update on power saving features

We received much feedback on the power saving features in the last developer preview. As a result, we have updates on two features:

Roll back of Wi-Fi off when BT is disconnected: To improve power consumption, the last developer preview would not connect to Wi-Fi when disconnected from Bluetooth. After listening carefully to user and developer feedback, we decided to roll back this change.
Limited background activity and foreground service: A number of health and fitness developers have said their apps require background monitoring of the user's motion and other vitals throughout the day. The developers said their apps cannot perform background monitoring if background services are unable to set alarms and jobs. For these types of exceptional use cases, we recommend that the apps use foreground services to anchor alarms and jobs. For other use-cases, developer should look at both foreground service as well as limiting jobs and alarms to while the watch is on charger. We are still fine tuning this feature, your feedback and use-cases will be most helpful in helping us get this right.

Smart Reply for bridged notifications

Smart Reply has been enabled for bridged notifications from the user's smartphone for some time. With the latest developer preview, we are introducing simplified Chinese support for our users in China. This feature is powered by an on-device model using TensorFlow Lite and the model is optimized for low-memory, low-power devices.
To use this feature, developers should set setAllowGeneratedReplies of the reply action to true. Here's a sample code snippet with the important part highlighted in bold:

NotificationCompat.Action action =
    new NotificationCompat.Action.Builder(R.drawable.ic_reply_white_24dp,
        replyLabel, replyPendingIntent)
        .addRemoteInput(remoteInput)
        .setAllowGeneratedReplies(true) // <--- true to enable smart replies
        // Wear OS requires a hint to display the reply action inline.
        .extend(new NotificationCompat.Action.WearableExtender()
            .setHintDisplayActionInline(true))
        .build();

In addition, for messaging apps, we recommend that developers use MessagingStyle notifications. This can give the algorithm a more structured data set on which to base its recommendations.

Please give us your feedback

We expect to provide more updates to this preview before the final production release. Please submit any bugs you find via the Wear OS by Google issue tracker. The earlier you submit them, the higher the likelihood that we can include the fixes in the final release.

Google I/O 2018: What’s new in Android

08 May 2018

Posted By Stephanie Cuthbertson, Product Management Director, Android Developer KeynoteDevelopment: making mobile development fast and easy

Android Jetpack — Today, we announced Android Jetpack, designed to accelerate your app development. Android Jetpack is the next generation of Android components, bringing together the benefits of the Support Library -- backwards compatibility and immediate updates -- to a larger set of components, making it quick and easy to build robust, high quality apps. Android Jetpack manages activities like background tasks, navigation, and lifecycle management, so you can eliminate boilerplate code and focus on what makes your app great. Android Jetpack is designed to work well with Kotlin, saving you even more code with Android KTX. The new Android Jetpack components released today include WorkManager, Paging, Navigation, and Slices.

Kotlin — Since announcing support for Kotlin last year, the developer community has embraced the language. Most importantly, 95% of developers tell us they are very happy with using Kotlin for their Android development. And, the more developers use it, the more that number rises. The number of Play Store apps using Kotlin grew 6x in the last year. 35% of pro developers use it, and that number is growing each month. We are continuing to improve the Kotlin developer experience across our libraries, tooling, runtime, documentation and training. Android KTX is launching today as part of Android Jetpack to optimize the Kotlin developer experience. Tooling continues to improve with Android Studio, Lint support, and R8 optimizations. We have even tuned the Android Runtime (ART) in Android P, so that apps built with Kotlin can run faster. We have rolled out Kotlin code snippets in our official documentation, and are publishing a Kotlin version of the API reference documentation today. Earlier this week, we launched a new Kotlin Bootcamp on Udacity, which is a great resource for developers who are new to Kotlin. Lastly, we now have a Kotlin specialization in the Google Developers Experts Program. If you still haven't used Kotlin, I hope you you give it a try.

Android Studio 3.2 Canary — Android Studio 3.2 features tools for Android Jetpack including a visual Navigation Editor and new code refactoring tools. The canary release also includes build tools to create the new Android App Bundle format, Snapshots in the Android Emulator for fast start time, new R8 optimizer for smaller download and install app code size, a new Energy Profiler to measure app impact on battery life, and more. You can download the latest version of Android Studio 3.2 from the canary channel download page.

Distribution: making apps radically smaller

Android App Bundle & Google Play Dynamic Delivery — Introducing the new app model for Android. Dramatically reduce app size with a new publishing format—the Android App Bundle. In Android Studio, you'll now build an app bundle that contains everything your app needs for any device—all the languages, every device screen size, every hardware architecture. Then, when a user downloads your app, Google Play's new Dynamic Delivery will only deliver the code and resources matching the user's device. People see a smaller install size on the Play Store, can download your app more quickly, and save space on their devices.

