June 17, 2015

Android at Google I/O 2015

Google I/O 2015 was held on May 28-29 at Moscone West in San Francisco, California. There were a lot of Android announcements and updates during I/O. Here are some of the updates related to Android.

Android M

Android M is the newest version of Android. It aims to improve the core user experience of Android and has big changes to the fundamentals of the platform.



What's New in Android M

New features include App Permisssions, Doze, App Links, Fingerprint support, and more. For development, new updates include Android Design Support Library, Google Play Services 7.5 (Smart Lock for Passwords, App Invites, and more), Android Studio 1.3 with NDK and C/C++ support, Data Binding, Google Cloud Messaging 3.0, among others. Also announced were Cloud Test Lab, Android Pay, and Brillo and Weave. Brillo extends the Android platform to connected devices while Weave is the IOT protocol for everything.

Android M Developer Preview

Google also released Developer Preview of Android M for Nexus 5, 6, 9, and Player. You can download the system image at https://developer.android.com/preview and flash it to your device. There will be OTA updates for the preview before they launch the official version in the third quarter of the year.

If you want to start playing around with the new APIs of Android M, you should download Android M (API 22, MNC Preview) packages using your SDK manager and use Android Studio 1.3 (available in the Canary channel). You can also check out the API Overview and samples

When creating new projects, you should use MNC: Android M (Preview) as the mimimum SDK. For existing projects, you can update your build.gradle file with the following values:
compileSdkVersion:'android-MNC'
minSdkVersion:'MNC'
targetSdkVersion:'MNC'


Android Training

They also announced http://medium.com/google-developers, a collection of Medium Articles written by Google Developers. One of the things you should check out is the Developing for Android Article Series.

I/O Videos

In the keynote, there were a lot of Android announcements. The keynote is available for watching here. You can also watch videos of Android-related I/O sessions and 100 Days of Google Dev videos here.


Android @ #io15 YouTube Playlist


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