Android Developers Community

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+ Android is working with communities to +

Create a cooperative relationship between highly impactful communities and high performing developers
Strengthen relationships between Android and coding communities so that developers have a motivation to interact with those communities
Reward communities for attracting developers by providing them with resources and direct access to the Android team

Our IMPACT is measured by good apps and a thriving community

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News

Our current theme is on the Android 4.4 KitKat and Updated Developer Tools release, with new ways to create beautiful apps, printing and storage frameworks, low-power sensors, new media capabilities and RenderScript in the NDK.

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Android 4.4 Platform Highlights

Android KitKat brings all of Android's most innovative, most beautiful, and most useful features to more devices everywhere.

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Android 4.4 APIs

Android 4.4 (KITKAT) is a new release for the Android platform that offers new features for users and app developers. This document provides an introduction to the most notable new APIs.

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New Nexus 5

Nexus 5 helps you capture the everyday and the epic in fresh new ways. It's the slimmest and fastest Nexus phone ever made, powered by Android 4.4, KitKat.

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Community Spotlight

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Android Community Groups

July 2013

GDG Armenia held ecaHack Yerevan, an Android hackathon featuring "Angry Designers vs Android Developers", where the designers had a look into developers apps and gave them some advices regarding to design. The hackathon was sponsored by Alcatel One Touch and each member of the winner team got one Alcatel One Touch Idol. Check out the photos.

September 2013

GDG Blrdroid held a meetup on performance optimisation.

GDG Dublin held their meetup with a talk on AdMob for Android and iOS, entitled “Admob for Android and iOS developers”.

GDG Mbale’s Hassan Nsubuga has been managing a university course session since September. They are now through with the basics and have a firm foundation, so this month they will be doing a lot of advanced stuff including exploring the latest API enhancements with KitKat.

GDG Warsaw held an Android Barcamp focused on App Quality. The discussion was moderated by GDG organisers, but the talks were given by the community members, including some top Android companies and developers in Poland.

October 2013

GDG Berlin Android held their DevFest.

GDG Blrdroid held their meetup in collaboration with GDG Bangalore, where they talked about a wider range of things from incorporating user feedback to effectively using the cell radio. David McLaughlin from the Developer Relations team also visited during the meetup and delivered the keynote. They also hit a milestone with its 4th anniversary on the 9th of October and crossed 4300 members in the past few days so its been a memorable couple of months for them.

GDG Cape Town held an Android Workshop where they gave away lots of branded KitKats.

GDG Dublin held its DevFest, which featured a codeLab on Android titled “Codelab: Intro to Android Development.”

GDG Dutch Android User Group held their DevFest. They had a bunch of Android sessions, mostly by local speakers. In addition to the Android sessions, they also ran a workshop on writing custom views.

Hugo Visser from the Dutch Android User Group spoke at DroidCon UK barcamp, where he delivered a talk on Cupboard, a simple and lightweight persistence framework, specifically for Android.

GDG GAUG held the Google Devfest 2013, where they had two tracks and more than 200 delegates attending. They also had a Hackathon and they hit the 1000 member mark this month, which makes them the second largest android community in India after GDG Blrdroid.

GDG Miage held their DevFest where they gave a talk about Intents and Services. The also held a startup Weekend Bootcamp where they talked about Activites and Layouts. They will also hold an Android Workshop in December.

GDG Uruguay had their DevFest, where they held an Android workshop for beginners as an Android vs iOS comparison, a session on best practices using YouTube APIs in Android, and What's new in Google for developers (with a special section about Android). You can see pictures on the G+ page.

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November 2013

Abidjandroid/GDG CÃ´te d'Ivoire held an Android Launch Party featuring the KitKat release.

The Dutch Android User Group had a very interactive presentation on Android Code Puzzlers and Tips & tricks, where they rewarded participation by giving out books, tshirts, jelly beans and kitkats. The presentation was at the Dutch JFall conference, organized by the NLJUG. It's a large yearly Java conference and the DAUG had the only Android session there.

The GDG Berlin Android meetup this month featured the KitKat release.

The GDG Blrdroid meetup was another focused on KitKat.

At the GDG Cairo DevFest there was a "What's new in Android SDK" session on day 1, and an Android workshop on day 2. Kitkat also provided interest in the sessions and the snacks bar. The KitKat presentation, the track organization, and everything related to it were all organized by women.

GDG Cape Town held an Android Workshop.

GDG Udine organized a talk after the release of KitKat for a school in Pordenone.

Hugo Visser from Droidcon Netherlands organized an Android hackathon themed "Location, Location, Location".

Paris Android User Group welcomed Romain Guy and Chet Haase to their meetup this month. They’ll be meeting up with other GDG leads and UG managers meet at Devoxx next Thursday.

GDG Warsaw had over 250 attendees at their DevFest, which featured session tracks on Android and Web and a whole day of Code Labs in Android, AngularJS and Arduino.

December 2013

GDG GAUG are planning a codelab and hackathon.

Peter Svensson spoke at DroidCon Stockholm

+The unstoppable Max Bonbhel from the African GDG Android is hosting AAC 2014 and Android GDG Barcamp events in December. Also, in order to encourage African Java developers to move to the Android platform, he created the Africa Android Training (AAT) program. The training material targets developers with different levels of experience in Java development. More than 60 developers have been taking part in the weekly sessions. The next 10 sessions will start Saturday, November 9, 2013. 260 GDG and Java User Group members have already registered from 12 Countries. +

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Android Community Experts

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October 2013

Eyal Lezmy presented two sessions. “Play Store bashing, learn from the biggest fails” looked at several applications, mainly developed by huge companies, and analyzed why they failed to satisfy the users or the Android guidelines. “Android, the life of your app” tells a story, living the life of a user, identify the frustrations he can encounter and present ways to avoid it, as a developer.