An example of all resources being delivered to a device via a legacy APK and an example of Dynamic Delivery serving just what’s needed to a device.

(Left) An example of all resources being delivered to a device via a legacy APK.
(Right) An example of Dynamic Delivery serving just what’s needed to a device.

Dynamic features via the Android App Bundle — The Android App Bundle also enables modularization so that you can deliver features on-demand, instead of during install. You can build dynamic feature modules in the latest Android Studio canary release. Join our beta program to publish them on Google Play.

Google Play Console — New features and reports in the Play Console will help you improve your app's performance and grow your business. Read about the improvements to the dashboard, statistics, Android vitals, pre-launch report, acquisition report, and subscriptions dashboard. You can also upload, test, and publish apps using our new publishing format, the Android App Bundle.

Google Play Instant — After launching in beta at GDC, today we announced that all game developers can build instant apps and we're thrilled to welcome Candy Crush Saga. Google Play Instant is now available on over 1 billion devices worldwide from the Play Store, search, social and most places you can tap a link. To make instant apps easier to build, we are launching a Unity plugin and beta integration with Cocos creator this week. Recently, we've started testing Google Play Instant compatibility with AdWords, allowing people to try out games directly from ads, across all the channels reached by Universal App campaigns.

Engagement: bringing users back more and more.

Slices — Slices are UI templates that display a rich array of dynamic, and interactive content from your app, across Android and within Google surfaces. Slices can include live-data, scrolling content, inline actions, and deep-linking into your app so users can do everything from playing music to checking reservation updates. Slices can also contain interactive controls like toggles and sliders. You can get started building Slices today, and they will begin appearing for users soon.

Actions — Actions are a new way to make your app's capabilities and content more accessible, so that people can easily get to it at the right moment. App Actions will appear to users based on usage and relevance, across multiple Google and Android surfaces, such as the Google Search App, the Play Store, the Google Assistant, and the Launcher. App Actions will be available for all developers to try soon, please sign up here if you'd like to be notified. You can also choose to build a Conversational Action as a companion experience to your app. This works on a variety of Assistant-enabled devices, such as speakers and smart displays. Both types of Actions use a new common catalog of intents.

Smarter devices: a powerful platform for IoT devices

Android Things 1.0 — Android Things is Google's managed OS that enables developers to build and maintain Internet of Things devices at scale. Earlier this year at CES, we announced Lenovo, Harman, LG, and iHome are all building Assistant-enabled products powered by Android Things.

After a developer preview with over 100,000 SDK downloads and feedback from more than 10,000 developers, we announced Android Things 1.0 this week. Four new System-on-Modules (SoMs) are now supported on the platform with guaranteed long-term support for three years and additional options for extended support, making it easier to go from prototypes to production. To make product development more seamless than ever, the accompanying Android Things Console is also ready for production. It helps developers easily manage and update their devices with the latest stability fixes and security updates provided by Google.

developer siteCommunity HubGoogle's IoT Developers CommunityOEM Partner ProgramWomen TechmakersGDGsGoogle Developers Certification50 agencies90 Android Developer Expertswinners and nomineesGoogle I/O

Use Android Jetpack to Accelerate Your App Development

08 May 2018

Posted by Chris Sells, Benjamin Poiesz, Karen Ng, Product Management, Android Developer Tools Today we're excited to introduce Android Jetpack, the next generation of components, tools and architectural guidance to accelerate your Android app development. Android Jetpack was inspired by the Support Library, a set of components to make it easy to take advantage of new Android features while maintaining backwards compatibility; it's currently used by 99% of every app in the Play Store. Following on that success, we introduced the Architecture Components, designed to make it easier to deal with data in the face of changes and the complications of the app lifecycle. Since we introduced those components at I/O just one year ago, an overwhelming number of you have adopted them. Companies such as LinkedIn, Zillow and iHeartRadio are seeing fewer bugs, higher testability and more time to focus on what makes their app unique. The Android developer community has been clear -- not only do you like what we've done with these existing components, but we know that you want more! And so more is what you get. What is Android Jetpack?Android Jetpack is a set of components, tools and guidance to make great Android apps. The Android Jetpack components bring together the existing Support Library and Architecture Components and arranges them into four categories:

