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There’s a lot to explore with Google Play services 7.3

Posted by Ian Lake, Developer Advocate


Today, we’re excited to give you new tools to build better apps with the rollout of Google Play services 7.3. With new Android Wear APIs, the addition of nutrition data to Google Fit, improvements to retrieving the user’s activity and location, and better support for optional APIs, there’s a lot to explore in this release.

Android Wear

Google Play services 7.3 extends the Android Wear network by enabling you to connect multiple Wear devices to a single mobile device.


While the DataApi will automatically sync DataItems across all nodes in the Wear network, the directed nature of the MessageApi is faced with new challenges. What node do you send a message to when the NodeApi starts showing multiple nodes from getConnectedNodes()? This is exactly the use case for the new CapabilityApi, which allows different nodes to advertise that they provide a specific functionality (say, the phone node being able to download images from the internet). This allows you to replace a generic NodeListener with a more specific CapabilityListener, getting only connection results and a list of nodes that have the specific functionality you need. We’ve updated the Sending and Receiving Messages training to explore this new functionality.


Another new addition for Android Wear is the ChannelApi, which provides a bidirectional data connection between two nodes. While assets are the best way to efficiently add binary data to the data layer for synchronization to all devices, this API focuses on sending larger binary data directly between specific nodes. This comes in two forms: sending full files via the sendFile() method (perfect for later offline access) or opening an OutputStream to stream real time binary data. We hope this offers a flexible, low level API to complement the DataApi and MessageApi.


We’ve updated our samples with these changes in mind so go check them out here!

Google Fit

Google Fit makes building fitness apps easier with fitness specific APIs on retrieving sensor data like current location and speed, collecting and storing activity data in Google Fit’s open platform, and automatically aggregating that data into a single view of the user’s fitness data.


To make it even easier to retrieve up-to-date information, Google Play Services 7.3 adds a new method to the HistoryApi: readDailyTotal(). This automatically aggregates data for a given DataType from midnight on the current day through now, giving you a single DataPoint. For TYPE_STEP_COUNT_DELTA, this method does not require any authentication, making it possible to retrieve the current number of steps for today from any application whether on mobile devices or on Android Wear - great for watch faces!


Google Fit is also augmenting its existing data types with granular nutrition information, including protein, fat, cholesterol, and more. By leveraging these details about the user’s diet, developers can help users stay more informed about their health and fitness.

Location

LocationRequest is the heart of the FusedLocationProviderApi, encapsulating the type and frequency of location information you’d like to receive. An important, but small change to LocationRequest is the addition of a maximum wait time for location updates via setMaxWaitTime(). By using a value at least two times larger than the requested interval, the system can batch location updates together, reducing battery usage and, on some devices, actually improving location accuracy.


For any ongoing location requests, it is important to know that you will continue to get good location data back. The SettingsApi is still incredibly useful for confirming that user settings are optimal before you put in a LocationRequest, however, it isn’t the best approach for continual monitoring. For that, you can use the new LocationCallback class in place of your existing LocationListener to receive LocationAvailability updates in addition to location updates, giving you a simple callback whenever settings might have changed which will affect the current set of LocationRequests. You can also use FusedLocationProviderApi’s getLocationAvailability() to retrieve the current state on demand.

Connecting to Google Play services

One of the biggest benefits of GoogleApiClient is that it provides a single connection state, whether you are connecting to a single API or multiple APIs. However, this made it hard to work with APIs that might not be available on all devices, such as the Wearable API. This release makes it much easier to work with APIs that may not always be available with the addition of an addApiIfAvailable() method ensuring that unavailable APIs do not hold up the connection process. The current state for each API can then be retrieved via getConnectionResult(), giving you a way to check at runtime whether an API is available and connected.


While GoogleApiClient’s connection process already takes care of checking for Google Play services availability, if you are not using GoogleApiClient, you’ll find many of the static utility methods in GooglePlayServicesUtil such as isGooglePlayServicesAvailable() have now been moved to the singleton GoogleApiAvailability class. We hope the move away from static methods helps you when writing tests, ensuring your application can properly handle any error cases.

SDK is now available!

Google Play services 7.3 is now available: get started with updated SDK now!


To learn more about Google Play services and the APIs available to you through it, visit the Google Play services section on the Android Developer site.

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New Android Code Samples

Posted by Rich Hyndman, Developer Advocate

A new set of Android code samples, covering Android Wear, Android for Work, NFC and Screen capturing, have been committed to our Google Samples repository on GitHub. Here’s a summary of the new code samples:

XYZTouristAttractions

This sample mimics a real world mobile and Android Wear app. It has a more refined design and also provides a practical example of how a mobile app would interact and communicate with its Wear counterpart.

