Tag Archives: Android Developer

Calling European game developers, enter the Indie Games Contest by December 31

Originally posted on Google Developers blog

Posted by Matteo Vallone, Google Play Partner Development Manager

To build awareness of the awesome innovation and art that indie game developers are bringing to users on Google Play, we have invested heavily over the past year in programs like Indie Corner, as well as events like the Google Play Indie Games Festivals in North America and Korea.

As part of that sustained effort, we also want to celebrate the passion and innovation of indie game developers with the introduction of the first-ever Google Play Indie Games Contest in Europe. The contest will recognize the best indie talent in several countries and offer prizes that will help you get your game noticed by industry experts and gamers worldwide.

Prizes for the finalists and winners:

  • An open showcase held at the Saatchi Gallery in London
  • YouTube influencer campaigns worth up to 100,000 EUR
  • Premium placements on Google Play
  • Tickets to Google I/O 2017 and other top industry events
  • Promotions on our channels
  • Special prizes for the best Unity game
  • And more!

Entering the contest:

If you're based in Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France (coming soon), Germany, Iceland, Israel, Netherlands, Norway, Poland (coming soon), Romania, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, or UK (excl. Northern Ireland), have 15 or less full time employees, and published a new game on Google Play after 1 January 2016, you may now be eligible to enter the contest. If you're planning on publishing a new game soon, you can also enter by submitting a private beta. Check out all the details in the terms and conditions. Submissions close on 31 December 2016.

The process:

Up to 20 finalists will get to showcase their games at an open event at the Saatchi Gallery in London on the 16th February 2017. At the event, the top 10 will be selected by the event attendees and the Google Play team. The top 10 will then get the opportunity to pitch to a jury of industry experts, from which the final winner and runners up will be selected.

Even if someone is NOT entering the contest:

Even if you're not eligible to enter the contest, you can still register to attend the final showcase event in London on 16 February 2017, check out some great indie games, and have fun with various industry experts and indie developers. We will also be hosting a workshop for all indie games developers from across EMEA in the new Google office in Kings Cross the next day, so this will be a packed week.

Get started:

Enter the Indie Games Contest now and visit the contest site to find out more about the contest, the event, and the workshop.

Google Play services and Firebase for Android will support API level 14 at minimum

Posted by Doug Stevenson, Developer Advocate

Version 10.0.0 of the Google Play services client libraries, as well as the Firebase client libraries for Android, will be the last version of these libraries that support Android API level 9 (Android 2.3, Gingerbread). The next scheduled release of these libraries, version 10.2.0, will increase the minimum supported API level from 9 to 14 (Android 4.0.1, Ice Cream Sandwich). This change will happen in early 2017.

Why are we discontinuing support for Gingerbread and Honeycomb in Google Play services?

The Gingerbread platform is almost six years old. Many Android developers have already discontinued support for Gingerbread in their apps. This helps them build better apps that make use of the newer capabilities of the Android platform. For us, the situation is the same. By making this change, we will be able to provide a more robust collection of tools for Android developers with greater speed.

What this means for your Android app that uses Google Play services or Firebase:

You may use version 10.0.0 of Google Play services and Firebase as you are currently. It will continue to work with Gingerbread devices as it has in the past.

When you choose to upgrade to the future version 10.2.0, and if your app minimally supports API level 14 or greater (typically specified as "minSdkVersion" in your build.gradle), you will not encounter any versioning problems. However, if your app supports lower than API level 14, you will encounter a problem at build time with an error that looks like this: 

Error:Execution failed for task ':app:processDebugManifest'.
> Manifest merger failed : uses-sdk:minSdkVersion 9 cannot be smaller than version 14 declared in library [com.google.android.gms:play-services:10.2.0]
        Suggestion: use tools:overrideLibrary="com.google.android.gms:play_services" to force usage

Unfortunately, the stated suggestion will not help you successfully run your app on older devices. In order to use Google Play services 10.2.0 and later, you can choose one of the following options:

1. Target API level 14 as the minimum supported API level.

This is the recommended course of action. To discontinue support for API levels that will no longer receive Google Play services updates, simply increase the minSdkVersion value in your app's build.gradle to at least 14. If you update your app in this way and publish it to the Play Store, users of devices with less than that level of support will not be able to see or download the update. However, they will still be able to download and use the most recently published version of the app that does target their device.