Android Jetpack components are provided as "unbundled" libraries that are not part of the underlying Android platform. This means that you can adopt each component at your own speed, at your own time. When new Android Jetpack functionality is available, you can add it to your app, deploy your app to the Play Store and give users the new features all in a single day (if you're quick)! The unbundled Android Jetpack libraries have all been moved into the new androidx.* namespace (as described in detail in this post). In addition, your app can run on various versions of the platform because Android Jetpack components are built to provide their functionality independent of any specific version, providing backwards compatibility. Further, Android Jetpack is built around modern design practices like separation of concerns and testability as well as productivity features like Kotlin integration. This makes it far easier for you to build robust, high quality apps with less code. While the components of Android Jetpack are built to work together, e.g. lifecycle awareness and live data, you don't have to use all of them -- you can integrate the parts of Android Jetpack that solve your problems while keeping the parts of your app that are already working great. We know that these benefits are important to you because of feedback like this: "We had been thinking of trying out MVVM in our code base. Android Architecture Components gave us an easy template to implement it. And it's helped make our code more testable as well; the ability to unit test ViewModels has definitely increased code robustness." -- Sumiran Pradhan, Sr. Engineer, Zillow If you want to learn more about how companies are using Android Jetpack components, you can read the developer stories on the Android Developer site. And finally, as you can see from the Android Jetpack diagram above, today we're announcing new components as well. What's NewAndroid Jetpack comes with five new components:

WorkManager alpha release

Navigation alpha release

Paging stable release

Slices alpha release

Android KTX (Kotlin Extensions) alpha release

WorkManagerThe WorkMananager component is a powerful new library that provides a one-stop solution for constraint-based background jobs that need guaranteed execution, replacing the need to use things like jobs or SyncAdapters. WorkManager provides a simplified, modern API, the ability to work on devices with or without Google Play Services, the ability to create graphs of work, and the ability to query the state of your work. Early feedback is very encouraging but we love to make sure that your use cases are covered, too. You can see what we have so far and provide feedback on our alpha on the WorkManager component. NavigationWhile activities are the system provided entry points into your app's UI, their inflexibility when it comes to sharing data between each other and transitions has made them a less than ideal architecture for constructing your in-app navigation. Today we are introducing the Navigation component as a framework for structuring your in-app UI, with a focus on making a single-Activity app the preferred architecture. With out of the box support for Fragments, you get all of the Architecture Components benefits such as Lifecycle and ViewModel while allowing Navigation to handle the complexity of FragmentTransactions for you. Further, the Navigation component allows you to declare transitions that we handle for you, automatically builds the correct Up and Back behavior, includes full support for deep links, and provides helpers for connecting Navigation into the appropriate UI widgets, like the navigation drawer and bottom navigation. But that's not all! The Navigation Editor in Android Studio 3.2 allows you to see and manage your navigation properties visually:

The Navigation component is also in alpha and we'd love your feedback. PagingData presented in an app can be large and costly to load, so it's important to avoid downloading, creating, or presenting too much at once. The Paging component version 1.0.0 makes it easy to load and present large data sets with fast, infinite scrolling in your RecyclerView. It can load paged data from local storage, the network, or both, and lets you define how your content gets loaded. It works out of the box with Room, LiveData, and RxJava. SlicesAnd finally, to round out the set of new features making their debut in Android Jetpack is the Slices component. A "slice" is a way to surface your app's UI inside of the Google Assistant as a result of a search:

You can learn all about the Slices component and how to integrate it into your app on the Android Developer website. Android KTXAnd last but not least, one goal of Android Jetpack takes advantage of Kotlin language features that make you more productive. Android KTX lets you transform Kotlin code like this: view.viewTreeObserver.addOnPreDrawListener( object : ViewTreeObserver.OnPreDrawListener { override fun onPreDraw(): Boolean { viewTreeObserver.removeOnPreDrawListener(this) actionToBeTriggered() return true } }); into more concise Kotlin code like the following: view.doOnPreDraw { actionToBeTriggered() } This is just the first step in bringing Kotlin support to Android Jetpack components; our goal is to make Android Jetpack great for Kotlin developers (and of course Java developers!).You can read more about Android KTX on the Android Developer web site. Getting StartedYou can get started with Android Jetpack at developer.android.com/jetpack. You'll find docs and videos for Android Jetpack, see what's new in Android Jetpack components, participate in the community and give us feedback. We've also created a YouTube playlist devoted to Android Jetpack, so you can tune in for information about Android Jetpack, components, tools and best practices. Getting Started with Android Jetpack will tell you how to bring the Android Jetpack components into your existing apps and help you get started with new Android Jetpack apps. Android Studio 3.2 has great tooling support for Android Jetpack. For building new apps, use the Activity & Fragment+ViewData activity, which you can get to from File | New | New Project in Android Studio:

What's NextWith Android Jetpack, we're taking the benefits of the Support Library and the Architecture Components and turning it up a notch with new components, Android Studio integration and Kotlin support. And while Android Jetpack provides the next generation components, tools and guidance to accelerate your Android development, we've got a lot more that we want to do and we want your help. Please go to developer.android.com/jetpack and let us know what we can do to make your experience building Android apps even better.

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