The app itself is modeled after a hypothetical tourist attractions experience that notifies the user when they are in close proximity to notable points of interest. In parallel,the Wear component shows tourist attraction images and summary information, and provides quick actions for nearby tourist attractions in a GridViewPager UI component.

DeviceOwner - A Device Owner is a specialized type of device administrator that can control device security and configuration. This sample uses the DevicePolicyManager to demonstrate how to use device owner features, including configuring global settings (e.g.automatic time and time-zone) and setting the default launcher.

NfcProvisioning - This sample demonstrates how to use NFC to provision a device with a device owner. This sample sets up the peer device with the DeviceOwner sample by default. You can rewrite the configuration to use any other device owner.

NFC BeamLargeFiles - A demonstration of how to transfer large files via Android Beam on Android 4.1 and above. After the initial handshake over NFC, file transfer will take place over a secondary high-speed communication channel such as Bluetooth or WiFi Direct.

ScreenCapture - The MediaProjection API was added in Android Lollipop and allows you to easily capture screen contents and/or record system audio. The ScreenCapture sample demonstrates how to use the API to capture device screen in real time and show it on a SurfaceView.

As an additional bonus, the Santa Tracker Android app, including three games, two watch-faces and other goodies, was also recently open sourced and is now available on GitHub.

As with all the Android samples, you can also easily access these new additions in Android Studio using the built in Import Samples feature and they’re also available through our Samples Browser.

Check out a sample today to help you with your development!

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Game Performance: Explicit Uniform Locations

Posted by Shanee Nishry, Games Developer Advocate

Uniforms variables in GLSL are crucial for passing data between the game code on the CPU and the shader program on the graphics card. Unfortunately, up until the availability of OpenGL ES 3.1, using uniforms required some preparation which made the workflow slightly more complicated and wasted time during loading.

Let us examine a simple vertex shader and see how OpenGL ES 3.1 allows us to improve it:

#version 300 es

layout(location = 0) in vec4 vertexPosition;
layout(location = 1) in vec2 vertexUV;

uniform mat4 matWorldViewProjection;

out vec2 outTexCoord;

void main()
{
    outTexCoord = vertexUV;
    gl_Position = matWorldViewProjection * vertexPosition;
}

Note: You might be familiar with this shader from a previous Game Performance article on Layout Qualifiers. Find it here.

We have a single uniform for our world view projection matrix:

uniform mat4 matWorldViewProjection;

The inefficiency appears when you want to assign the uniform value.

You need to use glUniformMatrix4fv or glUniform4f to set the uniform’s value but you also need the handle for the uniform’s location in the program. To get the handle you must call glGetUniformLocation.

GLuint program; // the shader program
float matWorldViewProject[16]; // 4x4 matrix as float array

GLint handle = glGetUniformLocation( program, “matWorldViewProjection” );
glUniformMatrix4fv( handle, 1, false, matWorldViewProject );

That pattern leads to having to call glGetUniformLocation for each uniform in every shader and keeping the handles or worse, calling glGetUniformLocation every frame.

Warning! Never call glGetUniformLocation every frame! Not only is it bad practice but it is slow and bad for your game’s performance. Always call it during initialization and save it somewhere in your code for use in the render loop.

This process is inefficient, it requires you to do more work and costs precious time and performance.

Also take into consideration that you might have multiple shaders with the same uniforms. It would be much better if your code was deterministic and the shader language allowed you to explicitly set the locations of your uniforms so you don’t need to query and manage access handles. This is now possible with Explicit Uniform Locations.

You can set the location for uniforms directly in the shader’s code. They are declared like this

layout(location = index) uniform type name;

For our example shader it would be:

layout(location = 0) uniform mat4 matWorldViewProjection;

This means you never need to use glGetUniformLocation again, resulting in simpler code, initialization process and saved CPU cycles.

This is how the example shader looks after the change. Changes are marked in bold:

#version 310 es

layout(location = 0) in vec4 vertexPosition;
layout(location = 1) in vec2 vertexUV;

layout(location = 0) uniform mat4 matWorldViewProjection;

out vec2 outTexCoord;

void main()
{
    outTexCoord = vertexUV;
    gl_Position = matWorldViewProjection * vertexPosition;
}

As Explicit Uniform Locations are only supported from OpenGL ES 3.1 we also changed the version declaration to 310.

