Posted by Peter Lubbers, Senior Program Manager, Google Developer Training
We know how important it is for you to efficiently develop the skills to build better Android apps and be successful in your jobs. To meet your training needs, we’ve partnered with Udacity to create Android training courses, ranging from beginner to more advanced content.
Last week at Google I/O we announced the Android Nanodegree, an education credential that is designed for busy people to learn new skills and advance their careers in a short amount of time from anywhere at any time. The nanodegree ties together our Android courses, and provides you with a certificate that may help you be a more marketable Android developer.
Training courses
All training courses are developed and taught by expert Google instructors from the Developer Platform team. In addition to updating our popular Developing Android Apps course and releasing Advanced Android App Development, we now have courses for everyone from beginning programmers to advanced developers who want to configure their Gradle build settings. And then there's all the fun stuff in between—designing great-looking, high performance apps, making your apps run on watches, TVs, and in cars, and using Google services like Maps, Ads, Analytics, and Fit.
Each course is available individually, without charge, at udacity.com/google. Our instructors are waiting for you:
Android Nanodegree
You can also enroll in the new Android Nanodegree for a monthly subscription fee, which gives you access to coaches who will review your code, provide guidance on your project, answer questions about the class, and help keep you on track when you need it.
More importantly, you will learn by doing, focusing only on where you need to grow. Since the Nanodegree is based on your skills and the projects in your portfolio, you do not need to complete the courses that address the skills you already have. You can focus on writing the code and building the projects that meet the requirements for the Nanodegree credential. We’ll also be inviting 50 Android Nanodegree graduates to Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, for a three day intensive Android Career Summit in November. Participants will have the opportunity to experience Google’s company culture and attend workshops focused on developing their personal career paths. Participants will then leverage the skills learned from Udacity’s Android Nanodegree during a two-day hackathon.
To help you learn more about this program and and courses within it, Google and Udacity are partnering up for an "Ask the Experts" live streamed series. In the first episode on Wednesday, June 3rd at 2pm PDT, Join Sebastian Thrun, Peter Lubbers and Jocelyn Becker who will be answering your questions on the Nanodegree. RSVP here and ask and vote for questions here.
Android training in Arabic
We also believe that everyone has the right to learn how to develop Android apps. Today, there is a great need for developers in countries outside of the United States as software powers every industry from food and transportation to healthcare and retail. As a first step in getting the Android Nanodegree localized and targeted for individual countries, we have worked with the Government of Egypt and Udacity to create end-to-end translations of our top Android courses into Arabic (including fully dubbed video). Google will offer 2,000 scholarships to students to get a certificate for completing the Arabic version of the Android Fundamentals course. Google will also host job fairs and sessions for students with local employers and the Egyptian Government. For more information, see www.udacity.com/egypt.
Complete Android course catalog
Here are the currently-planned courses in the Android Nanodegree:
Android 5.0 Lollipop was one of the most significant Android releases ever, in no small part due to the introduction of material design, a new design language that refreshed the entire Android experience. Our detailed spec is a great place to start to adopt material design, but we understand that it can be a challenge for developers, particularly ones concerned with backward compatibility. With a little help from the new Android Design Support Library, we’re bringing a number of important material design components to all developers and to all Android 2.1 or higher devices. You’ll find a navigation drawer view, floating labels for editing text, a floating action button, snackbar, tabs, and a motion and scroll framework to tie them together.
Navigation View
The navigation drawer can be an important focal point for identity and navigation within your app and consistency in the design here can make a considerable difference in how easy your app is to navigate, particularly for first time users. NavigationView makes this easier by providing the framework you need for the navigation drawer as well as the ability to inflate your navigation items through a menu resource.
You use NavigationView as DrawerLayout’s drawer content view with a layout such as:
You’ll note two attributes for NavigationView: app:headerLayout controls the (optional) layout used for the header. app:menu is the menu resource inflated for the navigation items (which can also be updated at runtime). NavigationView takes care of the scrim protection of the status bar for you, ensuring that your NavigationView interacts with the status bar appropriately on API21+ devices.