A very small percentage of all Android devices are using API levels less than 14. You can read more about the current distribution of Android devices. We believe that many of these old devices are not actively being used.

If your app still has a significant number of users on older devices, you can use multiple APK support in Google Play to deliver an APK that uses Google Play services 10.0.0. This is described below.

2. Build multiple APKs to support devices with an API level less than 14.

Along with some configuration and code management, you can build multiple APKs that support different minimum API levels, with different versions of Google Play services. You can accomplish this with build variants in Gradle. First, define build flavors for legacy and newer versions of your app. For example, in your build.gradle, define two different product flavors, with two different compile dependencies for the components of Play Services you're using: 

productFlavors {
    legacy {
        minSdkVersion 9
        versionCode 901  // Min API level 9, v01
    }
    current {
        minSdkVersion 14
        versionCode 1401  // Min API level 14, v01
    }
}

dependencies {
    legacyCompile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services:10.0.0'
    currentCompile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services:10.2.0'
}

In the above situation, there are two product flavors being built against two different versions of the Google Play services client libraries. This will work fine if only APIs are called that are available in the 10.0.0 library. If you need to call newer APIs made available with 10.2.0, you will have to create a compatibility library for the newer API calls so that they are only built into the version of the application that can use them:

  • Declare a Java interface that exposes the higher-level functionality you want to perform that is only available in current versions of Play services.
  • Build two Android libraries that implement that interface. The "current" implementation should call the newer APIs as desired. The "legacy" implementation should no-op or otherwise act as desired with older versions of Play services. The interface should be added to both libraries.
  • Conditionally compile each library into the app using "legacyCompile" and "currentCompile" dependencies.
  • In the app's code, call through to the compatibility library whenever newer Play APIs are required.

After building a release APK for each flavor, you then publish them both to the Play Store, and the device will update with the most appropriate version for that device. Read more about multiple APK support in the Play Store.

Pixel Security: Better, Faster, Stronger

Posted by Paul Crowley, Senior Software Engineer and Paul Lawrence, Senior Software Engineer

Encryption protects your data if your phone falls into someone else's hands. The new Google Pixel and Pixel XL are encrypted by default to offer strong data protection, while maintaining a great user experience with high I/O performance and long battery life. In addition to encryption, the Pixel phones debuted running the Android Nougat release, which has even more security improvements.

This blog post covers the encryption implementation on Google Pixel devices and how it improves the user experience, performance, and security of the device.

File-Based Encryption Direct Boot experience

One of the security features introduced in Android Nougat was file-based encryption. File-based encryption (FBE) means different files are encrypted with different keys that can be unlocked independently. FBE also separates data into device encrypted (DE) data and credential encrypted (CE) data.

Direct boot uses file-based encryption to allow a seamless user experience when a device reboots by combining the unlock and decrypt screen. For users, this means that applications like alarm clocks, accessibility settings, and phone calls are available immediately after boot.

Enhanced with TrustZone® security

Modern processors provide a means to execute code in a mode that remains secure even if the kernel is compromised. On ARM®-based processors this mode is known as TrustZone. Starting in Android Nougat, all disk encryption keys are stored encrypted with keys held by TrustZone software. This secures encrypted data in two ways:

  • TrustZone enforces the Verified Boot process. If TrustZone detects that the operating system has been modified, it won't decrypt disk encryption keys; this helps to secure device encrypted (DE) data.
  • TrustZone enforces a waiting period between guesses at the user credential, which gets longer after a sequence of wrong guesses. With 1624 valid four-point patterns and TrustZone's ever-growing waiting period, trying all patterns would take more than four years. This improves security for all users, especially those who have a shorter and more easily guessed pattern, PIN, or password.

