Android Studio 2.0 - Beta

Posted by Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

Android Studio 2.0 is latest release of the official Android IDE focused on build performance and emulator speed to improve the app development experience. With brand new features like Instant Run which enables you to quickly edit and view code changes, or the new & faster Android emulator, Android Studio 2.0 is the upgrade you do not want to miss. In preparation for the final release, you can download Android Studio 2.0 Beta in the Beta release channel. Overall, the Android Studio 2.0 release has a host of new features which include:

• *Updated for Beta* Instant Run - Enables a faster code edit & app deployment cycle.


• *Updated for Beta* Android Emulator - Brand new emulator that is faster than most real devices, and includes a brand new user interface.


• *Updated for Beta* Google App Indexing Integration & Testing - Adding App Indexing into your app helps you re-engage your users. In the first preview of Android Studio 2.0 you could add indexing code stubs into your code. With the beta release you can now test and validate your URL links in your app all within the IDE.


• Fast ADB - Installing and pushing files is now up to 5x faster using Android Studio 2.0 with an updated Android Debug Bridge (ADB) offered in platform-tools 23.1.0.


• GPU Profiler Preview - For graphics intensive applications, you can now visually step through your OpenGL ES code to optimize your app or game


• Integration of IntelliJ 15 - Android Studio is based on the efficient coding platform of Intellij. Check out the new features from IntelliJ here.

Check out the latest installment of Android Studio Tool Time video below to watch the highlights of the features.

New Features in Android Studio 2.0 Beta

Instant Run

We first previewed Instant Run in November; this latest beta release introduces a new capability called Cold Swap

Instant Run in Android Studio 2.0 allows you to quickly make changes to your app code while your app is running on an Android device or Android Emulator. Instead of waiting for your entire app to rebuild and redeploy after each code change, Android Studio 2.0 will try to incrementally build and push only the incremental code or resource change. Depending on the code changes you make, you can see the results of your change in under a second. By simply updating your app to use the latest Gradle plugin ( 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:2.0.0-beta2’ ), you can take advantage of this time saving features with no other modifications to your code. If your project is setup correctly with Instant Run, you will see a lightning bolt next to your Run button on the toolbar:

Instant Run Button

Behind the scenes, Android Studio 2.0 instruments your code during the first compilation and deployment of your app to your device in order to determine where to swap out code and resources. The Instant Run features updates your app on a best-effort basis and automatically uses one of the following swap methods to update your app:

• Hot Swap - When only method implementations (including constructors) are changed, the changes are hot swapped. Your application keeps running and the new implementation is used the next time the method is called.


• Warm Swap - When app resources are changed, the changes are warm swapped. This is similar to a hot swap, except that the current Activity is restarted. You will notice a slight flicker on the screen as the Activity restarts.


• *New for Beta* Cold Swap - This will quickly restart the whole application. Typically for structural code change, including changes to the class hierarchy, method signatures, static initializers, or fields. Cold Swap is available when you deploy to targets with API level 21 or above.

We made major changes to Instant Run since the first preview of Android Studio 2.0, and now the feature works with more code and resources cases. We will continue to add more code change cases to Instant Run in future releases of Android Studio. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to send us a feature request and learn more about Instant Run here.

App Indexing

Supporting app indexing is now even easier with Android Studio 2.0. App Indexing puts your app in front of users who use Google Search. It works by indexing the URL patterns you provide in your app manifest and using API calls from your app to make content within your app available to both existing and new users. Specifically, when you support URLs for your app content, your users can go directly to those links from Google Search results on their device.

• Code Generation
  Introduced in Android Studio 2.0 Preview, you can right click on AndroidManifest.xml or Activity method (or go to Code → Generate…→ App Indexing API Code) to insert HTTP URL stub codes into your manifest and app code.
  

• *New for Beta* URL Testing & Validation
  What is new in Android Studio 2.0 Beta is that you can now validate and check the results of your URLs with the built-in validation tool (Tools → Android → Google App Indexing Test). To learn more about app indexing, click here.

Insert App Indexing API Code into your app

App Indexing Testing

App Indexing Test Results

Android Emulator

*Updated for Beta* The new and faster Android emulator also includes fixes and small enhancements for this beta release. Notably, we updated the rotation controls on the emulator toolbar and added multi-touch support to help test apps that use pinch & zoom gestures. To use the multi-touch feature, hold down the Alt key on your keyboard and right-click your mouse to center the point of reference or click & drag the left mouse button to zoom.