Now all you need to do to set your matWorldViewProjection uniform value is call glUniformMatrix4fv for the handle 0:

const GLint UNIFORM_MAT_WVP = 0; // Uniform location for WorldViewProjection
float matWorldViewProject[16]; // 4x4 matrix as float array

glUniformMatrix4fv( UNIFORM_MAT_WVP, 1, false, matWorldViewProject );

This change is extremely simple and the improvements can be substantial, producing cleaner code, asset pipeline and improved performance. Be sure to make these changes If you are targeting OpenGL ES 3.1 or creating multiple APKs to support a wide range of devices.

To learn more about Explicit Uniform Locations check out the OpenGL wiki page for it which contains valuable information on different layouts and how arrays are represented.

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Android Developer Story: Jelly Button Games grows globally through data driven development

Posted by Leticia Lago, Google Play team

For Jelly Button Games, understanding users is the key to creating and maintaining a successful game, particularly when growth relies on moving into overseas markets. The team makes extensive use of Google Analytics and Google BigQuery to analyze more than 3 billion events each month. By using this data, Jelly Button can pinpoint exactly where, when, and why people play their highly-rated game, Pirate Kings. Feeding this information back into development has driven active daily users up 1500 percent in just five months.

We caught up with Mor Shani, Moti Novo, and Ron Rejwan — some of the co-founders — in Tel Aviv, Israel, to discover how they created an international hit and keep it growing.

Learn about Google Analytics and taking your game to an international audience:

• Analyze — discover the power of data from the Google Play Developer Console and Google Analytics.


• Query — find out how Google BigQuery can help you extract the essential information you need from millions or billions of data points.


• Localize — guide the localization of your app with best practices and tools.

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Drive app installs through App Indexing

Posted by Lawrence Chang, Product Manager

You’ve invested time and effort into making your app an awesome experience, and we want to help people find the great content you’ve created. App Indexing has already been helping people engage with your Android app after they’ve installed it — we now have 30 billion links within apps indexed. Starting this week, people searching on Google can also discover your app if they haven’t installed it yet. If you’ve implemented App Indexing, when indexed content from your app is relevant to a search done on Google on Android devices, people may start to see app install buttons for your app in search results. Tapping these buttons will take them to the Google Play store where they can install your app, then continue straight on to the right content within it.

With the addition of these install links, we are starting to use App Indexing as a ranking signal for all users on Android, regardless of whether they have your app installed or not. We hope that Search will now help you acquire new users, as well as re-engage your existing ones. To get started, visit g.co/AppIndexing and to learn more about the other ways you can integrate with Google Search, visit g.co/DeveloperSearch.

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Helping developers connect with families on Google Play

Posted by Eunice Kim, Product Manager, Google Play

There are thousands of Android developers creating experiences for families and children — apps and games that broaden the mind and inspire creativity. These developers, like PBS Kids, Tynker and Crayola, carefully tailor their apps to provide high quality, age appropriate content; from optimizing user interface design for children to building interactive features that both educate and entertain.

Google Play is committed to the success of this emerging developer community, so today we’re introducing a new program called Designed for Families, which allows developers to designate their apps and games as family-friendly. Participating apps will be eligible for upcoming family-focused experiences on Google Play that will help parents discover great, age-appropriate content and make more informed choices.

Starting now, developers can opt in their app or game through the Google Play Developer Console. From there, our team will review the submission to verify that it meets the Designed for Families program requirements. In the coming weeks, we’ll be adding new ways to promote family content to users on Google Play — we’ll have more to share on this soon.

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New course: Take Android app performance to the next level

Posted by Jocelyn Becker, Developer Advocate

Building the next great Android app isn't enough. You can have the most amazing social integration, best API coverage, and coolest photo filters, but none of that matters if your app is slow and frustrating to use.

That's why we've launched our new online training course at Udacity, focusing entirely on improving Android performance. This course complements the Android Performance Patterns video series, focused on giving you the resources to help make fast, smooth, and awesome experiences for users.

Created by Android Performance guru Colt McAnlis, this course reviews the main pillars of performance (rendering, compute, and battery). You'll work through tutorials on how to use the tools in Android Studio to find and fix performance problems.

By the end of the course, you'll understand how common performance problems arise from your hardware, OS, and application code. Using profiling tools to gather data, you'll learn to identify and fix performance bottlenecks so users can have that smooth 60 FPS experience that will keep them coming back for more.

Take the course: https://www.udacity.com/course/ud825. Join the conversation and follow along on social at #PERFMATTERS.

