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Get ready for Javascript “Promises” with Google and Udacity

Sarah Clark, Program Manager, Google Developer Training

Front-end web developers face challenges when using common “asynchronous” requests. These requests, such as fetching a URL or reading a file, often lead to complicated code, especially when performing multiple actions in a row. How can we make this easier for developers?

Javascript Promises are a new tool that simplifies asynchronous code, converting a tangle of callbacks and event handlers into simple, straightforward code such as: fetch(url).then(decodeJSON).then(addToPage)...

Promises are used by many new web standards, including Service Worker, the Fetch API, Quota Management, Font Load Events,Web MIDI, and Streams.

We’ve just opened up a online course on Promises, built in collaboration with Udacity. This brief course, which you can finish in about a day, walks you through building an “Exoplanet Explorer” app that reads and displays live data using Promises. You’ll also learn to use the Fetch API and finally kiss XMLHttpRequest goodbye!

This short course is a prerequisite for most of the Senior Web Developer Nanodegree. Whether you are in the paid Nanodegree program or taking the course for free, won’t you come learn to make your code simpler and more reliable today?

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Google Play services 8 1 Get ready for Marshmallow!

Posted by, Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

With the rollout of Google Play services 8.1 finally finished, there’s a lot of new information to share with developers about the release!

Marshmallow Permissions

Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) has introduced a new permissions model allowing users to control app permissions at runtime. As an app developer, it’s important for you to adopt this and give your users good control over the permissions your app needs. You can find more details here.

If your app is using Google Play services SDK versions prior to 8.1, you must update to use this new version to ensure your app is fully compatible with Android 6.0. This will enable you to manage the permission flows appropriately for your app and avoid any potential connection issues. For more details, and a step-by-step guide to what your app should do for the best user experience, take a look at this blog post on the Android Developers site.

App Invites

App Invites allows you to grow your apps audience by letting existing Android and iOS users invite their Google contacts via email or SMS to try your app out. Google Play services 8.1 adds the ability for developers to customize the email invitation, including adding a custom image, and specifying a call-to-action button text. These improvements should help developers increase user engagement and conversions with app invites.

Ambient Mode Maps

Android Wear provides a feature called ambient mode, enabling apps to stay visible, even when they aren’t actively being used. Now, with Google Play services 8.1, the Google Maps Android API supports ambient mode. In this mode, a simplified low-color rendering of the map will be seen. This reduces power consumption by lighting fewer pixels, but the camera and zoom level are retained, so user context will be kept. To learn more about ambient mode, check out this blog post.

Nearby Status Listener

Google Nearby allows you to build simple interactions between nearby devices. A new addition in Google Play services allows your app to receive callbacks when an active Nearby publish or subscribe expires. This frees you from tracking the TTL and allows your apps UI to accurately reflect whether Nearby is active or not.

Play Games Player Stats API

The new Play Games Player Stats API allows you to build better, smarter, games. It will let you tailor user experiences to specific segments of players and different stages of the player lifecycle. For example, you can give your most valuable players that are returning from a break in play a special welcome back message and reward.

Breaking Changes

In this release, there are some changes to GoogleApiClient and PendingResult, making them abstract classes, which may lead to breaking changes in your code. Learn more about these changes and how to handle them in the release notes.

SDK Now available!

You can get started developing today by downloading the Google Play services SDK from the Android SDK Manager. To learn more about Google Play services and the APIs available to you through it, visit our documentation on Google Developers.

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Get your apps and games ready for space with Google Play April Fools

Posted by Lily Sheringham, Google Play team

Google Play lets you distribute your apps and games to over 1 billion active Android users around the world. With advances in space exploration and the advent of galactic tourism, there will be a high number of users beyond this world that developers need to start thinking about, too. Google Play can now help you reach them. We’ve added new features to the Google Play Developer Console and updated the material design guidelines, to help you design, test, and distribute your apps and games in space.

Here’s a look at how The Guardian, one of the largest English-news organizations in the world, enhanced its Android app to enable astronauts and space travellers to stay informed and up-to-date, while in orbit or on the surface of the moon.

"I am pleased to have The Guardians application to test the growing Interplanetary Internet" says Vint Cerf, distinguished visiting scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Googles Chief Internet Evangelist. "The interstellar version is in development and Im looking forward to having more Google Play apps and games tested in space flight."

Get your apps and games ready for take off today.

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Get your bibs ready for Big Android BBQ!

Posted by, Colt McAnlis, Senior Texas Based Developer Advocate

We’re excited to be involved in the Big Android BBQ (BABBQ) this year because of one thing: passion! Just like BBQ, Android development is much better when passionate people obsess over it. This year’s event is no exception.

Take +Ian Lake for example. His passion about Android development runs so deep, he was willing to chug a whole bottle of BBQ sauce just so we’d let him represent Android Development Patterns at the conference this year. Or even +Chet Haase, who suffered a humiliating defeat during the Speechless session last year (at the hands of this charming bald guy). He loves BBQ so much that he’s willing to come back and lose again this year, just so he can convince you all that #perfmatters. Let’s not forget +Reto Meier. That mustache was stuck on his face for days. DAYS! All because he loves Android Development so much.

