Author: David I. Meeks
Posted by Mayuri Khinvasara Khabya – Developer Relations Engineer (LinkedIn and X) In today’s media-centric apps, delivering a smooth, uninterrupted playback experience is key to a delightful user experience. Users expect their videos to start instantly and play seamlessly without pauses. The core challenge is latency. Traditionally, a video player only starts its work—connecting, downloading, parsing, buffering—after the user has chosen an item for playback. This reactive approach is slow for today’s short form video context. The solution is to be proactive. We need to anticipate what the user will watch next and get the content ready ahead of time.…
Posted by Garan Jenkin – Developer Relations Engineer This post is part of Wear OS Spotlight Week. Today, we’re focusing on creating engaging experiences across the various surfaces available on the wrist. Put your app’s unique information directly on a user’s watch face by building your own complications. These are the small, glanceable details on a watch face, like step count, date, or weather, that are used to convey additional information, beyond simply telling the time. Watches such as the recently-launched Pixel Watch 4 feature watch faces with as many as 8 complications. These small, powerful display elements are a…
Posted by Paris Hsu – Product Manager, Android Studio Welcome to the Android Studio Narwhal Feature Drop 3 release. This update delivers significant improvements across the board to enhance your productivity. While we continue to innovate with powerful, project-aware AI assistance in Gemini, this release also brings fundamental upgrades to core development workflows. Highlights include a resizable Compose Preview for faster UI iteration and robust app Backup & Restore tools to ensure smooth app transfers across devices for your users. These additions, alongside a more context-aware Gemini, aim to streamline every phase of your development process. These features are delivered…
Posted by Rebecca Franks – Developer Relations Engineer, Tracy Agyemang – Product Marketer, and Avneet Singh – Product Manager Androidify is our new app that lets you build your very own Android bot, using a selfie and AI. We walked you through some of the components earlier this year, and starting today it’s available on the web or as an app on Google Play. In the new Androidify, you can upload a selfie or write a prompt of what you’re looking for, add some accessories, and watch as AI builds your unique bot. Once you’ve had a chance to try…
Posted by Robbie McLachlan – Developer Marketing In our latest #WeArePlay stories, we meet the founders building apps and games that power entrepreneurs and business owners around the world. From digitizing finances for micro-merchants in Bogotá to modernizing barbershops in New York, they are solving real-world challenges with intuitive apps. Here are a few of our favorites: Lluís and Man Hei’s app Treinta saves microbusiness owners 30 minutes a day by digitizing their sales, inventory, and cash flow. Lluís Cañadell and Man Hei Lou, co-founders of TreintaBogotá, ColombiaAfter meeting at university, Lluís and Man Hei reunited to launch Treinta, an…
Posted by Niharika Arora (X and LinkedIn) – Senior Developer Relations Engineer and Vinisha Athwani – Technical Writer (LinkedIn) In a world where digital security is becoming increasingly critical, passwords have become a notorious weak link – they’re cumbersome, often insecure, and a source of frustration for users and developers. But there’s good news: passkeys are gaining popularity as the most user-friendly, phishing-resistant, and secure authentication mechanism available. For Android developers, the Credential Manager API helps you guide your users towards using passkeys while ensuring continued support for traditional sign-in mechanisms, such as passwords. In this blog, we discuss some…
Now that August is over, it’s time to look back at the best new apps that arrived on the App Store last month. Our top choice is a great app that turns your travel photos into a visual passport. The entire list is here. Source link
Posted by Fahd Imtiaz – Senior Product Manager and Miguel Montemayor – Developer Relations Engineer With new form factors like the Pixel 10 Pro Fold joining the Android ecosystem, adaptive app development is essential for creating high-quality user experiences across phones, tablets, and foldables. Users expect your app’s UI to seamlessly adapt to these different sizes and postures. To help you build these dynamic experiences more efficiently, we are announcing that the Compose Adaptive Layouts Library 1.2 is officially entering beta. This release provides powerful new tools to create polished, responsive UIs for this expanding device ecosystem. Powerful new tools…
Posted by John Zoeller – Developer Relations Engineer, Loyrn Hairston – Product Marketing Manager, and Jonathan Salamon – Dashlane Staff Software Engineer Dashlane is a password management and provision tool that provides a secure way to manage user credentials, access control, and authentication across multiple systems and applications. Dashlane has over 18 million users and 20,000 businesses in 180 countries. It’s available on Android, Wear OS, iOS, macOS, Windows, and as a web app with an extension for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. Recently, they expanded their offerings by creating a Wear OS app with a Credential Provider integration from…
Posted by Paris Hsu – Product Manager Entri delivers online learning experiences across local languages to over 15 million people in India, empowering them to secure jobs and advance in their careers. To seize on the latest advancements in AI, the Entri team explored a variety of tools to help their developers create better experiences for users. Their latest experiment? Adopting Gemini in Android Studio to enable them to move faster. Not only did Gemini speed up the teams’ work, trim tedious tasks, and foster ongoing learning, it streamlined collaboration between design and development and became an enjoyable, go-to resource…