Google has announced the creation of Open Usage Commons, an organization aimed to help open source projects manage and enforce their trademarks appropriately and effectively.
For years now, long before it became a part of Google’s Firebase, Crashlytics has offered Android and iOS developers a way to obtain insights about if and why their app is crashing on their user’s devices. As has been the trend for Firebase libraries recently, Google has made Crashlytics for Android and iOS into an open source project.
As evidenced by Android and Chromium, Google has long been committed to open source software. The company now wants to foster a similar community for hardware and chip design, particularly open source silicon.
As both Google Home and Google Assistant devices become more ubiquitous in our lives, making new Actions for the Assistant becomes an almost necessary step for developers. To make it easier for Android developers (among others) to make the leap, today, Google has released a Java & Kotlin library for Actions on Google.
Do you remember having an Etch-A-Sketch as a kid? Developers in the Google Chrome Labs sure do. Calling back to this nostalgic toy, Google Chrome Labs has released a free, online, open source recreation called Web-A-Skeb.
Many aspects of Google Chrome and Chrome OS are available open source directly from Google under the Chromium projects. However, Google still keeps some things private. One piece of Chrome OS that’s been kept private all this time is the Camera app, but that is changing now with it being added to the open source Chromium repository. Google also seems to be planning some improvements like portrait mode.
As part of the Android Jetpack announcement at I/O in May, Google unveiled a redesign for the Android Support Library, called AndroidX. Like its predecessor, AndroidX is designed to help developers maintain backward compatibility with old versions of Android. As announced on Reddit, these libraries are now open source, as part of AOSP.
Open source is a very important principle at Google, considering how many of its projects are developed that way. Google is now a Platinum sponsor of The Linux Foundation — a non-profit organization that advances the cause.
On its Open Source Blog, Google announced the first major revision of the open source Git protocol.
Google has today launched a new website to showcase the many open source projects that it is working on — including Android, Chromium, TensorFlow, and plenty others.
AnyPixel.js is great example of a Google experiment becoming an actual product. The open source software and hardware library — available on GitHub — allows anyone to use the web to build “big, unusual, interactive displays” with any component.
Thread, the low-power mesh network protocol that Alphabet-owned Nest built in tandem with Samsung, ARM, and other companies, is now going open-source. Since it opened membership in October of 2014, the not-completely-open “Thread Group” has grown to have over 30 products. But this OpenThread release takes things a step further in the name of openness…
A new open source project called PieMessage enables cross-platform iMessage support, allowing Android users to communicate using Apple’s iPhone messaging platform.
In the video below, we get a short look at the PieMessage app in action with a still unreleased prototype version of the app.
The AMP Project — to speed up and improve mobile web pages — is picking up steam since its announcement six weeks ago, and now we know that it’s expected to launch in an official capacity early next year. A bevy of new media organizations and ad tech companies have announced their support and commitment to the open source project, as well.
During Microsoft’s Connect 2015 event today live from New York, the company announced it is open-sourcing its Visual Studio Code program for developers and in the process bringing its Visual Studio Emulator for Android to Mac users.
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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.
As smartphones grow in popularity in emerging markets, Hugo Barra has very publicly spoken for Xiaomi, the Chinese-based technology company that he left Google to join as Vice President of International in September 2013. Today, he sat down with Bloomberg to talk about many things, including accusations that the Chinese company has stolen Apple’s design, Android as one of the best decisions Google ever made, and Xiaomi’s eventual plan to bring its devices stateside…
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Longtime users of Google Chrome may remember a period when it was possible to display tabs vertically, in a bar on the left-hand side of the screen, rather than at the top above the address bar. That feature (pictured above) was experimental, and the Chromium team, which creates public forks of the source code behind Google’s commercial browser, eventually gave up on the idea because it was believed to be a niche feature and “nobody stepped forward to do the work to drive the feature to completion.” Sidebars may be coming back from the dead in a different but similar form, however…
While other competing browsers have long had special modes that strip all extraneous content from the pages of articles so as to reduce distraction, Chrome has thus far only seen this option, commonly referred to as “Reader Mode,” appear as an experimental version. That’s even though the base Chromium browser has had an implementation of it available built-in for over a year now, and the Google Chrome team having had added an experimental toolbar icon for it to its mobile browser more than a year ago. It looks like the Chrome team might be close to a wide rollout, however.
With a swarm of developers from around the world converging on San Francisco’s Moscone Center tomorrow for Google I/O, Twitter wants them to keep the company’s real-time social platform at the top of mind. This afternoon it announced that its developer tools for integrating Twitter into Android apps have been open-sourced, with the projects now hosted publicly on Github.
Launched in September 2008, Google’s Chrome browser is now dominant in its share of the desktop web browser market, with approximately 1 in 4 Internet users interfacing with the web using the browser. What many Chrome users probably don’t know, however, is that it’s actually based off the open source Chromium browser, also developed by Google. Up until today Chrome for Android differed from its desktop counterpart in that it’s codebase wasn’t open source – meaning, the code for the app wasn’t publicly available for other developers to view, modify, and build upon. That changed today.
“Adblockers,” browser tools which work to hide ads from the web browsing experience, are a controversial topic of discussion among those in the media industry. And for good reason, as the media industry as a whole is in the midst of a large shift from creating content for – and earning a vast majority of revenue from – the print and desktop mediums, where large boxy ads have long reigned king. But when we talk about adblockers, the one tool we’re all probably referring to, the one which has become synonymous with the term, is Adblock Plus (ABP), and the company behind it has released a dedicated browser for Android…
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 this afternoon, in a blog post on its Open Source Blog, announced the details for two of its upcoming coding challenges. Google Code-In 2014 and Summer of Code 2015 are two ways in which Google hopes to encourage students to design and participate in open source projects, while also attempting to win contests and learn from their peers.