Mario Viviani presented and recorded the next Android App Clinic - Italia. This episode was regarding the Cards UI and SMS app support in Android 4.4. They experimented with a short form of the video (10 minutes instead of 20) and in less than day it got almost 400+ views -- which is great considering it's in Italian! The previous episode reached 1300 views all-time and was the most successful video of GDL Italia in Q2.

Matthias KÃ¤ppler contributed the first Android specific component to the RxJava project, and spoke about RxJava and reactive programming on Android at DroidCon UK. He has also open sourced Memento, an Android annotation processor to replace the deprecated onRetainNonConfigurationInstance.

Wojtek KaliciÅski’s talk, "Android - is it time for a break yet?" highlights not only what's new in Android 4.4 KitKat, but also how to take your app to the next level by making sure you provide the best app experience possible to all 4.0+ users.

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New Content

Android 4.4 What's New

+KitKat has been optimized to run on a much broader range of devices, with special focus on the millions of entry-level devices that have as little as 512MB RAM. To help, we've created new APIs, better tools, and better documentation to let you create apps that perform well on all devices.
+Check out this video summary of some of the most significant developer features in the latest Android release, including new ways to make your apps beautiful, NFC Host Card Emulation, a printing framework, the storage access framework, low-power step detector and step counter sensors, and more!
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+Be sure to get the full Android 4.4 API Overview, and take a look at our related DevBytes videos

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WebView in Android 4.4

+Android 4.4 (API level 19) introduces a new version of WebView that is based on Chromium. This change upgrades WebView performance and standards support for HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript to match the latest web browsers. Any apps using WebView will inherit these upgrades when running on Android 4.4 and higher. +

API Guide

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Android 4.4 Immersive Mode

+With Android 4.4 KitKat, your apps can now truly go full-screen with a new Immersive Mode. Immersive Mode lets your apps hide the system's status and navigation bars while capturing all touch eventsâideal for rich interactive content such as books and games. This video demonstrates how to use the new API, in addition to recapping earlier full-screen APIs on Android. +

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Android 4.4 Storage Access Framework - Provider

+Get up to speed on the new document storage API in Android 4.4 KitKat. This video gets you up and running with your own DocumentProvider by stepping you through the making of a simple cloud storage app. +

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Sample, Box Application

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Android 4.4 Storage Access Framework - Client

+Get up to speed on the new storage access framework in Android 4.4 KitKat. This video teaches you how to quickly create, edit, save and delete documents provided by other apps as a client of the storage access framework. +

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Android 4.4 Closed Captioning

+Displaying closed captions in your app's videos can be quick and simple in Android 4.4 KitKat,. Learn how to attach timed text tracks to VideoView and allow users to customize how captions are displayed. +

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Android 4.4 Transitions

+In this episode, we introduce the new Transitions API in Android 4.4 Kitkat. This API provides a simple way for developers to provide animated segues to different scenes of their application, helping users to understand the application flow with very little code. The general approach is to tell the system that you'd like to run a transition animation, then make the necessary changes to your UI. The system figures out the differences and animates the changes. +

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Android 4.4: SMS APIs

+Android 4.4 KitKat introduces the new SMS APIs as well as the new concept of a default SMS app. This video discusses these new APIs and how your app should use them to send and receive SMS and MMS messages.
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+See also -
+Android Developer Blog post on Android 4.4 KitKat SMS APIs
+Android Protip on using booleans in your AndroidManifest.xml

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Android 4.4 Printing API

+In this video, we introduce the new Printing API in Android 4.4 KitKat. This API provides a simple way for developers to print to cloud-connected printers using Google Cloud Print. It's really easy to print bitmaps, and HTML (that you generate on the device, or just web content).
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+Some pro-tips: +

For Webview/HTML printing, printing from javascript is not supported yet (window.print() for example). Also we are planning to address the limitations around WebView/HTML printing in future releases (eg: headers/footers, and specifying print ranges).
We encourage developers to open Android Open Source bugs for features that they feel important as a feedback.

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App Indexing

+In this episode we discuss the new App Indexing feature that we recently announced for Google Search for Android.
+Currently, when you do a google search on the web, you get results that are links to websites. With App Indexing, you will be able to point Google Search users on Android directly to content within your app! +If youâre an Android app developer who has a web presence and you want more control over how your content is accessed from search, via your website or Android app, App Indexing is a great feature for you to explore. +Also, enabling your website and app for indexing is a way to increase engagement with your app by making the content more discoverable, and more accessible to users directly from the search results page. +For information on App Indexing, please visit http://g.co/appindexing +

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Blog

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Community Outreach

News

Community Spotlight

Android Community Groups

July 2013

September 2013

October 2013

November 2013

December 2013

Android Community Experts

October 2013

New Content

Android 4.4 What's New

WebView in Android 4.4

Android 4.4 Immersive Mode

Android 4.4 Storage Access Framework - Provider

Sample, Box Application

Android 4.4 Storage Access Framework - Client

Android 4.4 Closed Captioning

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Android 4.4 Transitions

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Android 4.4: SMS APIs

Android 4.4 Printing API

App Indexing

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