The simplest drawer menus will be a collection of checkable menu items:
You’ll get callbacks on selected items by setting a OnNavigationItemSelectedListener using setNavigationItemSelectedListener(). This provides you with the MenuItem that was clicked, allowing you to handle selection events, changed the checked status, load new content, programmatically close the drawer, or any other actions you may want.
Floating labels for editing text
Even the humble EditText has room to improve in material design. While an EditText alone will hide the hint text after the first character is typed, you can now wrap it in a TextInputLayout, causing the hint text to become a floating label above the EditText, ensuring that users never lose context in what they are entering.
In addition to showing hints, you can also display an error message below the EditText by calling setError().
Floating Action Button
A floating action button is a round button denoting a primary action on your interface. The Design library’s FloatingActionButton gives you a single consistent implementation, by default colored using the colorAccent from your theme.
In addition to the normal size floating action button, it also supports the mini size (fabSize="mini") when visual continuity with other elements is critical. As FloatingActionButton extends ImageView, you’ll use android:src or any of the methods such as setImageDrawable() to control the icon shown within the FloatingActionButton.
Snackbar
Providing lightweight, quick feedback about an operation is a perfect opportunity to use a snackbar. Snackbars are shown on the bottom of the screen and contain text with an optional single action. They automatically time out after the given time length by animating off the screen. In addition, users can swipe them away before the timeout.
By including the ability to interact with the Snackbar through swiping it away or actions, these are considerably more powerful than toasts, another lightweight feedback mechanism. However, you’ll find the API very familiar:
You’ll note the use of a View as the first parameter to make() - Snackbar will attempt to find an appropriate parent of the Snackbar’s view to ensure that it is anchored to the bottom.
Tabs
Switching between different views in your app via tabs is not a new concept to material design and they are equally at home as a top level navigation pattern or for organizing different groupings of content within your app (say, different genres of music).
The Design library’s TabLayout implements both fixed tabs, where the view’s width is divided equally between all of the tabs, as well as scrollable tabs, where the tabs are not a uniform size and can scroll horizontally. Tabs can be added programmatically:
However, if you are using a ViewPager for horizontal paging between tabs, you can create tabs directly from your PagerAdapter’s getPageTitle() and then connect the two together using setupWithViewPager(). This ensures that tab selection events update the ViewPager and page changes update the selected tab.
CoordinatorLayout, motion, and scrolling
Distinctive visuals are only one part of material design: motion is also an important part of making a great material designed app. While there are a lot of parts of motion in material design including touch ripples and meaningful transitions, the Design library introduces CoordinatorLayout, a layout which provides an additional level of control over touch events between child views, something which many of the components in the Design library take advantage of.
CoordinatorLayout and floating action buttons
A great example of this is when you add a FloatingActionButton as a child of your CoordinatorLayout and then pass that CoordinatorLayout to your Snackbar.make() call - instead of the snackbar displaying over the floating action button, the FloatingActionButton takes advantage of additional callbacks provided by CoordinatorLayout to automatically move upward as the snackbar animates in and returns to its position when the snackbar animates out on Android 3.0 and higher devices - no extra code required.
CoordinatorLayout also provides an layout_anchor attribute which, along with layout_anchorGravity, can be used to place floating views, such as the FloatingActionButton, relative to other views.
