Yesterday we wrote about three new Android apps to come out of Google’s Creative Lab, which at the time we had trouble making sense of as at first glance since they all seemed like trivial products without clear meaning. Now their existence makes more sense with the launch of a new community gallery of apps called Android Experiments.
Google this morning made tickets available for its Chrome Dev Summit held at the Google Quad building. The event runs for two days between November 17th and 18th and is exclusively designed to help Chrome engineers and developers build better, faster and more attractive web apps. The company warns that places are limited and anyone seeking to go should register for their ticket as soon as they can.
Google’s Chrome Dev Summit will feature short talks, collaborative discussions and code labs among other events. For those who can’t make it in person, Google will stream all presentations live and make them available to watch on YouTube afterwards. Keep an eye on the Google Developers YouTube channel to stay updated during the event.
Tickets to this November’s event are available now from Google’s Chrome Dev Summit home page.
Update: Google is holding an “Ask the Experts” session today, June 3rd, at 2PM PDT where Sebastian Thrun, Peter Lubbers, and Jocelyn Becker from Udacity and Google will be answering user-submitted questions about the Android Nanodegree program. The Q&A session will be live-streamed on YouTube and there’s also a form where you can submit any questions you may have.
Yesterday Google’s Sundar Pichai said on stage at the company’s I/O conference that 8 out of every 10 phones that shipped worldwide last year were running Android, and that 600 million new smartphone users came online over the past year. That’s a lot of devices running the company’s smartphone OS, and they really want developers to realize the potential of their apps reaching that many people. So much so that they spent over $4 million developing an extensive Android development course in partnership with Udacity.
Almost a year after Google took the wraps off of Material Design at I/O 2014, the Mountain View company has today updated its Developers website with a visual overhaul to bring its appearance in line with that of Android Lollipop. This isn’t the first of Google’s properties to get the new design (as we saw Google Play Music get a redesign in May), but it’s yet another one of Google’s properties that is falling in line with the new look.
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Google has today released an open source exercise “game sample” to GitHub which utilizes a handful of Android technologies to demonstrate to developers how they can create fun games using Google Fit and Android Wear.
Google today has officially released Play Games Player Analytics to developers. In a post on the Android Developers Blog, Google announced that these new tools will allow for game developers to better track in-game player behavior and improve in-app business tactics and performance.
Google paid developers a total of $7B in the past 12 months from a mix of app sales and in-app purchases, the company says, closing in on the record $10B payout recently announced by Apple.
Re/code also reports that Google is testing sponsored searches in the Play Store, enabling developers to pay to have their apps show up at the top of searches. Sponsored Play Store searches will work in exactly the same way as they do in the company’s main search engine: developers bidding for keywords, with sponsored apps appearing above organic search results, flagged with a small Ad tag …
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObvaD7EcDGM]
Google today launched a new version of its developer-focused YouTube channel, continuing the company’s expansion into the Chinese market. Ironically, YouTube is still blocked by China’s nationwide firewall, so users interested in taking advantage of the channel will need to find other ways to access its content.
The English-language version of the channel contains resources for developers creating Android apps, web content, and other software projects. The Chinese channel currently only features two introductory channels, but will likely contain localized versions of new videos from the English channel.
Google today released a set of improvements to the Google Maps APIs for developers looking to use transit directions in their Android apps. Specifically, users can now receive fare info where available and make use of the same mode and routing options as the Google Maps app.
The latest numbers from app metrics tracking firm AppFigures reveal that Google’s Play Store topped Apple’s App Store based on total number of apps and developers for the first time in 2014. Google moved ahead of Apple with 1.43 million Android apps in the Play Store, compared to 1.21 million on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
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Google today has updated its Play Store guidelines with yet another restriction on what developers can put in the descriptions of their apps. With today’s update, developers are now forbidden to include user testimonials in their app’s description. Any developer who breaks this rule could see the app in question pulled (via Android Police).
In a developer blog post this morning, Sony announced that developers can now build custom versions of Android for all 2014 Xperia devices with a Qualcomm processor. This is made possible through Google’s AOSP (Android Open Source Project), a project dedicated to keeping Android open and giving developers the power to build their own custom ROMs.
Google may own the world’s most popular mobile operating system in Android, but it wants iPhone and iPad developers to recognize that the company has a lot to offer for them as well. Enter a new web series called Route 85, which will consist of a set of videos uploaded to the Google Developers channel on YouTube to showcase everything from SDKs to code libraries that iOS developers can take advantage of.
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Google on Monday released Android Studio 1.0, the first stable version of its Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for building and managing apps. The tool, available for Windows, Mac and Linux, was under development for the past two years and is intended to replace Eclipse as the official Android IDE for developers.
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Dropbox today officially announced its Dropbox for Business API allowing corporate IT systems to integrate the cloud-syncing platform for businesses into their own solutions. Dropbox says its newly announced Business API (application programming interface) will let developers take advantage of “team-level functionality” and corporate partners to further integrate Dropbox for Business into their own systems. Specifically, the Dropbox for Business API will provide the following benefits for partners:
Back at I/O, Google gave attendees a look at Android Auto and now the outfit is giving developers the tools to optimize their applications for automobiles. Today, the company announced the availability of its first APIs for building car-friendly apps with voice and messaging capabilities.