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Enable your messaging app for Android Auto

Posted by Joshua Gordon, Developer Advocate

What if there was a way for drivers to stay connected using your messaging app, while keeping their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road?

Android Auto helps drivers stay connected, but in a more convenient way that's integrated with the car. It eliminates the need to type and read messages by replacing these activities with a voice controlled interface.

Enabling your messaging app to work with Android Auto is easy. Developers like Skype and textPlus have already done so. Check out this DevByte for an overview of the messaging APIs, and see the developer training guide for a deep dive. Read on for a look at the key steps involved.

Message notifications on the car’s display

When an Android 5.0+ phone is connected to a compatible car, users receive incoming message notifications from Auto-enabled apps on the car’s head unit display. Your app runs on the phone, but is controlled by the car. To learn more about how this works, watch the Introduction to Android Auto DevByte.

A new message notification from Skype

If your app already uses notifications to alert the user to incoming messages, it’ll be easy to extend these for Auto. It takes just a few lines of code, and you won’t have to change how your app works on the phone.

There are a couple small differences between message notifications on Auto vs. a phone. On Auto, a preview of the message content isn’t shown, because messaging is driven entirely by voice. Second, message notifications are backed by a conversation object. This is simply a collection of unread messages from a particular sender.

Decorate your notification with the CarExtender to add support for the car. Next, use the UnreadConversation.Builder to create a conversation, and populate it by iterating over your app's unread messages (from a certain sender) and adding them to the conversation. Pass your conversation object to the CarExtender, and you’re done!

Tap to hear messages

Tapping on a message notification plays it back on the car's sound system, via text to speech. This is handled automatically by the framework; no additional code is required. Pretty cool, right?

In order to know when the user hears a message, you provide a PendingIntent that’s triggered by the system. That’s one of just two intents you’ll need to handle to enable your app for Auto.

Reply by voice

Voice control is the real magic of Android Auto. Users reply to messages by speaking, via voice recognition. This is far faster and more natural than typing.

Enabling this functionality is as simple as adding a RemoteInput instance to your conversation objects, before you issue the notification. Speech recognition is handled entirely by the framework. The recognition result is delivered to your app as a plain text string via a second PendingIntent.

Replying to a message from textPlus by voice.

Next Steps

Make your messaging app more natural to use in the car by enabling it for Android Auto. Now drivers can stay connected, without typing or reading messages. It just takes a few lines of code. To learn more visit developer.android.com/auto

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Power Great Gaming with New Analytics from Play Games

By Ben Frenkel, Google Play Games team

A few weeks ago at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), we announced Play Games Player Analytics, a new set of free reports to help you manage your games business and understand in-game player behavior. Today, we’re excited to make these new tools available to you in the Google Play Developer Console.

Analytics is a key component of running a game as a service, which is increasingly becoming a necessity for running a successful mobile gaming business. When you take a closer look at large developers that do this successfully, you find that they do three things really well:

• Manage their business to revenue targets


• Identify hot spots in their business metrics so they can continuously focus on the game updates that will drive the most impact


• Use analytics to understand how players are progressing, spending, and churning

“With player engagement and revenue data living under one roof, developers get a level of data quality that is simply not available to smaller teams without dedicated staff. As the tools evolve, I think Google Play Games Player Analytics will finally allow indie devs to confidently make data-driven changes that actually improve revenue.”

Kevin Pazirandeh
Developer of Zombie Highway 2

With Player Analytics, we wanted to make these capabilities available to the entire developer ecosystem on Google Play in a frictionless, easy-to-use way, freeing up your precious time to create great gaming experiences. Small studios, including the makers of Zombie Highway 2 and Bombsquad, have already started to see the benefits and impact of Player Analytics on their business.

Further, if you integrate with Google Play game services, you get this set of analytics with no incremental effort. But, for a little extra work, you can also unlock another set of high impact reports by integrating Google Play game services Events, starting with the Sources and Sinks report, a report to help you balance your in-game economy.

If you already have a game integrated with Google Play game services, go check out the new reports in the Google Play Developer Console today. For everyone else, enabling Player Analytics is as simple as adding a handful of lines of code to your game to integrate Google Play game services.

Manage your business to revenue targets

Set your spend target in Player Analytics by choosing a daily goal

To help assess the health of your games business, Player Analytics enables you to select a daily in-app purchase revenue target and then assess how you're doing against that goal through the Target vs Actual report depicted below. Learn more.

Identify hot spots using benchmarks with the Business Drivers report

Ever wonder how your game’s performance stacks up against other games? Player Analytics tells you exactly how well you are doing compared to similar games in your category.