CoordinatorLayout and the app bar
The other main use case for the CoordinatorLayout concerns the app bar (formerly action bar) and scrolling techniques. You may already be using a Toolbar in your layout, allowing you to more easily customize the look and integration of that iconic part of an app with the rest of your layout. The Design library takes this to the next level: using an AppBarLayout allows your Toolbar and other views (such as tabs provided by TabLayout) to react to scroll events in a sibling view marked with a ScrollingViewBehavior. Therefore you can create a layout such as:
Now, as the user scrolls the RecyclerView, the AppBarLayout can respond to those events by using the children’s scroll flags to control how they enter (scroll on screen) and exit (scroll off screen). Flags include:
scroll: this flag should be set for all views that want to scroll off the screen - for views that do not use this flag, they’ll remain pinned to the top of the screen
enterAlways: this flag ensures that any downward scroll will cause this view to become visible, enabling the ‘quick return’ pattern
enterAlwaysCollapsed: When your view has declared a minHeight and you use this flag, your View will only enter at its minimum height (i.e., ‘collapsed’), only re-expanding to its full height when the scrolling view has reached it’s top.
exitUntilCollapsed: this flag causes the view to scroll off until it is ‘collapsed’ (its minHeight) before exiting
One note: all views using the scroll flag must be declared before views that do not use the flag. This ensures that all views exit from the top, leaving the fixed elements behind.
Collapsing Toolbars
Adding a Toolbar directly to an AppBarLayout gives you access to the enterAlwaysCollapsed and exitUntilCollapsed scroll flags, but not the detailed control on how different elements react to collapsing. For that, you can use CollapsingToolbarLayout:
This setup uses CollapsingToolbarLayout’s app:layout_collapseMode="pin" to ensure that the Toolbar itself remains pinned to the top of the screen while the view collapses. Even better, when you use CollapsingToolbarLayout and Toolbar together, the title will automatically appear larger when the layout is fully visible, then transition to its default size as it is collapsed. Note that in those cases, you should call setTitle() on the CollapsingToolbarLayout, rather than on the Toolbar itself.
In addition to pinning a view, you can use app:layout_collapseMode="parallax" (and optionally app:layout_collapseParallaxMultiplier="0.7" to set the parallax multiplier) to implement parallax scrolling (say of a sibling ImageView within the CollapsingToolbarLayout). This use case pairs nicely with the app:contentScrim="?attr/colorPrimary" attribute for CollapsingToolbarLayout, adding a full bleed scrim when the view is collapsed.
CoordinatorLayout and custom views
One thing that is important to note is that CoordinatorLayout doesn’t have any innate understanding of a FloatingActionButton or AppBarLayout work - it just provides an additional API in the form of a Coordinator.Behavior, which allows child views to better control touch events and gestures as well as declare dependencies between each other and receive callbacks via onDependentViewChanged().
Views can declare a default Behavior by using the CoordinatorLayout.DefaultBehavior(YourView.Behavior.class) annotation,or set it in your layout files by with the app:layout_behavior="com.example.app.YourView$Behavior" attribute. This framework makes it possible for any view to integrate with CoordinatorLayout.
Available now!
The Design library is available now, so make sure to update the Android Support Repository in the SDK Manager. You can then start using the Design library with a single new dependency:
compile 'com.android.support:design:22.2.0'
Note that as the Design library depends on the Support v4 and AppCompat Support Libraries, those will be included automatically when you add the Design library dependency. We also took care that these new widgets are usable in the Android Studio Layout Editor’s Design view (find them under CustomView), giving you an easier way to preview some of these new components.
The Design library, AppCompat, and all of the Android Support Library are important tools in providing the building blocks needed to build a modern, great looking Android app without building everything from scratch.
When we first announced material design in June 2014, we shared an aspirational highlights reel that demonstrated key material principles for motion, interaction, and visual design across a range of hypothetical apps. “Hypothetical” being the key word here—back then, material design was just an idea. Sure, designers and engineers at Google were already working hard on applying material to Google’s Android, iOS, and web apps, but the notion of a single design system that can work across platforms and brands was just an idea.
Fast-forward to today, and thousands of Android apps are adopting material design using the Android 5.0 SDK and AppCompat, while designers and developers begin to experiment with material design on iOS and the web as well. These apps are starting to realize that aspirational vision we set out with that sizzle reel.
Today, we’re celebrating the amazing design work from Google Play developers and announcing the Material Design Showcase and Material Design Awards.
