Tag: Android Developer

After a three year hiatus, Google has announced that they will be hosting an Android Dev Summit November 7th and 8th in the Mountain View, California based Computer History Museum.  The event, as the name suggests, is aimed for Android developers and will provide two days of breakout sessions, keynotes and time to chat with other developers and Googlers.

Registration details and session details have not been announced and readers are encouraged to follow the Android Dev Twitter account for more details (or the hashtag #AndroidDevSummit

After some 17 months of testing in various shapes and forms, Android Things has finally been released.  The 1.0 version of Android for IoT (Internet of Things) devices, brings all the benefits of Android but in a streamlined, power friendly package.  Developers of Android should find Android Things familiar straight away.

The beauty of Things is that you have access to all the APIs, development tools and resources that are already used in Android development and can use them to develop hardware solutions on certified Android Things hardware for use in IoT projects.

If you are aiming to get to Google I/O 2018, your first important date is February 22nd. That is when ticket sales begin at 10:00 AM Pacific which is more-or-less a ticket into the lottery to be selected.

The lottery system has been the method Google has used for the past several years as there are always far more developers interested in attending than there is space for them to attend. To attempt to make it fair, you sign up starting the 22nd and if you are selected, you complete your registration. That is, you pay for your ticket.

Google has laid out a three stage process that Android developers will need to pay attention to going forward.  With the goal of improving performance and security, the company to to the Android Developers Blog yesterday to outline their requirements for apps starting next year.  This will lead to the ultimate end of apps being 64-bit enabled by August of 2019.

The first step in the process starts next year with the requirement that development of new apps be around the latest APIs in the platform.  Come August 2018, app developers will be required to code against API 26, or as we end users know it, Android 8.0.  If developers have an existing app, that app has to be updated to API 26 by November of 2018.  Going forward, as you would expect, the API requirements will go up as new version of Android are release.

Readers should not that this require does not mean that the apps will only run on Oreo 8.0.  It means that developers have to develop, using the Oreo API level, in the assumption that everyone is using Oreo.  Developers are encouraged, and will, be backwards compatible to a few API levels back.

Google has made a small but important update to the Android Developer site that brings the OTA images of the latest updates to Android Marshmallow for Nexus devices which can be downloaded.  Before now, Google has had the full images of updates available for Nexus owners to update their devices but it required a full install and subsequent reset of their devices.  Now developers and users who like to flash their devices manually can do just the OTA update instead of having to do a full reset of their device.