Posted by Ian Lake, Developer Advocate Today, we’re bringing you new tools to build better apps with the completion of the rollout of Google Play services 7.0. With this release, we’re delivering improvements to location settings experiences, a brand new API for place information, new fitness data, Google Play Games, and more. Location Settings DialogWhile the FusedLocationProviderApi combines mul

Android applications are, at least on the T-Mobile G1, limited to 16 MB of heap. It's both a lot of memory for a phone and yet very little for what some developers want to achieve. Even if you do not plan on using all of this memory, you should use as little as possible to let other applications run without getting them killed. The more applications Android can keep in memory, the faster it will b

[This post is by Dan Bornstein, virtual-machine wrangler. — Tim Bray] As the tech lead for the Dalvik team within the Android project, I spend my time working on the virtual machine (VM) and core class libraries that sit beneath the Android application framework. This layer is mostly invisible to end users, but done right, it helps make Android devices run smoothly and improves developer productiv

The Android 1.6 SDK includes a tool called zipalign that optimizes the way an application is packaged. Doing this enables Android to interact with your application more efficiently and thus has the potential to make your application and the overall system run faster. We strongly encourage you to use zipalign on both new and already published applications and to make the optimized version available

We've introduced a new feature in version 1.6 of the Android platform: Text-To-Speech (TTS). Also known as "speech synthesis", TTS enables your Android device to "speak" text of different languages. Before we explain how to use the TTS API itself, let's first review a few aspects of the engine that will be important to your TTS-enabled application. We will then show how to make your Android applic

Android 1.5 introduced a number of new features that application developers can take advantage of, like virtual input devices and speech recognition. As a developer, you need to be aware of backward compatibility issues on older devices—do you want to allow your application to run on all devices, or just those running newer software? In some cases it will be useful to employ the newer APIs on devi

GLSurfaceView is a new API class in Android 1.5. GLSurfaceView makes OpenGL ES applications easier to write by: Providing the glue code to connect OpenGL ES to the View system.Providing the glue code to make OpenGL ES work with the Activity life-cycle.Making it easy to choose an appropriate frame buffer pixel format.Creating and managing a separate rendering thread to enable smooth animation.Provi

To create an input method (IME) for entering text into text fields and other Views, you need to extend the InputMethodService. class. This class provides much of the basic implementation for an input method, in terms of managing the state and visibility of the input method and communicating with the currently visible activity. A good starting point would be the SoftKeyboard sample code provided as