Encryption on Pixel phones

Protecting different folders with different keys required a distinct approach from full-disk encryption (FDE). The natural choice for Linux-based systems is the industry-standard eCryptFS. However, eCryptFS didn't meet our performance requirements. Fortunately one of the eCryptFS creators, Michael Halcrow, worked with the ext4 maintainer, Ted Ts'o, to add encryption natively to ext4, and Android became the first consumer of this technology. ext4 encryption performance is similar to full-disk encryption, which is as performant as a software-only solution can be.

Additionally, Pixel phones have an inline hardware encryption engine, which gives them the ability to write encrypted data at line speed to the flash memory. To take advantage of this, we modified ext4 encryption to use this hardware by adding a key reference to the bio structure, within the ext4 driver before passing it to the block layer. (The bio structure is the basic container for block I/O in the Linux kernel.) We then modified the inline encryption block driver to pass this to the hardware. As with ext4 encryption, keys are managed by the Linux keyring. To see our implementation, take a look at the source code for the Pixel kernel.

While this specific implementation of file-based encryption using ext4 with inline encryption benefits Pixel users, FBE is available in AOSP and ready to use, along with the other features mentioned in this post.

Understanding APK packaging in Android Studio 2.2

Posted by Wojtek Kaliciński, Android Developer Advocate

Android Studio 2.2 launched recently with many new and improved features. Some of the changes are easy to miss because they happened under the hood in the Android Gradle plugin, such as the newly rewritten integrated APK packaging and signing step.

APK Signature Scheme v2

With the introduction of the new APK Signature Scheme v2 in Android 7.0 Nougat, we decided to rewrite how assembling APKs works in the Android Gradle plugin. You can read all about the low-level technical details of v2 signatures in the documentation, but here's a quick tl;dr summary of the info you need as an Android app developer:

  • The cryptographic signature of the APK that is used to verify its integrity is now located immediately before the ZIP Central Directory.
  • The signature is computed and verified over the binary contents of the whole APK file, as opposed to decompressed file contents of each file in the archive in v1.
  • An APK can be signed by both v1 and v2 signatures at the same time, so it remains backwards compatible with previous Android releases.

Why introduce this change to how Android verifies APKs? Firstly, for enhanced security and extensibility of this new signing format, and secondly for performance - the new signatures take significantly less time to verify on the device (no need for costly decompression), resulting in faster app installation times.

The consequence of this new signing scheme, however, is that there are new constraints on the APK creation process. Since only uncompressed file contents were verified in v1, that allowed for quite a lot of modifications to be made after APK signing - files could be moved around or even recompressed. In fact, the zipalign tool which was part of the build process did exactly that - it was used to align ZIP entries on correct byte boundaries for improved runtime performance.

Because v2 signatures verify all bytes in the archive and not individual ZIP entries, running zipalign is no longer possible after signing. That's why compression, aligning and signing now happens in a single, integrated step of the build process.

If you have any custom tasks in your build process that involve tampering with or post-processing the APK file in any way, please make sure you disable them or you risk invalidating the v2 signature and thus making your APKs incompatible with Android 7.0 and above.

Should you choose to do signing and aligning manually (such as from the command line), we offer a new tool in the Android SDK, called apksigner, that provides both v1 and v2 APK signing and verification. Note that you need to run zipalign before running apksigner if you are using v2 signatures. Also remember the jarsigner tool from the JDK is not compatible with Android v2 signatures, so you can't use it to re-sign your APKs if you want to retain the v2 signature.

In case you want to disable adding v1 or v2 signatures when building with the Android Gradle plugin, you can add these lines to your signingConfig section in build.gradle: 

v1SigningEnabled false
v2SigningEnabled false

Note: both signing schemes are enabled by default in Android Gradle plugin 2.2.

