Posted by Jeff Vander Stoep, Android Security team Android relies heavily on the Linux kernel for enforcement of its security model. To better protect the kernel, we’ve enabled a number of mechanisms within Android. At a high level these protections are grouped into two categories—memory protections and attack surface reduction. Memory protections One of the major security features provided by the

Android N APIs are now final, get your apps ready for Android N! As we put the finishing touches on the next release of Android, which will begin to roll out to consumers later this summer, we’re releasing the 4th Developer Preview of Android N, including the Android N final SDK. And thanks to your continued feedback over the last three releases, all of the APIs are now final as well. If you’ve al

Posted by Ian Lake, Developer Advocate As a developer, there’s a wide range of features added in Android N to take advantage of, but when it comes to designing and building your UI, having strong multi-window support should be at the forefront. The primary mode that users will be interacting with multi-window is through split-screen mode, which is available on both handheld devices and larger tabl

Optimize, Develop, and Debug with Vulkan Developer Tools Posted by Shannon Woods, Technical Program Manager Today we're pleased to bring you a preview of Android development tools for Vulkan™. Vulkan is a new 3D rendering API which we’ve helped to develop as a member of Khronos, geared at providing explicit, low-overhead GPU (Graphics Processor Unit) control to developers. Vulkan’s reduction of CP

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering Today we’re happy to announce a Developer Preview of the N release of Android! We’re doing something a little different this year by releasing the preview early… really early. By releasing a “work in progress” build earlier in development, we have more time to incorporate developer feedback. Also, the earlier preview allows us to hand off the final N release

When talking about the Android Support Library, it is important to realize this isn’t one monolithic library, but a whole collection of libraries that seek to provide backward-compatible versions of APIs, as well as offer unique features without requiring the latest platform version. Version 23.2 adds a few new support libraries as well as new features to many of the existing libraries. Support Ve

Create promo codes for your apps and in-app products in the Google Play Developer Console Posted by Yoshi Tamura, Product Manager, Google Play Over the past six months, a number of new tools in the Google Play Developer Console have been added to help you grow your app or game business on Google Play. Our improved beta testing features help you gather more feedback and fix issues. Store Listing Ex

Posted by, Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android Android Studio 1.5 is now available in the stable release channel. The latest release is focused on delivering more stability, with most of the enhancements being made under the hood (along with addressing several bugs). Some of the specific bug fixes, include the ability to use short names when code-completing custom views. In addition to the stabi

Posted by Wayne Piekarski, Developer Advocate The new LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE is the first watch to run Android 6.0 Marshmallow (API 23) for Android Wear. Currently, all other Android Wear watches implement API 22, and in the coming months, these will receive an OTA update for API 23 as well. So what does this mean for you as an Android Wear developer? You will need to ensure that your app

Posted by Alex Ames, Fun Propulsion Labs* Originally posted to the Google Developers blog At Fun Propulsion Labs we spend some of our time building sample games to help demonstrate how to make easy-to-build, performant, cross-platform games. With the growth of Google Cardboard, we got to work and over many long evenings, feeding our animal hunger on sushi, we came up with Zooshi. Zooshi is an open

Posted by Wayne Piekarski, Developer Advocate Android Auto brings the Android platform to the car in a way that’s optimized for the driving experience, allowing the user to keep their hands on the wheel, and their eyes on the road. To learn how to extend your existing media and messaging apps to work within a car, we collaborated with Udacity to introduce a new course on Ubiquitous Computing with

Posted by Wayne Piekarski, Developer Advocate We recently released a new Udacity course on Ubiquitous Computing with Android Wear, built as a collaboration between Udacity and Google. Android Wear watches allow users to get access to their information quickly, with just a glance, using an always-on display. By taking this course, you will learn everything you need to know to reach your users with

Posted by Ian Lake, Developer Advocate The Android Support Library is a collection of libraries available on a wide array of API levels that help you focus on the unique parts of your app, providing pre-built components, new functionality, and compatibility shims. With the latest release of the Android Support Library (23.1), you will see improvements across the Support V4, Media Router, RecyclerV

Posted by, Barak Turovsky, Product Lead, Google Translate Google Translate is used by more than 500 million people every month, translating more than 100 billion words every single day. Beginning this week, Android mobile users who have the Translate app installed will be able to translate in 90 languages right within some of their favorite apps on any device running the newest version of Android’

Today we are releasing the 1.4 update to the Android Studio stable release channel. Most of the work and enhancements for Android Studio 1.4 are under the hood. However we have a handful of new features that we hope you enjoy and integrate into your workflow. Note that some of new features (e.g. vector assets) require you to use Gradle Plugin 1.4 for your app project. The beta version of the Gradl

Nexus 5X has a quantized density of 420 dpi, which falls in between the xhdpi and xxhdpi primary density buckets. Nexus 6P has a density of 560 dpi, which falls in between the xxhdpi and xxxhdpi buckets. The platform will scale down any assets from a higher resolution bucket, but if those aren’t available, then it will scale up the assets from a lower-density bucket. For best appearance in the lau

Google Play services 8.1: Get ready for Marshmallow! Posted by, Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate With the rollout of Google Play services 8.1 finally finished, there’s a lot of new information to share with developers about the release! Marshmallow Permissions Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) has introduced a new permissions model allowing users to control app permissions at runtime. As an app develo

Posted by, Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate Along with new platform features, Android 6.0 Marshmallow has a new permissions model that streamlines the app install and auto-update process. Google Play services 8.1 is the first release to support runtime permissions on devices running Android 6.0. and will obtain all the permissions it needs to support its APIs. As a result, your apps won’t norm

Android Development Patterns: A Series on Best Practices for Android Development Posted by, Ian Lake, Developer Advocate One of the benefits of Android development is the flexibility provided by the large number of APIs in the Android framework and Support Library, not even including the Google Play services APIs. However, that can be a lot to understand, particularly when confronted with multiple

Posted by Rich Hyndman, Developer Advocate Three new Android Marshmallow sample applications have gone live this week. As usual they are available directly from the Google Samples repository on GitHub or through the Android Studio samples browser. Android Direct Share Sample Direct Share is a new feature in Android Marshmallow that provides APIs to make sharing more intuitive and quick for users.