When you see passion like this, you just have to be part of it. Which is why this year’s BABBQ is jam packed with awesome Google Developers content. We’re going to be talking about performance, new APIs in Marshmallow 6.0, NDK tricks, and Wear optimization. We even have a new set of code labs so that folks can get their hands on new code to use in their apps.

Finally, we haven’t even mentioned our BABBQ attendees, yet. We’re talking about people who are so passionate about an Android development conference that they are willing to travel to Texas to be a part of it!

If BBQ isn’t your thing, or you won’t be able to make the event in person, the Android Developers and Google Developers YouTube channels will be there in full force. We’ll be recording the sessions and posting them to Twitter and Google+ throughout the event.

So, whether you are planning to attend in person or watch online, we want you to remain passionate about your Android development.

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Game developers get ready for our Developer Day at GDC 2016

Next week, we’ll be in San Francisco to host our annual Developer Day at the Game Developers Conference (GDC). Join us to get a first look at our latest efforts to help developers of all sizes build successful mobile games businesses with powerful tools to develop high quality apps, grow a valuable user base, and earn more revenue.

Our Developer Day will take place in room 2020 of the West Hall of Moscone Center on Monday, March 14. Based on your feedback from last year, were going to keep presentations short and informative with lightning talks around virtual reality, the cloud, ads, and so much more, while dedicating more time to interactive discussions with Google engineers and your peers in the industry.

Here’s a glimpse of the agenda on Monday, March 14:

Opening keynote || 10AM: Be the first to see what’s new and hear about the investments Google is making to help mobile developers grow their game business.

Best practices for success on Google Play || 10:30AM: In this talk, you’ll learn how successful mobile game developers acquire users and bring them back to keep them playing longer.

Lightning talks || 11:15AM: A series of 5-minute talks on innovative technologies to tantalize players, like Project Tango, software to speed and simplify game development, and new ways to predict and prevent user churn.

Interactive roundtables || 2:00PM: After lunch, we’ll break up into interactive roundtables to interact with Google experts and peers on how to build better and more successful games. Ask questions, tell Google product teams what you need, and learn from fellow game developers.

Visit the agenda page to get a full list of our talks and speaker details. Please note that these events are part of the official Game Developers Conference, so you will need a pass to attend.

For everyone who can’t make it in person, we’ll be live streaming our event on YouTube. Tune in from 10am on Monday, March 18.

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Android N APIs are now final get your apps ready for Android N!

As we put the finishing touches on the next release of Android, which will begin to roll out to consumers later this summer, we’re releasing the 4th Developer Preview of Android N, including the Android N final SDK. And thanks to your continued feedback over the last three releases, all of the APIs are now final as well. If you’ve already enrolled your device in the Android Beta Program, (available at android.com/beta) you will receive an update to this Developer Preview shortly.

Get your apps ready for Android N

The final SDK for Android N is now available for download through the SDK Manager in Android Studio. It gives you everything you need to develop and test against the official APIs in the Android N platform. Once you’ve installed the final SDK, you can update your project’s compileSdkVersion to API 24 to develop with the Android N APIs and build and test on the new platform, for new features such as Multi-window support, direct-reply notifications, and others. We also recommend updating your app’s targetSdkVersion to API 24 to opt-in and test your app with Android N specific behavior changes. For details on how to setup your app with the final SDK, see Set up the Preview. For details on API level 24 check out the API diffs and the updated API reference, now hosted online.

Along with the Android N final SDK, we’ve also updated the Android Support Library to 24.0.0. This allows you to use multi-window and picture-in-picture callbacks, new notification features, methods for supporting Direct Boot, and new MediaBrowser APIs in a backward compatible manner.

Publish your apps to alpha, beta or production channels in Google Play

Now that you have a final set of APIs, you can publish updates compiling with, and optionally targeting, API 24 to Google Play. You can now publish app updates that use API 24 to your alpha, beta, or even production channels in the Google Play Developer Console. In this way, you can test your app’s backward-compatibility and push updates to users whose devices are running Developer Preview 4.

To make sure that your updated app runs well on Android N, as well as older versions, a common strategy is to use Google Play’s beta testing feature to get early feedback from a small group of users -- including developer preview users — and then do a staged rollout as you release the updated app to all users.

How to Get Developer Preview 4

Developer Preview 4 includes updated system images for all supported Preview devices as well as for the Android emulator. If you are already enrolled in the Android Beta program, your devices will get the Developer Preview 4 update right away, no action is needed on your part. If you aren’t yet enrolled in Android Beta, the easiest way to get started is by visiting android.com/beta and opt-in your eligible Android phone or tablet -- you’ll soon receive this (and later) preview updates over-the-air. As always, you can also download and flash this update manually. The N Developer Preview is available for Nexus 6, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus 9, and Pixel C devices, as well as General Mobile 4G [Android One] devices and the Sony Xperia Z3.

Thanks so much for all of your feedback so far. Please continue to share feedback or requests either in the N Developer Preview issue tracker, N Preview Developer community, or Android Beta community as we work towards the consumer release later this summer. We’re looking forward to seeing your apps on Android N!

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