Release builds for smaller APKs

We took this opportunity when rewriting the packager to make some optimizations to the size of release APKs, resulting in faster downloads, smaller delta updates on the Play Store, and less wasted space on the device. Here are some of the changes we made:

  • Files in the archive are now sorted to minimize differences between APK builds.
  • All file timestamps and metadata are zeroed out.
  • Level 6 and level 9 compression is checked for all files in parallel and the optimal one is used, i.e. if L9 provides little benefit in terms of size, then L6 may be chosen for better performance
  • Native libraries are stored uncompressed and page aligned in the APK. This brings support for the android:extractNativeLibs="false" option from Android 6.0 Marshmallow and lets applications use less space on the device as well as generate smaller updates on the Play Store
  • Zopfli compression is not used to better support Play Store update algorithms. It is not recommended to recompress your APKs with Zopfli. Pre-optimizing individual resources such as PNG files in your projects is still fine and recommended.

These changes help make your releases as small as possible so that users can download and update your app even on a slower connection or on less capable devices. But what about debug builds?

Debug builds for installation speed

When developing apps you want to keep the iteration cycle fast - change code, build, and deploy on a connected device or emulator. Since Android Studio 2.0 we've been working to make all the steps as fast as possible. With Instant Run we're now able to update only the changed code and resources during runtime, while the new Emulator brings multi-processor support and faster ADB speeds for quicker APK transfer and installation. Build improvements can cut that time even further and in Android Studio 2.2 we're introducing incremental packaging and parallel compression for debug builds. Together with other features like selectively packaging resources for the target device density and ABI this will make your development even faster.

A word of caution: the APK files created for Instant Run or by invoking a debug build are not meant for distribution on the Play Store! They contain additional instrumentation code for Instant Run and are missing resources for device configurations other than the one that was connected when you started the build. Make sure you only distribute release versions of the APK which you can create using the Android Studio Generate Signed APK command or the assembleRelease Gradle task.

Adding TV Channels to Your App with the TIF Companion Library

Posted by Nick Felker and Sachit Mishra, Developer Programs Engineers

The TV Input Framework (TIF) on Android TV makes it easy for third-party app developers to create their own TV channels with any type of linear media. It introduces a new way for apps to engage with users with a high-quality channel surfing experience, and it gives users a single interface to browse and watch all of their channels.

To help developers get started with building TV channels, we have created the TV Input Framework Companion Library, which includes a number of helper methods and classes to make the development process as easy as possible.

This library provides standard classes to set up a background task that updates the program guide and an interface that helps integrate your media player with the playback controller, as well as supports the new TV Recording APIs that are available in Android Nougat. It includes everything you need to start showing your content on your Android TV's live TV app.

(Note: source from android-tv-sample-inputs sample)

To get started, take a look at the sample app and documentation. The sample demonstrates how to extend this library to create custom channels and manage video playback. Developers can immediately get started with the sample app by updating the XMLTV file with their own content or dynamically creating channels in the SampleJobService.

You can include this library in your app by copying the library directory from the sample into your project root directory. Then, add the following to your project's settings.gradle file: 

include ':library'

In your app's build.gradle file, add the following to your dependencies: 

compile project(':library')

Android TV continues to grow, and whether your app has on-demand or live media, TIF is a great way to keep users engaged with your content. One partner for example, Haystack TV, recently integrated TIF into their app and it now accounts for 16% of watch time for new users on Android TV.

Check out our TV developer site to learn more about Android TV, and join our developer community on Google+ at g.co/androidtvdev to discuss this library and other topics with TV developers.

Android Developer Stories: drupe and Noom expand globally by localising their apps on Google Play

Posted by Kacey Fahey, Marketing Programs Manager, Google Play

Interested in growing your app on a global scale? See how two app developers localized their apps in unique ways to drive revenue and user engagement.

drupe

drupe is a communications app that utilizes the openness of android to build a truly native experience delivering highly contextual recommendations to their users across the world.

Key to achieving international growth, drupe has translated their app in 17 languages, and their store listing page in 28 languages. This led to an increase in conversion and retention rates. Additionally, when entering India, the team noticed several user reviews requesting integration with a specific messaging app widely used in the Indian market. Through a combination of this integration, adding Hindi language translation, and other new features, drupe saw improved performance. In six months, daily active users increased 300%, and actions per average daily user increased 25% in the Indian market.

Noom

Noom is a health & fitness app that has achieved an 80% increase in international revenue growth on Android over the past three years by localizing their app with unique cultural behaviors, cuisines, and local-market coaches.

