Android Developers Blog

This is why TechCrunch isn't great. Here are the actual details: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2015/11/android-studio-20-previ… It's in Canary right now.

This link adds nothing to the original content, which can be found at [1]. Neither mentions that this will not break apps which were built for an older OS and are simply run on KitKat. In order the the app to break the developer must specifically change the API their app targets to KitKat without changing which key generation algorithm they use. I wish the docs [2] mentioned this change, but presumably if you're developing apps you'll be following the blog. It would be very cool, and it's certainly within Google's capabilities, if Google emailed developers using PBKDF2WithHmacSHA1 to notify them. That would close the loop and prevent anybody from being caught by the breaking change. [1] http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2013/12/changes-to-secretkeyfac… [2] http://developer.android.com/reference/javax/crypto/SecretKeyFactory.h…

There's actually such a thing. :D http://android-developers.blogspot.com/

The hardware/software split is too simplistic a view. The companies have their various strengths and weaknesses. For example, the graphics stack on iOS embarrasses Android's. It took how many years and how many hardware advances before flagship Android got scrolling as smooth as the first iPhone? Another example: Google released Renderscript in early 2011 (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/02/introducing-renderscrip… only to deprecate it a little over a year later (https://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-4.1.html#Rendersc… We can cherry pick examples all day long, but the bottom line is that each company excels at certain things. It's interesting how Samsung is basically stuck to Google at this point. I'm sure they'd love to switch to their own Bada or Android fork and capture more of the profit, but Samsung is absolutely abysmal at software.

Google recommends developers use the "Android_ID". I bet Admob, Googles app ad network also requests this: http://android-developers.blogspot.de/2011/03/identifying-app-installa…

Worse part is that the older Firefox is the best browser for Android 3. Now it cannot be found in the market anymore because the new version made it incompatible. If they wanted to make it incompatible with 3.0, they should've released a new apk, so the tablet users could still install the old one. Android allows you to have multiple apks for different costumers [1], so no need to make the app unavailable after an upgrade. [1] http://android-developers.blogspot.com.br/2011/07/multiple-apk-support…

There's been multiple APK support (for different OS versions, etc.) in the Android market since last July[1], so you could do the best thing for your "main" version in one build and have fallbacks for other versions in other builds (where necessary, of course). [1] http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/07/multiple-apk-support-in…

FWIW, Google discourages the use of UDID as a 'unique user id' and recommends these alternatives: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/03/identifying-app-install…

I was fortunate enough to be given a Nexus One at a Google developer day and really love it (not just because it was free). My wife now uses my iPhone 3G and, playing with that handset from time to time, I wouldn't go back to it. If you're in the UK, I know Vodafone supply them. Or, if you're in the US, you can just buy one as an unlocked developer phone: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/08/nexus-one-developer-pho…

The main difference is screen sizes and densities -- their latest blog post talks about it in depth: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/

W3C has good basic info on what internationalization and localization each mean: http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-i18n.en Many developers will make a start by: - Internationalizing their strings. In the case of Android, this is typically achieved by moving hard coded strings from the code to a separate strings.xml file - Localizing those strings: Having one or more professional or volunteer translators create localized versions. Different platforms use different file formats for localized strings. For example, a lot of web frameworks use .po files: https://www.drupal.org/node/1814954 Best practices: - Don't re-invent the wheel. Use libraries provided by others, e.g. https://developers.google.com/international/i18n - Decide which languages you will want to support over the long term, and think about what it will take for you to be successful (e.g. local support staff, marketing effort, ...) - Don't stop at translation. Do all the other stuff (number/date formats, support for right-to-left languages) - Of course, use UTF-8 or UTF-16 - Choose the right platforms/partners for translation. Google offers a service targeted at Android apps[0] and there are crowdsourcing platforms which may work if your users are willing to translate for you [1][2]. These work for web apps as well as native. - Get a native speaker to do QA on the output (on the app itself, not just by looking at the strings file) [0]…

A good lunchtime read, thanks. A couple of misleading topics and word of advice from our own experience [0] of starting Android development after years of iOS development: - Google seems to moving away from Activities in favor of Fragments (can someone confirm this?) so we'd recommend a Fragment based design pattern; - App navigation paradigms seem to be evolving quickly, with Google recently introducing Navigation Drawer as a standard [1], among others; - Choosing the navigation paradigm first seems to important as these seem to be Fragment based, using Bundle objects to share data between Fragments; - Use Android Studio [2] because it seems a) Google is going to standardize on this, and b) the navigation paradigms are offered as app template options and can be a good starting point presumably with 'blessed' Fragment design patterns. Good luck! [0] http://blog.fieldforceapp.com [1] http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/navigation-drawer.html [2] http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2013/05/android-studio-ide-buil…

abcd_f, I'm not part of the Telegram team, nor am I a cryptographer. However, I do support these guys, and for the last 3 days I saw the Telegram team diligently reply tech questions in Twitter, HN and blogs. I saw them collect questions from security experts and put up FAQs based on them http://core.telegram.org/techfaq or http://core.telegram.org/contestfaq as well as update the obscure parts of their documentation. >> Perhaps consider offering an alternative crypto suite based on standard protocols? In parallel with what you have. Just reuse an existing crypto framework and redo transport layer to your needs. Again, I am not cryptographer. But as a person who wants his data to be secure I don't see anything wrong with different teams trying different approaches. I 100% agree that people crave a good encrypted communication system, but I'm not sure it can be achieved in a world where everybody uses similar methods. What if some of the common "best practices" are intentionally promoted in the crypto-community as the best ones exactly because they contain flaws and backdoors? Please allow me to give you an example of something that could be just that. The Telegram team was criticized by some NH critics for their custom auth key exchange protocol. People asked – why take a random value from server and a random value from client and combine both with a creepy function? Why not, e.g., just generate a random value on the client and use RSA instead? Well, the answer is simple…