Pinch & Zoom Gesture with Multi-Touch

What's Next

Android Studio 2.0 is a big release, and now is good time to check out the beta release to incorporate the new features into your workflow. The beta release is near stable release quality, and should be relatively bug free. But as with any beta release, bugs may still exist, so, if you do find an issue, let us know so we can work to fix it. If you’re already using Android Studio, you can check for updates on the Beta channel from the navigation menu (Help → Check for Update [Windows/Linux] , Android Studio → Check for Updates [OS X]). When you update to beta, you will get access to the new version of Android Studio and Android Emulator.

Connect with us, the Android Studio development team, on Google+.

Project Tango workshops help bring indoor location apps to life

Posted by Eitan Marder-Eppstein, Developer Engineering Lead, Project Tango

GPS helps us find our way outside whether it is turn by turn navigation to the nearest grocery or just getting us oriented in a new city. But once we get indoors, it is not quite as easy - GPS doesn't work, with accuracy dropping and navigation becoming all but impossible. This is one of the reasons why we started Project Tango, which has centimeter-scale accuracy of a device’s location, allowing better navigation and experiences in indoor spaces.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been collecting amazing ideas from around the world for great apps for Lenovo’s Project Tango-powered phone. (Have an idea? If you can dream it, you can submit it!) As part of this program we're hosting workshops, focused on specific Tango features. And we just wrapped up a session that we hosted with Westfield Labs devoted to indoor location. Here are some of the highlights:

As you can see, everyone from retail brands to robot startups joined in on the fun—using Project Tango's motion tracking, depth perception, and area learning capabilities to build some amazing location-based apps. Some of our favorites included:

• Wayfair made it possible to look through your phone and visualize how a piece of furniture would look in your home.


• Lowe’s Innovation Labs improved in-store navigation by overlaying directions to individual items
  


• And Aisle411 created a shop-along experience with some of your favorite celebrities

The next stop in our series is a utilities workshop, where we'll be going deep on getting things done with Project Tango—like taking 3D measurements, or mapping your home or building. In the meantime, keep submitting your ideas to the App Incubator (the deadline is February 15!), and we'll see you soon!

Marshmallow and User Data

Posted by Joanna Smith, Developer Advocate and Giles Hogben, Google Privacy Team

Marshmallow introduced several changes that were designed to help your app look after user data. The goal was to make it easier for developers to do the right thing. So as Android 6.0, Marshmallow, gains traction, we challenge you to do just that.

This post highlights the key considerations for user trust when it comes to runtime permissions and hardware identifiers, and points you to new best practices documentation to clarify what to aim for in your own app.

Permission Changes

With Marshmallow, permissions have moved from install-time to runtime. This is a mandatory change for SDK 23+, meaning it will affect all developers and all applications targeting Android 6.0. Your app will need to be updated anyway, so your challenge is to do so thoughtfully.

Runtime permissions mean that your app can now request access to sensitive information in the context that it will be used. This gives you a chance to explain the need for the permission, without scaring users with a long list of requests.

Permissions are also now organized into groups, so that users can make an informed decision without needing to understand technical jargon. By allowing your users to make a decision, they may decide not to grant a permission or to revoke a previously-granted permission. So, your app needs to be thoughtful when handling API calls requiring permissions that may have been denied, and about building in graceful failure-handling so that your users can still interact with the rest of your app.

Identifier Changes

The other aspect of user trust is doing the right thing with user data. With Marshmallow, we are turning off access to some kinds of data in order to direct developers down this path.

Most notably, Local WiFi and Bluetooth MAC addresses are no longer available. The getMacAddress() method of a WifiInfo object and the BluetoothAdapter.getDefaultAdapter().getAddress() method will both return 02:00:00:00:00:00 from now on.

However, Google Play Services now provides Instance IDs, which identify an application instance running on a device. Instance IDs provide a reliable alternative to non-resettable, device-scoped hardware IDs, as they will not persist across a factory reset and are scoped to an app instance. See the Google Developer's What is Instance ID? help article for more information.

What’s Next

User trust depends largely on what users see and how they feel. Mishandling permissions and identifiers increases the risk of unwanted/unintended tracking, and can result in users feeling that your app doesn’t actually care about the user. So to help you get it right, we’ve created new documentation that should enable developers to be certain that their app is doing the right thing for their users.

• Understand how permissions and user data are linked


• Learn more about the best practices for permissions


• Discover the best practices for unique identifiers, with clarity based on changes in Marshmallow.

So happy developing! May your apps make users happy, and may your reviews reflect that. :)

Android Developer Story: Travel app Wego, increases monthly user retention by 300% with material design

Posted by Lily Sheringham, Google Play team

Headquartered in Singapore, Wego is a popular online travel marketplace for flights and hotels for users in South East Asia and the Middle East. They launched their Android app in early 2014, and today, more than 62 percent of Wego app users are on Android. Wego recently redesigned their app using material design principles to provide their users a more native Android experience for consistency and easier navigation.