In addition to translating their app and store listing page, Noom conducted extensive analysis to determine the right financial model tailored to each international market. This included evaluation of their competitive landscape and local health and wellness spending behavior, in addition to running pricing experiments to determine the optimal offering between subscriptions, IAPs, or a premium app.

Use the Localization Checklist to learn more about tailoring your app for different markets to drive installs and revenue, and to create a better overall user experience. Also, get the Playbook for Developers app to stay up-to-date on new features and learn best practices that will help you grow a successful business on Google Play.

Read the full articles for drupe and Noom.

Extending Web Technology with Android

Developer guest post by Active Theory

Paper Planes started as a simple thought - “What if you could throw a paper plane from one screen to another?”

The heart of our concept was to bring people together from all over the world, using the power of the web - an instant connection to one another. Modern web technology, specifically JavaScript and WebGL, powered the experience on every screen.

Paper Planes was initially featured at Google I/O 2016, connecting attendees and outside viewers for 30 minutes preceding the keynote. For the public launch on International Peace Day 2016, we created an Android Experiment, which is also featured on Google Play, to augment the existing web technology with native Android Nougat features such as rich notifications when a plane is caught elsewhere in the world.

Introduction

Users create and fold their own plane while adding a stamp that is pre-filled with their location. A simple throwing gesture launches the plane into the virtual world. Users visiting the desktop website would see their planes flying into the screen.

Later, users can check back and see where their planes have been caught around the world. Each stamp on the plane reads like a passport, and a 3D Earth highlights flightpath and distance travelled.

In addition to making their own planes, users can gesture their phone like a net to catch a plane that has been thrown from elsewhere and pinch to open it, revealing where it has visited. Then they can add their own stamp, and throw it back into the flock.

WebView

We developed Paper Planes to work across devices ranging from the 50-foot screen on stage at Google I/O to desktop and mobile using the latest in web technology.

WebGL

From the stylized low-poly Earth to the flocking planes, WebGL is used to render the 3D elements that power the experience. We wrote custom GLSL shaders to light the Earth and morph targets to animate the paper as the user pinches to open or close.

WebSockets

When a user “throws” a plane a message is sent over websockets to the back-end servers where it is relayed to all desktop computers to visualize the plane taking off.

WebWorkers

The plane flocking simulation is calculated across multiple threads using WebWorkers that calculate the position of each plane and relay that information back to the main thread to be rendered by WebGL.

To create an experience that works great across platforms, we extended the web with native Android code. This enabled us to utilize the deep integration of Chromium within Android to make the view layer of the application with the web code that already existed, while adding deeper integration with the OS such as rich notifications and background services.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to bridge WebView and Java code, check out this GitHub repo for a tutorial.

Notifications

Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) was used to send push notifications to the Android app. When a user’s plane has been caught and thrown by someone else, a notification showing how many cities and miles it has travelled is sent to the device of the plane’s creator via FCM. Outgoing notifications are managed to ensure they are not sent too frequently to a device.

Background Service

We implemented a background service to run once a day which checks against local storage to determine when a user last visited the app. If the user hasn’t visited in over two weeks, the app sends a notification to invite the user back into the app to create a new plane.

The Communication Network

Our application runs on a network of servers on Google Cloud Platform. We used built-in geocoding headers to get approximate geographic locations for stamps and Socket.IO to connect all devices over WebSockets.

Users connect to the server nearest them, which relays messages to a single main server as well as to any desktop computers viewing the experience in that region.

Moving forward

This approach worked extremely well for us, enabling an experience that was smooth and captivating across platforms and form factors, connecting people from all over the world. Extending the web with native capabilities has proven to be a valuable avenue to deliver high quality experiences going forward. You can learn even more on the Android Experiments website.

Keeping Android safe: Security enhancements in Nougat

Posted by Xiaowen Xin, Android Security Team

Over the course of the summer, we previewed a variety of security enhancements in Android 7.0 Nougat: an increased focus on security with our vulnerability rewards program, a new Direct Boot mode, re-architected mediaserver and hardened media stack, apps that are protected from accidental regressions to cleartext traffic, an update to the way Android handles trusted certificate authorities, strict enforcement of verified boot with error correction, and updates to the Linux kernel to reduce the attack surface and increase memory protection. Phew!