Metrics highlighted in red are below the benchmark. Arrows indicate whether a metric is trending up or down, and any cell with the icon can be clicked to see more details about the underlying drivers of the change. Learn more.

Track player retention by new user cohort

In the Retention report, you can see the percentage of players that continued to play your game on the following seven days after installing your game.

Learn more.

See where players are spending their time, struggling, and churning with the Player Progression report

Measured by the number of achievements players have earned, the Player Progression funnel helps you identify where your players are struggling and churning to help you refine your game and, ultimately, improve retention. Add more achievements to make progression tracking more precise.

Learn more.

Manage your in-game economy with the Sources and Sinks report

The Sources and Sinks report helps you balance your in-game economy by showing the relationship between how quickly players are earning or buying and using resources.

For example, Eric Froemling, one man developer of BombSquad, used the Sources & Sinks report to help balance the rate at which players earned and spent tickets.

Read more about Eric’s experience with Player Analytics in his recent blog post.

To enable the Sources and Sinks report you will need to create and integrate Play game services Events that track sources of premium currency (e.g., gold coins earned), and sinks of premium currency (e.g., gold coins spent to buy in-app items).

Game Performance: Layout Qualifiers

Today, we want to share some best practices on using the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) that can optimize the performance of your game and simplify your workflow. Specifically, Layout qualifiers make your code more deterministic and increase performance by reducing your work.

Let’s start with a simple vertex shader and change it as we go along.



This basic vertex shader takes position and texture coordinates, transforms the position and outputs the data to the fragment shader:

attribute vec4 vertexPosition;
attribute vec2 vertexUV;

uniform mat4 matWorldViewProjection;

varying vec2 outTexCoord;

void main()
{
  outTexCoord = vertexUV;
  gl_Position = matWorldViewProjection * vertexPosition;
}

Vertex Attribute Index

To draw a mesh on to the screen, you need to create a vertex buffer and fill it with vertex data, including positions and texture coordinates for this example.



In our sample shader, the vertex data may be laid out like this:

struct Vertex
{
  Vector4 Position;
  Vector2 TexCoords;
};

Therefore, we defined our vertex shader attributes like this:

attribute vec4 vertexPosition;
attribute vec2  vertexUV;

To associate the vertex data with the shader attributes, a call to glGetAttribLocation will get the handle of the named attribute. The attribute format is then detailed with a call to glVertexAttribPointer.

GLint handleVertexPos = glGetAttribLocation( myShaderProgram, "vertexPosition" );
glVertexAttribPointer( handleVertexPos, 4, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0, 0 );

GLint handleVertexUV = glGetAttribLocation( myShaderProgram, "vertexUV" );
glVertexAttribPointer( handleVertexUV, 2, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0, 0 );

But you may have multiple shaders with the vertexPosition attribute and calling glGetAttribLocation for every shader is a waste of performance which increases the loading time of your game.



Using layout qualifiers you can change your vertex shader attributes declaration like this:

layout(location = 0) in vec4 vertexPosition;
layout(location = 1) in vec2 vertexUV;

To do so you also need to tell the shader compiler that your shader is aimed at GL ES version 3.1. This is done by adding a version declaration:

#version 300 es

Let’s see how this affects our shader, changes are marked in bold:

#version 300 es

layout(location = 0) in vec4 vertexPosition;
layout(location = 1) in vec2 vertexUV;

uniform mat4 matWorldViewProjection;

out vec2 outTexCoord;

void main()
{
  outTexCoord = vertexUV;
  gl_Position = matWorldViewProjection * vertexPosition;
}

Note that we also changed outTexCoord from varying to out. The varying keyword is deprecated from version 300 es and requires changing for the shader to work.



Note that Vertex Attribute qualifiers and #version 300 es are supported from OpenGL ES 3.0. The desktop equivalent is supported on OpenGL 3.3 and using #version 330.



Now you know your position attributes always at 0 and your texture coordinates will be at 1 and you can now bind your shader format without using glGetAttribLocation:

const int ATTRIB_POS = 0;
const int ATTRIB_UV   = 1;

glVertexAttribPointer( ATTRIB_POS, 4, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0, 0 );
glVertexAttribPointer( ATTRIB_UV, 2, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0, 0 );

This simple change leads to a cleaner pipeline, simpler code and saved performance during loading time.


To learn more about performance on Android, check out the Android Performance Patterns series.