Watch Ross Veitch, co-founder and CEO, and the Wego team talk about how they increased monthly user retention by 300 percent and reduced uninstall rates by up to 25 percent with material design.

Learn more about Material Design, how to use Android Studio, and how to find success on Google Play with the new guide ‘Secrets to App Success on Google Play.’

How Fabulous and Yummly grew with App Invites

Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

Introduced in May 2015, App Invites is an out-of-the-box solution for conducting app referrals and encouraging sharing. So far, we’ve seen very positive results on how the feature improves app discovery. While 52 percent of users discover apps by word of mouth, we have seen 92 percent of users trust recommendations from family and friends with App Invites. In this post, we’ll share some success stories from companies that have already used App Invites to grow their user base.

Fabulous is a research-based app incubated in Duke University's Center for Advanced Hindsight. The app helps users to embark on a journey to resetting poor habits, replacing them with healthy rituals, with the ultimate goal of improving health and well-being.

Users started taking advantage of App Invites within the app to share their experience with their friends and family. App Invites installs now account for 60 percent of all Fabulous installs via referrals. Sharing clicks also increased by 10 percent once App Invites were used. Fabulous also noticed increased user retention, with 2x the Life Time Value of the app for users that came in to it via App Invites. Fabulous simplified their user experience, combining SMS and email into a single interface, allowing users to focus on sharing.

Additionally, users that were acquired via App Invites versus other channels were found to be twice as likely to stay with the app.

CTO of Fabulous, Amine Laddhari, commented, “It took me only a few hours to implement App Invites versus several days of work when we built our own solution. It was straightforward!”

You can view the full case study from Fabulous here.

Yummly, a food discovery platform that views cooking a meal as a personalized, shareable experience wanted to expand its user base and generate awareness on the Android platform. It added App Invites so that users could recommend the app to their family and friends, giving functionality to share specific recipes, dinner ideas or shipping lists.

With App invites, they found that installation rates were about 60 percent higher compared to other sharing channels. Additionally, Yummly was able to take advantage of the seamless integration of Google Analytics. It’s the only share channel that has this integration, allowing data such as the number of invites sent, accepted and resulting installs to be accurately tracked.

Melissa Guyre, Product Manager at Yummly, commented, “The App Invites Integration process was seamless. A bonus feature is the excellent tracking tie-in with Google Analytics.”

You can view the full case study from Yummly here.

App Invites is available for Android or iOS, and you can learn how you can build it into your own apps at g.co/appinvites.

New features to better understand player behavior with Player Analytics

Posted by Lily Sheringham, Developer Marketing at Google Play

Google Play games services includes Player Analytics, a free reporting tool available in the Google Play Developer Console, to help you understand how players are progressing, spending, and churning. Now, you can see what Player Analytics looks like with an exemplary implementation of Play games services: try out the new sample game in the Google Play Developer Console, which we produced with help from Auxbrain, developer of Zombie Highway 2. The sample game uses randomized and anonymized data from a real game and will also let you try the new features we’re announcing today. Note: You need a Google Play Developer account in order to access the sample game.

Use predictive analytics to engage players before they might churn

To help you better understand your players’ behavior, we’ve extended the Player Stats API in Player Analytics with predictive functionality. The churn prediction method will return data on the probability that the player will churn, i.e., stop playing the game, so you can create content in response to this to entice them to stay in your game. Additionally, the spend prediction method will return the probability that the player will spend, and you could, for example, provide discounted in-app purchases or show ads based on these insights.

Create charts in the new funnels report to quickly visualize sequences of events

The funnels report enables you to create a funnel chart from any sequence events, such as achievements, spend, and custom events. For example, you could log custom events for each step in a tutorial flow (e.g., tutorial step 1, step 2, step 3), and then use the funnel report to visualize the exit points in your tutorial.

Measure and compare the effect of changes and cumulative values by new users with cohort’s report

The cohorts report allows you to take any event such as sessions, cumulative spend, and custom events, and compare the cumulative event values by new user cohorts - providing valuable insight into the impact of your decisions on your gaming model. For example, you can view users that started the day before you made a change and the day after. This allows you to measure and compare the effect of changes made, so if you doubled the price of all your items in your in-game store, you can see if the cumulative sessions started after the change was lower or higher than the users that started before the change.

Updated C++, iOS SDKs and Unity plug-in to support Player Stats API

We have updated the C++ and iOS SDKs, and the Unity plug-in, all of which now support the Player Stats API, which includes the basic player stats as well as spend and churn predictions.

Be sure to check out the sample game and learn more about Play Games Services. You can also get top tips from game developer Auxbrain to help you find success with Google Play game services.