His work also highlights the lack of support given by Google for backwards compatibility. Stuff like action bar (one of the biggest new UI changes in 3.0+) backwards compatibility is essential if you design your app around the new patterns and guidelines. Their official recommendations for having an action bar in 2.3 and below are: 1. Reimplement almost the whole action bar on 2.3 and below by building on top of their "ActionBarCompat" example which is very minimal and only supports menu items - if developers take this approach, there's going to be a lot of inconsistent action bars out there. 2. Just forget the action bar on older versions of Android (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2012/01/say-goodbye-to-menu-but… which is terrible advice - you can't just pretend that it never existed when the whole app is designed around it. Thankfully they don't believe this themselves since all their apps have some sort of action bar implementation on older versions too.

Google just released File-By-File patching for zip files -- sounds like it might be close: http://android-developers.blogspot.com.au/2016/12/saving-data-reducing…

You're most likely right. I was under the impression that they just did a basic anti-malware scan on your app, but that seems to have changed back in 2015. Oddly enough, this doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere in the Google help pages or Android docs. This blog post [1] is the closest thing to an official confirmation I managed to find. [1]: https://android-developers.blogspot.com/2015/03/creating-better-user-e…

AFAIU, the distinguishing characteristic of Nexus devices is that they're unlocked. Yes, per Wikipedia: "All Nexus devices feature an unlockable bootloader[3] to allow further development and end-user modification.[4]" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Nexus http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/12/its-not-rooting-its-ope… http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/03/galaxy-nexus-gets-rooted-forums-bur… Note that this still does you comparatively little good if you don't have CyanogenMod to put on it. Mind, I didn't say "no good", I said "little good". It's the CyanogenMod dev team at Cyanogen Inc who've been impacted by the layoffs. There's still the independent effort, but it's lost a major employer and investor.

Hm, might the changes to Android's dynamic linking behavior described here [0] also be related to similar actual or possible attack vectors? [0] http://android-developers.blogspot.de/2016/06/android-changes-for-ndk-…

The animated gifs located here (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2016/05/android-instant-apps-ev… make it look as if you can cancel out of it. They introduced an instant app like experience prior to this but only through the Google App and they called it streaming. I tried to get hotel tonight to load in this manner right now but could not get it working unfortunately. edit: got it working. The link was specifically marked as an app link above the regular webpage link. Personally I could see this being handy for things like games and other times when you might need to install an app to complete a specific task but I don't see it replacing the mobile web.

It's funny your example is covered by a new web api called PaymentRequest which Google showed off at the very same conference where they announced this. http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2016/05/enhancing-android-pay-a…

Yes, Dianne Hackborn was one of the main proponents and designers of the fragment system lamented in your StackOverflow question referenced: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/02/android-30-fragments-ap…

Yeah, it would be awesome if they would release an android update that allowed you to revoke and limit application permissions. http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2015/08/building-better-apps-wi…

Get your apps and games ready for space with Google Play: http://android-developers.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/get-your-apps-and-gam…

Official announcement on the Android Dev blog: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2015/11/android-studio-20-previ…

One notable new feature in 8.1 is the new permissions model (run-time permission checking). More info can be found here in this blog post (also published today): http://android-developers.blogspot.ca/2015/09/google-play-services-81-… As well as in the official documentation: https://developer.android.com/preview/features/runtime-permissions.htm… As usual, this new feature (verifying and requesting permissions at run-time) has been backported into the V4 support library.

Google will be porting their Android OpenGL ES conformance test suite to Vulkan and will donate the source to the Khronos group [1]. ---- For Vulkan, we’ll not only develop similar tests for use in the Android CTS, but we’ll also contribute them to Khronos for use in Vulkan’s own open source Conformance Test Suite. ---- [1] http://android-developers.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/low-overhead-renderin…

Use AppCompat, and you'll get native MD on >= SDK 21, and an emulated MD on < SDK 21 devices. http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2014/10/appcompat-v21-material-… It's a bit of a hassle (you'll need to use compatibility facades vs the real thing, which are sometimes a bit inconsistent), but it's not too bad.

> Android is Google's project to begin with It wasn't always; it was an independent company that was acquired by Google in the mid 2000s.[1] > and the closed components which are part of the Play Service Framework have been a part of Android since it's initial release. No, Google Play Services was first released in 2012, whereas Google's first Android release was in 2008[2], so it most certainly has not been a part of Android from the beginning. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#History [2] http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2008/09/announcing-android-10-s…

They made 3 billion USD from Google Play in 2014. (30% cut on all sales) http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2015/02/a-new-way-to-promote-yo…

So does Android: http://developer.android.com/training/managing-audio/audio-focus.html http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2013/08/respecting-audio-focus.…