The last year has been an exciting one for Android developers, with an incredible amount of momentum. In fact, over 48 billion apps have been downloaded from Google Play to date, with over 2.5 billion app downloads in the last month alone.
This week, at Google I/O, our annual developer conference, we’re celebrating this momentum, and putting on stage a number of new features and advancements both for the Android platform and Google Play, to help you design, develop and distribute great apps to your users.
We just wrapped up the keynote, and wanted to share a number of those new features; we’ll be spotlighting some of them throughout the week both here, on Google+, and in 36 Android sessions and sandboxes at the Moscone center in San Francisco (with many of the sessions livestreamed at developer.google.com). Enjoy!
Google Play Services 3.1
Google Play Services is our platform for bringing you easier integration with Google products and new capabilities to use in your apps. Today we announced a new version of Google Play Services that has some great APIs for developers.
- Google Play games services give you great new social features that you can add to your games achievements, leaderboards, cloud save, and real-time multiplayer
- Location APIs make it easy to add location- and context-awareness to your apps through a fused location provider, geofencing, and activity recognition
- Google Cloud Messaging enhancements let you use bidirectional XMPP messaging between server and devices and dismiss notifications
- Cross-Platform Single Sign On, which lets your users sign in once, for all of their devices using Google+ Sign-In.
Android Studio: A new IDE for Android development
Today we announced a new Integrated Development Environment (IDE) built just for Android, with the needs of Android developers in mind. It’s called Android Studio, it’s free, and it’s available now to try as an early access preview.
To build Android Studio, we worked with with JetBrains, creators of one of the most advanced Java IDEs available today. Based on the powerful, extensible IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition, we've added features and capabilities that are designed specifically for Android development, to simplify and optimize your daily workflow for creating Android apps.
Google Play Developer Console: a better distribution experience
Building awesome Android apps is only part of the story. Today we announced great new features in the Google Play Developer Console that give you more control over how you distribute your app and insight into how your app is doing:
- App translation service: a pilot program that lets you purchase professional translations for your app directly from the Developer Console.
- Revenue graphs: a new tab in the Developer Console gives you a summary of your app global app revenue over time.
- Alpha and beta testing and staged rollouts: you can now distribute your app to controlled alpha and beta test groups, or do staged rollouts to specific percentages of your userbase.
- Optimization tips: design your app for tablets and understand how to expand your app into new language markets.
- Google Analytics: launching later this summer, your Google Analytics usage stats will be viewable right in the Developer Console.
- Referral tracking: also launching later this summer, you’ll get a new report in Google Analytics to show what blogs, campaigns, and ads are driving your installs.
Follow the Android Sessions
Join us for the Android sessions today and through the week by livestream. Visit the I/O Live Stream schedule for details.