Now that Nougat has begun to roll out, we wanted to recap these updates in a single overview and highlight a few new improvements.

Direct Boot and encryption

In previous versions of Android, users with encrypted devices would have to enter their PIN/pattern/password by default during the boot process to decrypt their storage area and finish booting. With Android 7.0 Nougat, we’ve updated the underlying encryption scheme and streamlined the boot process to speed up rebooting your phone. Now your phone’s main features, like the phone app and your alarm clock, are ready right away before you even type your PIN, so people can call you and your alarm clock can wake you up. We call this feature Direct Boot.

Under the hood, file-based encryption enables this improved user experience. With this new encryption scheme, the system storage area, as well as each user profile storage area, are all encrypted separately. Unlike with full-disk encryption, where all data was encrypted as a single unit, per-profile-based encryption enables the system to reboot normally into a functional state using just device keys. Essential apps can opt-in to run in a limited state after reboot, and when you enter your lock screen credential, these apps then get access your user data to provide full functionality.

File-based encryption better isolates and protects individual users and profiles on a device by encrypting data at a finer granularity. Each profile is encrypted using a unique key that can only be unlocked by your PIN or password, so that your data can only be decrypted by you.

Encryption support is getting stronger across the Android ecosystem as well. Starting with Marshmallow, all capable devices were required to support encryption. Many devices, like Nexus 5X and 6P also use unique keys that are accessible only with trusted hardware, such as the ARM TrustZone. Now with 7.0 Nougat, all new capable Android devices must also have this kind of hardware support for key storage and provide brute force protection while verifying your lock screen credential before these keys can be used. This way, all of your data can only be decrypted on that exact device and only by you.

The media stack and platform hardening

In Android Nougat, we’ve both hardened and re-architected mediaserver, one of the main system services that processes untrusted input. First, by incorporating integer overflow sanitization, part of Clang’s UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer, we prevent an entire class of vulnerabilities, which comprise the majority of reported libstagefright bugs. As soon as an integer overflow is detected, we shut down the process so an attack is stopped. Second, we’ve modularized the media stack to put different components into individual sandboxes and tightened the privileges of each sandbox to have the minimum privileges required to perform its job. With this containment technique, a compromise in many parts of the stack grants the attacker access to significantly fewer permissions and significantly reduced exposed kernel attack surface.

In addition to hardening the mediaserver, we’ve added a large list of protections for the platform, including:

App security improvements

Android Nougat is the safest and easiest version of Android for application developers to use.

  • Apps that want to share data with other apps now must explicitly opt-in by offering their files through a Content Provider, like FileProvider. The application private directory (usually /data/data/) is now set to Linux permission 0700 for apps targeting API Level 24+.
  • To make it easier for apps to control access to their secure network traffic, user-installed certificate authorities and those installed through Device Admin APIs are no longer trusted by default for apps targeting API Level 24+. Additionally, all new Android devices must ship with the same trusted CA store.
  • With Network Security Config, developers can more easily configure network security policy through a declarative configuration file. This includes blocking cleartext traffic, configuring the set of trusted CAs and certificates, and setting up a separate debug configuration.

We’ve also continued to refine app permissions and capabilities to protect you from potentially harmful apps.

  • To improve device privacy, we have further restricted and removed access to persistent device identifiers such as MAC addresses.
  • User interface overlays can no longer be displayed on top of permissions dialogs. This “clickjacking” technique was used by some apps to attempt to gain permissions improperly.
  • We’ve reduced the power of device admin applications so they can no longer change your lockscreen if you have a lockscreen set, and device admin will no longer be notified of impending disable via onDisableRequested(). These were tactics used by some ransomware to gain control of a device.

System Updates

Lastly, we've made significant enhancements to the OTA update system to keep your device up-to-date much more easily with the latest system software and security patches. We've made the install time for OTAs faster, and the OTA size smaller for security updates. You no longer have to wait for the optimizing apps step, which was one of the slowest parts of the update process, because the new JIT compiler has been optimized to make installs and updates lightning fast.