Posted by Shanee Nishry, Games Developer Advocate

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Developing audio apps for Android Auto

Posted by Joshua Gordon, Developer Advocate

Have you ever wanted to develop apps for the car, but found the variety of OEMs and proprietary platforms too big of a hurdle? Now with Android Auto, you can target a single platform supported by vehicles coming soon from 28 manufacturers.

Using familiar Android APIs, you can easily add a great in-car user experience to your existing audio apps, with just a small amount of code. If you’re new to developing for Auto, watch this DevByte for an overview of the APIs, and check out the training docs for an end-to-end tutorial.

Playback and custom controls

Custom playback controls on NPR One and iHeartRadio.

The first thing to understand about developing audio apps on Auto is that you don’t draw your user interface directly. Instead, the framework has two well-defined UIs (one for playback, one for browsing) that are created automatically. This ensures consistent behavior across audio apps for drivers, and frees you from dealing with any car specific functionalities or layouts. Although the layout is predefined, you can customize it with artwork, color themes, and custom controls.

Both NPR One and iHeartRadio customize their UI. NPR One adds controls to mark a story as interesting, to view a list of upcoming stories, and to skip to the next story. iHeartRadio adds controls to favorite stations and to like songs. Both apps store user preferences across form factors.

Because the UI is drawn by the framework, playback commands need to be relayed to your app. This is accomplished with the MediaSession callback, which has methods like onPlay() and onPause(). All car specific functionality is handled behind the scenes. For example, you don’t need to be aware if a command came from the touch screen, the steering wheel buttons, or the user’s voice.

Browsing and recommendations

Browsing content on NPR One and iHeartRadio.

The browsing UI is likewise drawn by the framework. You implement the MediaBrowserService to share your content hierarchy with the framework. A content hierarchy is a collection of MediaItems that are either playable (e.g., a song, audio book, or radio station) or browsable (e.g., a favorites folder). Together, these form a tree used to display a browsable menu of your content.

With both apps, recommendations are key. NPR One recommends a short list of in-depth stories that can be selected from the browsing menu. These improve over time based on user feedback. iHeartRadio’s browsing menu lets you pick from favorites and recommended stations, and their “For You” feature gives recommendations based on user location. The app also provides the ability create custom stations, from the browsing menu. Doing so is efficient and requires only three taps (“Create Station” -> “Rock” -> “Foo Fighters”).

When developing for the car, it’s important to quickly connect users with content to minimize distractions while driving. It’s important to note that design considerations on Android Auto are different than on a mobile device. If you imagine a typical media player on a phone, you may picture a browsable menus of “all tracks” or “all artists”. These are not ideal in the car, where the primary focus should be on the road. Both NPR One and iHeartRadio provide good examples of this, because they avoid deep menu hierarchies and lengthy browsable lists.

Voice actions for hands free operation

Voice actions (e.g., “Play KQED”) are an important part of Android Auto. You can support voice actions in your app by implementing onPlayFromSearch() in the MediaSession.Callback. Voice actions may also be used to start your app from the home screen (e.g., “Play KQED on iHeartRadio”). To enable this functionality, declare the MEDIA_PLAY_FROM_SEARCH intent filter in your manifest. For an example, see this sample app.

Next steps

NPR One and iHeartRadio are just two examples of great apps for Android Auto today. They feel like a part of the car, and look and sound great. You can extend your apps to the car today, too, and developing for Auto is easy. The framework handles the car specific functionalities for you, so you’re free to focus on making your app special. Join the discussion at http://g.co/androidautodev if you have questions or ideas to share. To get started on your app, visit developer.android.com/auto.

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Hello Places API for Android and iOS!

Posted by Jen Kovnats Harrington, Product Manager, Google Maps APIs

Originally posted to Google Geo Developers blog

People don’t think of their location in terms of coordinates on a map. They want context on what shops or restaurants they’re at, and what’s around them. To help your apps speak your users’ language, we’re launching the Places API for Android, as well as opening a beta program for the Places API for iOS.

The Places API web service and JavaScript library have been available for some time. By providing native support for Android and iOS devices, you can optimize the mobile experience with the new APIs by taking advantage of the device’s location signals.

The Places APIs for Android and iOS bridge the gap between simple geographic locations expressed as latitude and longitude, and how people associate location with a known place. For example, you wouldn’t tell someone you were born at 25.7918359,-80.2127959. You’d simply say, “I was born in Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, Florida.” The Places API brings the power of Google’s global places database into your app, providing more than 100 million places, like restaurants, local businesses, hotels, museums, and other attractions.