Of those 18 apps, we’re recognizing 6 with a special award, which we handed out during Google I/O today and announced at the Material Now session hosted by Matias Duarte.
These 6 winners of our first ever Material Design Awards represent best-in-class applications of specific aspects of material design:
B&H Photo Video Audio Pro for Immersive Imagery
New York Times for Elegant Typography
Pocket for Adaptive Layouts
Pocket Casts for Seamless Browsing
Tumblr for Delightful Animation
Weather Timeline for Crafted Simplicity
So today, we have a new highlights reel, featuring these six wonderful and very real apps:
The individuals, teams, and companies behind these apps have made the promise of material design that much more of a reality.
What’s next
But remember, this is only the beginning. We’ll continue to recognize excellent material design in the future, evolving the awards as we evolve material design itself—together as a community.
If you’re a designer or developer just starting out with material design, make sure to check out these 18 apps in the Material Design Showcase. They’re a great source of inspiration, in addition to the awesome content on community sites like Dribbble. And if you’re wondering how to start implementing some of these ideas, get started today with the Creating Apps with Material Design training docs. When you publish your next great app with material design, be sure to let us know on Google+ and Twitter!
At Google I/O, we announced the rollout of Google Play services 7.5 that deliver new capabilities and optimizations to devices across the Android ecosystem. Google Play services ensures that you can build on the latest features from Google for your users, with the confidence that those services will work properly on Android 2.3 and higher devices.
You’ll find the addition of Smart Lock for Passwords, Instance ID, new APIs for Google Cloud Messaging and Google Cast, as well as access to the Google Maps API on Android Wear devices.
Smart Lock for Passwords
Typing in a password, particularly on a mobile device, is never a pleasant experience. In many cases, your users have already logged in on the web or another device - shouldn’t your login process know that? Smart Lock for Passwords builds on the Chrome Password Manager, adding a new CredentialsApi API and UI on Android to retrieve saved credentials as part of your login process and saving new credentials for later use on other Android devices and any Chrome browser. Both password-based and Identity Provider (IDP, like Google Sign-In) credentials are supported. Keep your users logged in as they move between and to new devices; don’t let them drop off, get frustrated, or end up with multiple accounts.
Learn more about Smart Lock for Passwords on the developer site.
Instance ID, Identity, and Authorization
Instance ID (IID) allows you to retrieve a unique identifier for every app instance, providing a mechanism to authenticate and authorize actions, even if your app does not have user registration and accounts. For example, this allows you to uniquely determine which app instance is sending a request from by including the Instance ID token. We’ve also made it easy to handle edge cases to ensure that you’ll have valid Instance ID tokens.
Google Cloud Messaging
Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) gives developers a battery efficient mechanism for sending information to your users as well as send upstream messages from a device to your server.
Google Cloud Messaging and InstanceID
Previously, GCM used a unique registration ID to refer to each device - while these IDs will continue to work, you can now utilize Instance ID tokens for GCM, gaining all of the advantages of InstanceID around handling error cases. Instance ID tokens are fully compatible with user notifications, allowing you to send notifications to all of a user's devices.
Topic based subscriptions
You’ll also get another new feature for switching to InstanceID with GCM - topic based subscriptions! This makes it easy to publish a message to exactly the right audience and have GCM handle all the heavy lifting of sending to all subscribed instances. Your app can subscribe to multiple topics, allowing you to create any set of topics needed to best handle your app’s messaging needs.
Receiving messages with GCM
Of course, just subscribing to receive messages is only half the battle: receiving GCM messages can now be done using a GcmReceiver and a subclass of GcmListenerService. These two classes make it easy to help your app reliably process messages, even when the device is awakened from deep sleep.