The update experience is even faster for new Android devices running Nougat with updated firmware. Like they do with Chromebooks, updates are applied in the background while the device continues to run normally. These updates are applied to a different system partition, and when you reboot, it will seamlessly switch to that new partition running the new system software version.


We’re constantly working to improve Android security and Android Nougat brings significant security improvements across all fronts. As always, we appreciate feedback on our work and welcome suggestions for how we can improve Android. Contact us at [email protected].

The Power Of “Early Access”

By Karolis Balciunas, VC & Startups Business Development Manager, Google Play

If you have ever launched a mobile app, you know full well that launching your app into the world successfully requires more than publishing it and hoping for the best.

It’s the diligent testing, constant user feedback loop and incremental tweaks leading up to that special launch moment that truly count.

The Google Play Developer Console gives developers robust tools to do beta tests or experiment with how they market their apps to users through the Play store listing. Getting this critical early feedback from users requires just that — users. And as a developer working on a new product that isn’t fully launched yet, how do you find people to try your new app and take the time to give you feedback?

1 Million Tester Installs And Counting

At Google I/O in May, we unveiled a new destination on Google Play to address this dilemma head on. Together with 29 app and game partners, we launched an “Early Access” collection that made select new Android titles that are running an open beta available for anyone to try before they officially launch. It was an immediate hit. Early-adopter users were eager and willing to send developers actionable, private feedback in exchange for an opportunity to get their hands onto the latest exciting apps and games. Most importantly, the feedback was objective and candid as it did not come from their friends and family who are often afraid to hurt their feelings. In just over a month since the collection became available to all users, open beta titles have been installed over 1 million times and demand is only growing.

3 Powerful Stories

Our launch partners experienced the power of Early Access in various ways. Peer-based language practice developer Lingbe was eager to validate the concept of their app connecting natives with language learners via voice conversations, which meant they needed to connect with a critical mass of possible users around the world from different language and cultural backgrounds. In just a few weeks, "the surge in users in addition to our current fan base meant that we've had Brazilians practicing with Spanish users and talking about their hobby in photography, Mexicans making friends with people from India, and Filipinos talking to Moroccans!"

Readfeed, one of the first online book clubs on Android, relied on Early Access to solicit feature requests, identify bugs, locate new and optimize existing target markets as well as build a sizable reader community. They stated that "early access confirmed that our target market exists and that we have something that they need. I don't think we'd be in the same place right now without it. It enabled us to validate and effectively iterate on our idea from day one."

Finally, Drippler participated in Early Access to test their new "Wiz" app and understand their beta title's appeal to their target demographic. Their performance in the Early Access collection as well as private feedback from thousands of newly acquired beta testers allowed them to polish the app before the launch and gave them confidence that their users will enjoy it."

These three developers’ stories show us just a few ways that Early Access can help developers build great new apps and games, and it shows the value of getting early feedback from beta testers before launching more broadly.

Get Involved

If you are a developer getting ready to launch on Google Play, you can nominate your app or game to be part of Early Access. Learn more here.

New titles are added weekly and thousands of users are looking to experiment with new and exciting ideas.

New features for reviews and experiments in Google Play Developer Console app

Posted by Kobi Glick, Google Play team

With over one million apps published through the Google Play Developer Console, we know how important it is to publish with confidence, acquire users, learn about them, and manage your business. Whether reacting to a critical performance issue or responding to a negative review, checking on your apps when and where you need to is invaluable.

The Google Play Developer Console app, launched in May, has already helped thousands of developers stay informed of crucial business updates on the go.

We’re excited to tell you about new features, available today:

Receive notifications about new reviews

Use filters to find the reviews you want

Review and apply store listing experiment results

Increase the percent of a staged rollout or halt a bad staged rollout

Download the Developer Console app on Google Play and stay on top of your apps and games, wherever you are! Also, get the Playbook for Developers app to stay up-to-date with more features and best practices that will help you grow a successful business on Google Play.