Key features include:

• Add a place picker: a drop-in UI widget that allows your users to specify a place


• Get the place where the user is right now


• Show detailed place information, including the place’s name, address, phone number, and website


• Use autocomplete to save your users time and frustration typing out place names, by automatically completing them as they type


• Make your app stand out by adding new places that are relevant to your users and seeing the places appear in Google's Places database


• Improve the map around you by reporting the presence of a device at a particular place.

To get started with the Places API for Android, watch this DevByte, check out the developer documentation, and play with the demos. To apply for the Places API for iOS beta program, go here.

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Take your apps on the road with Android Auto

Posted by Wayne Piekarski, Developer Advocate

Starting today, anyone can take their apps for a drive with Android Auto using Android 5.0+ devices, connected to compatible cars and aftermarket head units. Android Auto lets you easily extend your apps to the car in an efficient way for drivers, allowing them to stay connected while still keeping their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road. When users connect their phone to a compatible vehicle, they will see an Android experience optimized for the head unit display that seamlessly integrates voice input, touch screen controls, and steering wheel buttons. Moreover, Android Auto provides consistent UX guidelines to ensure that developers are able to create great experiences across many diverse manufacturers and vehicle models, with a single application available on Google Play.

With the availability of the Pioneer AVIC-8100NEX, AVIC-7100NEX, and AVH-4100NEX aftermarket systems in the US, the AVIC-F77DAB, AVIC-F70DAB, AVH-X8700BT in the UK, and in Australia the AVIC-F70DAB, AVH-X8750BT, it is now possible to add Android Auto to many cars already on the road. As a developer, you now have a way to test your apps in a realistic environment. These are just the first Android Auto devices to launch, and vehicles from major auto manufacturers with integrated Android Auto support are coming soon.

With the increasing adoption of Android Auto by manufacturers, your users are going to be expecting more support of their apps in the car, so now is a good time to get started with development. If you are new to Android Auto, check out our DevByte video, which explains more about how this works, along with some live demos.

The SDK for Android Auto was made available to developers a few months ago, and now Google Play is ready to accept your application updates. Your existing apps can take advantage of all these cool new Android Auto features with just a few small changes. You’ll need to add Android Auto support to your application, and then agree to the Android Auto terms in the Pricing & Distribution category in the Google Play Developer Console. Once the application is approved, it will be made available as an update to your users, and shown in the cars’ display.

Adding support for Android Auto is easy. We have created an extensive set of documentation to help you add support for messaging (sample), and audio playback (sample). There are also short introduction DevByte videos for messaging and audio as well. Stay tuned for a series of posts coming up soon discussing more details of these APIs and how to work with them. We also have simulators to help you test your applications right at your desk during development.

With the launch of Android Auto, a new set of possibilities are available for you to make even more amazing experiences for your users, providing them the right information for the road ahead. Come join the discussion about Android Auto on Google+ at http://g.co/androidautodev where you can share ideas and ask questions with other developers.

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Android Developer Story: Outfit7 — Building an entertainment company with Google

Posted by Leticia Lago, Google Play team

Outfit7, creators of My Talking Tom and My Talking Angela, recently announced they’ve achieved 2.5 billion app downloads across their portfolio. The company now offers a complete entertainment experience to users spanning mobile apps, user generated and original YouTube content, and a range of toys, clothing, and accessories. They even have a silver screen project underway.

We caught up with Iza Login, Rok Zorko and Marko Štamcar - some of the co-founders- in Ljubljana, Slovenia, to learn best practices that helped them in reaching this milestone.

To learn about some of the Google and Google Play features used by Outfit7 to create their successful business, check out these resources:

• Monetization — explore the options available for generating revenue from your apps and games.


• Monetization with AdMob — learn how you can maximize your ad revenue.


• YouTube for Developers — Whether you’re building a business on YouTube or want to enhance your app with video, a rich set of YouTube APIs can bring your products to life.

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Creating Better User Experiences on Google Play

Posted by Eunice Kim, Product Manager for Google Play

Whether it's a way to track workouts, chart the nighttime stars, or build a new reality and battle for world domination, Google Play gives developers a platform to create engaging apps and games and build successful businesses. Key to that mission is offering users a positive experience while searching for apps and games on Google Play. Today we have two updates to improve the experience for both developers and users.

A global content rating system based on industry standards

Today we’re introducing a new age-based rating system for apps and games on Google Play. We know that people in different countries have different ideas about what content is appropriate for kids, teens and adults, so today’s announcement will help developers better label their apps for the right audience. Consistent with industry best practices, this change will give developers an easy way to communicate familiar and locally relevant content ratings to their users and help improve app discovery and engagement by letting people choose content that is right for them.

