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Google Play Store improvements are on the way for tablets, Chromebooks, and foldables
The Play Store will soon do a better job of highlighting apps optimized for large screens, according to an Android Dev Summit presentation.
If you have a Chromebook or Android tablet, it can be tricky to find applications that actually work well on large screens. Many apps and games, including some from Google itself, are primarily designed for phones and don't scale well to large displays. Google announced a renewed focus on Android apps for large screens today, including the first developer release of Android 12L, and the company also shared changes coming to the Play Store for large devices.
Google announces dates for 2021 Android Dev Summit, Chrome Dev Summit, and Firebase Dev Summit
Looking forward to the news from the Android Dev Summit, Chrome Dev Summit, and Firebase Summit? Here's when the 2021 events will happen!
Google's biggest developer conference of the year is Google I/O, where the company unveils a plethora of new services and upgrades to existing ones. Given the sheer size of Google as a company and the limited amount of time available, it's impossible for some of the larger teams within the company to unveil everything they've been working on. That's why some teams within Google hold dedicated events to bring developers up to speed on the latest features and tools they need to be aware of. Today, Google unveiled the dates for three such developer events: the Android Dev Summit, the Chrome Dev Summit, and the Firebase Summit.
Google says Chrome OS 80 will bring easier Android app sideloading for developers
Google is making it easier in Chrome OS 80 for developers to sideload Android apps. For the first time, you'll be able to sideload without Developer Mode.
Last week at the Android Dev Summit, Google announced a feature that Chrome OS enthusiasts have wanted for years: the ability to sideload Android apps without enabling Developer Mode. We've seen code commits in the past that would have enabled this feature, but none of those implementations ever made their way to the stable channel. Now that Google has officially confirmed this feature will arrive in Chrome OS 80, which is set for a stable release in the second week of February 2020, we no longer need to religiously monitor the Chromium Gerrit for this feature addition.
Google quantifies how much faster Android 10's new Share menu really is
Google says that Android 10's new Share menu is faster, but how much has it really improved? Google finally revealed the numbers.
The Share menu is one of Android's best features, but for years, it's been plagued by a design that's just plain slow. The problem with Android's clunky share menu stemmed from Android 6 Marshmallow when Google introduced Direct Share, a feature that allows users to directly share content to the relevant part of an app. When a user shares any item in an older Android version, the system starts building a list of shareable targets on-demand. If the user has hundreds of apps installed, many of which may have applicable direct share targets, then the loading speed of the share menu could suffer. Thankfully, Android 10 replaces Direct Share with the new Sharing Shortcuts API and deranks apps in the Share menu that still use the older APIs. The new API lets apps publish their direct share targets in advance, so the share menu no longer has to reactively pull share targets. As a result, when the user goes to share any item in Android 10, the share sheet should appear much faster than before.
Google brings back the Android Developer Challenge to find 10 innovative apps using Machine Learning
The Android Developer Challenge has been revived, and Google is looking for the 10 best apps that use Machine Learning to show off next year.
It's been many years since the last one, so it was surprising to hear that Google is bringing back the Android Developer Challenge. This time around, Google wants to promote one of the most promising fields of software engineering: Machine Learning. Google has used Machine Learning to build innovative features in a ton of its own products. Features like Smart Compose in Gmail, improved translations in Google Translate, Live Caption in Android 10, and so much more. Google believes there is still a lot that can be done with ML, so they're looking to the developer community to promote innovative ideas.