GCM Network Manager
Applications often need to sync data with their servers when new information is available. In GCM we refer to this model as “send to sync”. We made this task much simpler with the introduction of the GCM Network Manager APIs, which handles many of the common implementation patterns such as waiting for network connectivity, device charging, network retries, and backoff. GcmNetworkManager will schedule your background tasks when it is most appropriate and it can batch multiple tasks together for efficiency and battery savings, even utilizing the JobScheduler APIs for best performance on Android 5.0+ devices. With support for both one-off tasks and periodic tasks, this API serves as a flexible framework for many different types of operations.
App Invites Beta
Now in beta, App Invites is new functionality for both Android and iOS that provides a standard UI for users to invite their contacts to install your app and optionally deep link specifically to selected content, using your users’ device and Google-wide contacts as a source to drive referrals to increase the reach of your app.
With the ability to send invites via SMS or email, this provides a great mechanism to organically grow your user base, give your users a consistent way to share your app with exactly who would like it, and track how effective your invites are.
With App Invites, our goal is to take the hard work out of building user referral and onboarding flows, so that you can focus on your core app experience. Learn more about App Invites on the developer site!
Google Cast
Google Cast is a technology that lets you easily cast content from your mobile device or laptop right to your TV or speakers. With the new ability to use remote display on any Android, iOS, or Chrome app, better media support, better game support, we hope your Google Cast experience is better than ever!
Remote Display API
We are making it easy for mobile developers to bring graphically intensive apps or games to Google Cast receivers with Google Cast Remote Display APIs for Android and iOS. The new Remote Display API allows you to build a tailored, integrated second screen experience, without requiring an identical mirroring of content between mobile devices and the Google Cast device.
Playing single media items on Chromecast has been something RemoteMediaPlayer (or CastCompanionLibrary’s VideoCastController) has been doing well for some time. With this release, RemoteMediaPlayer is gaining a full media queue and support for autoplay for a seamless media playback experience. This ensures that all connected devices can easily maintain a synchronized queue of upcoming media items, opening up new possibilities of creating collaborative Google Cast media experiences.
Game Manager APIs for Google Cast
Bringing your game to Google Cast can make for a great multiplayer experience, using a mobile device as a game controller and the TV to display the action. To make it easier to send messages and state changes to all connected clients and the cast receiver, Google Play services 7.5 introduces the GameManagerClient and the Game Manager APIs for Google Cast, available for Android, iOS, Chrome, and for receivers.
Android Wear
Watches are great devices for telling time. But what if in addition showing you when you are, watches could easily show you where you are? With the new release, you can now use the familiar Maps APIs on Android Wear devices:
This makes it possible to display fully interactive maps, as well as lite mode maps, directly on Android Wear devices. You’ll be able to scroll and zoom interactive maps, show the user’s current location, and more. Check out the full list of supported features in the developer documentation and check out all the details on the Geo Developers blog.
Google Fit
Google Fit is an open platform designed to make building fitness apps, whether that means retrieving sensor data like current location and speed, collecting and storing activity data, or automatically aggregating that data into a single view of the user’s fitness data.
You’ll now be able to use the RecordingApi for gathering estimated distance traveled and calories burned data, making it available to your app and other Google Fit enabled apps via the HistoryApi.
Being active can take many forms. While some activities are easily measured in terms of steps or distance, strength training is measured in terms of type, resistance and repetitions. This type of data can now be stored in Google Fit via new support for a large number of workout exercises, helping users build a complete view of their activity.
SDK is now available!
Google Play services 7.5 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 APIs for Android site.
Posted by Ellie Powers, Product Manager, Google Play
With more than 50 billion app installs over the past year from users across 190 countries, Google Play continues to see incredible growth thanks to developers like you creating amazing experiences. Play is now reaching more than one billion users every month.
In February, we announced that we had paid out more than $7 billion to developers in the prior year alone. This week at Google I/O, we’re introducing new and powerful tools to help you further grow your business, improve decision making based on smarter insights, and better engage your user base with more relevant content.