Starting now, developers can complete a content rating questionnaire for each of their apps and games to receive objective content ratings. Google Play’s new rating system includes official ratings from the International Age Rating Coalition (IARC) and its participating bodies, including the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), Pan-European Game Information (PEGI), Australian Classification Board, Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle (USK) and Classificação Indicativa (ClassInd). Territories not covered by a specific ratings authority will display an age-based, generic rating. The process is quick, automated and free to developers. In the coming weeks, consumers worldwide will begin to see these new ratings in their local markets.

To help maintain your apps’ availability on Google Play, sign in to the Developer Console and complete the new rating questionnaire for each of your apps. Apps without a completed rating questionnaire will be marked as “Unrated” and may be blocked in certain territories or for specific users. Starting in May, all new apps and updates to existing apps will require a completed questionnaire before they can be published on Google Play.

An app review process that better protects users

Several months ago, we began reviewing apps before they are published on Google Play to better protect the community and improve the app catalog. This new process involves a team of experts who are responsible for identifying violations of our developer policies earlier in the app lifecycle. We value the rapid innovation and iteration that is unique to Google Play, and will continue to help developers get their products to market within a matter of hours after submission, rather than days or weeks. In fact, there has been no noticeable change for developers during the rollout.

To assist in this effort and provide more transparency to developers, we’ve also rolled out improvements to the way we handle publishing status. Developers now have more insight into why apps are rejected or suspended, and they can easily fix and resubmit their apps for minor policy violations.

Over the past year, we’ve paid more than $7 billion to developers and are excited to see the ecosystem grow and innovate. We’ll continue to build tools and services that foster this growth and help the developer community build successful businesses.

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Haystack TV Doubles Engagement with Android TV

Posted by Joshua Gordon, Developer Advocate

Haystack TV is a small six person startup with an ambitious goal: personalize the news. Traditionally, watching news on TV means viewing a list of stories curated by the network. Wouldn’t it be better if you could watch a personalized news channel, based on interesting YouTube stories?

Haystack already had a mobile app, but entering the living room space seemed daunting. Although “Smart TVs” have been on the market for a while, they remain challenging for developers to work with. Many hardware OEMs have proprietary platforms, but Android TV is different. It’s an open ecosystem with great developer resources. Developers can reach millions of users with familiar Android APIs. If you have an existing Android app, it’s easy to bring it to the living room.

Two weeks was all it took for Haystack TV to bring their mobile app to Android TV. That includes building an immersive, cinematic UI (a task greatly simplified by the Android framework). Since launching on Android TV, Haystack TV’s viewership is growing at 40% per month. Previously, users were spending about 40 minutes watching content on mobile per week. Now that’s up to 80 minutes in the living room. Their longest engagements are through Chromecast and Android TV.

Hear from Daniel Barreto, CEO of Haystack TV, on developing for Android TV

Haystack TV’s success on Android TV is a great example of how the Android multi-form factor developer experience shines. Once you’ve learned the ropes of writing Android apps, developing for another form factor (Wear, Auto, TV) is simple.

Android TV helps you create cinematic UIs

Haystack TV’s UI is smooth and cinematic. How were they able to build a great one so quickly? Developing an immersive UI/UX with Android TV is surprisingly easy. The Leanback support library provides fragments for browsing content, showing a details screen, and search. You can use these to get transitions and animations almost for free. To learn more about building UIs for Android TV, watch the Using the Leanback Library DevByte and check out the code samples.

Browsing recommended stories

Your content, front and center

The recommendations row is a central feature of the Android TV home screen. It’s the first thing users see when they turn on their TVs. You can surface content to appear on the recommendations row by implementing the recommendation service. For example, your app can suggest videos your users will want to watch next (say, the next episode in a series, or a related news story). This is great for getting noticed and increasing engagements.

Haystack’s content on the recommendations row

Make your content searchable

How can users find their favorite movie or show from a library of thousands? On Android TV, they can search for it using their voice. This is much faster and more relaxing than typing on the screen with a remote control! In addition to providing in-app search, your app can surface content to appear on the global search results page. The framework takes care of speech recognition for you and delivers the result to your app as a plain text string.

Next Steps

Android TV makes it possible for small startups to create apps for the living room. There are extensive developer resources. For an overview, watch the Introduction to Android TV DevByte. For details, see the developer training docs. Watch this episode of Coffee with a Googler to learn more about the vision for the platform. To get started on your app, visit developer.android.com/tv.

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