Google is continuing with its focus on guiding developers through the process of creating successful apps for Android. Today, the company released a new digital playbook that outlines the best practices to help software producers get the most out of their applications when publishing them on Google Play. Available as a free download, “The Secrets to App Success on Google Play,” is broken into seven sections that walk devs through some critical steps to make their software stand out.
Google previously allowed developers to make add-ons that bring extra functionality to its Google Docs and Sheets web apps, and now Google is bringing the same feature to its Forms app. Google gives a few examples of add-ons that might be handy for Forms. Imagine, for example,“setting a survey end date, sending custom emails based on responses, storing lists of choices that you frequently add to questions, and more.”
Over the last few months, Forms has been getting a bunch of updates to help you make good looking surveys, like new theme choices and the ability to create your own personalized themes. To give you even more flexibility and options, we’re introducing add-ons for Forms—new tools, created by developer partners, that deliver even more features to your surveys (just like add-ons for Docs and Sheets).
Google highlighted a few add-ons that are already available:
Add-ons for Forms are accessible from a new “Add-ons” menu in the app or this link. Developers interested in learning more about developing add-ons can do so here.
After releasing a preview of the new feature for iOS developers at an event earlier this year, Facebook today announced that it’s officially rolling out a Mobile Like Button to all, including Android developers. That means that app developers can now easily offer users the ability to “directly Like the app’s Facebook Page, or any Open Graph object within the app, and share on Facebook.”
The mobile Like Button works seamlessly with the Facebook account the person is logged into on their device, allowing people to Like any piece of content, while in your native app.
Facebook is recommending developers show the Like Button when users reach a certain achievement or “level of engagement”. The company pointed an example from The Tribez & Castles game pictured above. Another recommendation is to encourage users to Like as soon as they open the app as pictured in the musiXmatch example above.
Android developers interested in learning more can do so here.
Google announced today that it’s completely turning down Google Maps API for Flash on September 2nd. This decision follows suit with the company’s initial depreciation period, which started almost three years ago. Developers now have three weeks to migrate their outdated applications to JavaScript Maps API v3 in order for them to remain relevant.
Google announced on Tuesday that it has made the Google Play Developer Publishing API available to all developers, allowing for various publishing and management tasks for apps. The API can be used for managing in-app products and subscriptions, products purchase status, subscriptions purchase management, uploading new versions of an app, releasing apps by assigning APKs to various tracks, and creating and modifying Play Store listings.
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Yet another announcement from Google I/O today comes in the form of a new Gmail API beta that will make it easier for developers to integrate Gmail features into their apps:
While IMAP is great at what it was designed for (connecting email clients to email servers in a standard way), it wasn’t really designed to do all of the cool things that you have been working on, which is why this week at Google I/O, we’re launching the beta of the new Gmail API.
Designed to let you easily deliver Gmail-enabled features, this new API is a standard Google API, which gives RESTful access to a user’s mailbox under OAuth 2.0 authorization. It supports CRUD operations on true Gmail datatypes such as messages, threads, labels and drafts.
So what’s the benefit over IMAP or other solutions that developers have already been using to integrate Gmail features? Google says the new API, unlike IMAP, “gives fine-grained control to a user’s mailbox.” That means that an app, for example, “only needs to send mail on behalf of a user and does not need to read mail, you can limit your permission request to send-only.” There are also other benefits like speed:
To keep in sync, the API allows you to query the inbox change history, thereby avoiding the need to do “archaeology” to figure out what changed. Finally, a huge benefit is speed. While there’s still some tuning to be done (“beta” – remember?), results from our tests and feedback from pre-release developers suggest that the new Gmail API is delivering dramatic performance improvements over IMAP for web application use cases.
Screenshot via Google I/O microsite
With Google I/O kicking off today at 9 am PST/12 pm EST, Google VP Megan Smith tells USA Today that the number of women attending Google’s developer conference has more than doubled since last year’s conference.
She says women will make up 20 percent of the 6,000 software developers. Last year just 8 percent of Google I/O goers were women, a statistic that Smith says is typical of most tech conferences.
“Twenty percent is not 50 percent, which is where we want to be,” she said. “But the trajectory is good.”
Google is also making efforts to increase the stage presence of women on stage and leading sessions, according to Smith, with 25 percent of Google representatives being women this year compared to 16 percent a year ago.
The company recently released data showing that only 30 percent of its employees are women as it expressed it is not where it wants to be in terms of diversity as a company.
Amazon announced today that its standalone Appstore has been growing very quickly, tripling the number of apps that were in the store just 12 months ago. The company also announced that Amazon Coins, which let users save money on apps and games by buying the “currency” in bulk, have been very popular with customers having already spent “hundreds of millions” of them.
And apparently, developers are extremely happy with the store. When surveyed, 65% developers said that total revenue is just as good or better on Kindle Fire compared to other platforms, 74% said that Average Revenue per App/User is as good or better, and 76% said that the Kindle Fire “helps them connect with new market segments.”
“Developers tell us that they experience improved reach, greater monetization, and, oftentimes, higher revenue when they have their apps and games in the Amazon Appstore,” said Mike George, Vice President of Amazon Appstore and Games. “But this is just the beginning—we’re building more services and capabilities for developers and more Android-based APIs based on their feedback. Most Android apps just work on Kindle Fire, and with an Appstore made for Android devices, Amazon’s Appstore can help developers distribute their apps on Android devices all over the world. It’s a great time for developers to bring their apps to the Amazon Appstore.”
Amazon is holding a press event this wednesday, which is all but confirmed to be the company’s first entry into the smartphone market.