Acquire users from the Developer Console
Once you’ve built a great app, the next important step is to proactively find ways to promote it and grow a loyal user base. App install ads are one powerful way to do that. In the coming months, you’ll be able to quickly and easily set up ad campaigns right from within the Google Play Developer Console for the first time.
All you need to do is set a total budget and the cost you're willing to pay per user and we’ll scale your app promotion across our networks, including Google Search, AdMob, YouTube and the search ads we’re piloting on Google Play. With this new feature, you will will be able to better find the customers that are most likely to install your app.
Actionable insights with the Acquisition and Conversion Funnel
Whether you pay to acquire users or not, you want to know where they’re coming from. Through the Developer Console, you will soon be able to get a snapshot of how many users visit your Store listing, install your app, and make purchases. You’ll see where your most valuable users come from — across organic and paid traffic — and better understand where to focus your efforts.
Optimize your Play store listing with experiments
Your Play Store listing is extremely important, as it’s often the first touch point users have with your app. Starting today, we’re making it easier to optimize this page with support for A/B tests. You can run experiments with different versions of text and graphics to see which are most effective in converting visits into installs on Google Play. In our pilot program, we were thrilled to see that some developers like Kongregate achieved double-digit improvements in their install rates so far.
Test your app automatically on real devices with Cloud Test Lab
With the large variety of Android form factors in the market, testing your app on real devices is a critical step to ensuring a positive user experience on any device. However, you may not have access to every device that your users do. So we’re integrating the newly announced Cloud Test Lab into the Developer Console, which will allow you to automatically test your apps on hundreds of popular physical Android devices for free. We’re going to be rolling out this pilot program gradually, so we’ll welcome your feedback on it.
For each APK you upload to an alpha or beta channel, Google Play will execute fully automated testing of your app against physical devices matching your app targeting criteria and output a report with a detailed analysis of issues, including screenshots and logs. Google Cloud Test Lab will roll out to all developers later this year; you can sign-up to become a tester in the Developer Console now.
Build a data-driven games business with Player Analytics
Google Play Games has activated more than 180M new users in the past six months and continues to be the fastest growing mobile gaming platform in history.
Over the coming months, we're adding new reports, player segments, game metrics, and event types to Player Analytics to help you manage your games business. We're also bringing enhancements to our live operations tools that will enable dynamic content updates that make games feel more alive and engaging, gameplay to respond to changing player needs, and more fun, personalized user experiences. As the bar for success in mobile gaming continues to rise, we’re continuing to evolve our tools to help you meet the soaring expectations of players.
Find great apps – developer pages and search results
There are several ways in which we are improving the discoverability of great apps and games on Google Play to help drive more engagement. Starting today, you can create a unique homepage on Google Play to promote your entire app catalog. With your own developer page, you are able to upload graphics, explain what your company is all about and pick a special app to feature. This gives you a single destination to promote all of your apps on Google Play.
We are also helping guide users with broad interests (e.g. “shopping”) in a new search results experience.
The focus is on organizing results in an intuitive way that allows users to narrow their intent -- such as grouping shopping apps into coupons apps and fashion apps. By doing so, users will be able to better see the range of apps that satisfy their needs, while also increasing the chances of discovering new and innovative apps that you’re building.
Family-friendly content in Google Play
Starting today, we’re making it easier to find family-friendly content on Google Play through new discovery features. On the Apps & Games and Movies & TV homepages, users can now hit the “Family” star to see a curated set of options for specific age groups. In Play Books, tap the “Children’s Books” star. These pages let you browse by age ranges to find content that’s the best fit for the family. If you’ve already opted-in your apps to the Designed for Families program and they’ve met the requirements, they’ll be included in the new family section so that parents can find suitable, trusted, high-quality apps and games more easily. Find out more about opting-in to the Designed for Families program.
If you’re at I/O 2015, come along to our breakout sessions where we’ll be talking about and demo’ing these new features. Find our sessions in the I/O 2015 schedule.
Check out developer.android.com/distribute over the coming weeks and months as we add I/O videos and more details about these and other new features.
