Hello, Stack Overflow!

Over the past year, an Android presence has been growing on a relatively new technical Q&A web site called Stack Overflow. The site was designed specifically for programmers, with features like syntax highlighting, tagging, user reputation, and community editing. It's attracted a loyal software developer community, and developers continue to express great praise for this new tool. Well, the Android team has been listening...and we agree.Today,...

Back and other hard keys: three stories

Android 2.0 introduces new behavior and support for handling hard keys such as BACK and MENU, including some special features to support the virtual hard keys that are appearing on recent devices such as Droid.This article will give you three stories on these changes: from the most simple to the gory details. Pick the one you prefer.Story 1: Making things easier for developersIf you were to survey the base applications in the Android platform, you...

New resources and sample code on developer.android.com

Hey Android developers—if you've visited the online Android SDK documentation recently, you may have noticed a few changes. That's right, there's a new Resources tab, which was designed to take some of the load off the Developer's Guide. We've moved a number of existing resources to the Resources tab, including tutorials, sample code, and FAQs. We've also formalized a few of our most popular developer...

Knowing is half the battle

As a developer, I often wonder which Android platforms my applications should support,especially as the number of Android-powered devices grows. Should my application only focus on the latest version of the platform or should it support older ones as well?To help with this kind of decision, I am excited to announce the newdevice dashboard. It provides information about deployed Android-powered devices...

Come to Our Virtual Office Hours

Starting this week, we're going to be holding regular IRC office hours for Android app developers in the #android-dev channel on irc.freenode.net. Members of the Android team will be on hand to answer your technical questions. (Note that we will not be able to provide customer support for the phones themselves.)We've arranged our office hours to accommodate as many different schedules as possible, for folks around the world. We will initially hold...

Optimize your layouts

/* Stylesheet generated from TextMate theme * * Mac Classic * * *//* Mostly to improve view within the TextMate HTML viewer */body { margin: 0; padding: 0;}pre.textmate-source { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 2px; font-family: Monaco, monospace; font-size: 11px; line-height: 1.3em; word-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: -moz-pre-wrap; white-space: -o-pre-wrap;}pre.textmate-source.mac_classic { color: #000000; background-color:...

Android SDK Updates

Today we are releasing updates to multiple components of the Android SDK:Android 2.0.1, revision 1Android 1.6, revision 2SDK Tools, revision 4Android 2.0.1 is a minor update to Android 2.0. This update includes several bug fixes and behavior changes, such as application resource selection based on API level and changes to the value of some Bluetooth-related constants. For more detailed information, please see the Android 2.0.1 release notes.To differentiate...

Announcing the Winners of ADC 2

Back in May at Google I/O, we announced ADC 2 -- the second Android Developer Challenge -- to encourage the development of cool apps that delight mobile users. We received many interesting and high-quality applications -- everything from exciting arcade games to nifty productivity utilities. We also saw apps that took advantage of openness of Android to enhance system behavior at a deep level to provide users with a greater degree of customization...

ADC 2 Public Judging is now closed

Thanks to tens of thousands of Android users around the world who participated in the review of ADC 2 finalist applications, we have now collected sufficient scores to complete Round 2 of public judging.We are reviewing the final results and will announce the top winners this coming Monday, November 30. Thanks to all who've participated in ADC 2 and good luck to all the finalis...

Integrating Application with Intents

Written in collaboration with Michael Burton, Mob.ly; Ivan Mitrovic, uLocate; and Josh Garnier, OpenTable.OpenTable, uLocate, and Mob.ly worked together to create a great user experience on Android. We saw an opportunity to enable WHERE and GoodFood users to make reservations on OpenTable easily and seamlessly. This is a situation where everyone wins — OpenTable gets more traffic, WHERE and GoodFood...

ADC 2 Round 2 Voting Open

The results from ADC 2 Round 1 are now tabulated and verified. With the top 200 applications identified, it's time to begin the final round judging. Be sure to download the ADC 2 judging application, or update your existing application, and help us select the final winners!For the final round, both users and a Google-selected panel of industry judges will provide votes to determine the final winners....

Bring Your Lab Coats

With the recent release of Android 2.0 and the growing number of available devices, we want to give developers a convenient way to test drive their apps on these new devices. We also want to make our Android advocates available to answer any questions you may have.We are pleased to announce that we will host a series of all day Android developer labs over the next month in the following cities (dates...

Announcing Android 2.0 support in the SDK!

I am excited to announce that the Android SDK now supports Android 2.0 (also known as Eclair).Android 2.0 brings new developer APIs for sync, Bluetooth, and a few other areas. Using the new sync, account manager and contacts APIs, you can write applications to enable users to sync their devices to various contact sources. You can also give users a faster way to communicate with others by embedding...

UI framework changes in Android 1.6

Android 1.6 introduces numerous enhancements and bug fixes in the UI framework. Today, I'd like to highlight three two improvements in particular.Optimized drawingThe UI toolkit introduced in Android 1.6 is aware of which views are opaque and can use this information to avoid drawing views that the user will not be able to see. Before Android 1.6, the UI toolkit would sometimes perform unnecessary...

Support for additional screen resolutions and densities in Android

You may have heard that one of the key changes introduced in Android 1.6 is support for new screen sizes. This is one of the things that has me very excited about Android 1.6 since it means Android will start becoming available on so many more devices. However, as a developer, I know this also means a bit of additional work. That's why we've spent quite a bit of time making it as easy as possible for you to update your apps to work on these new...

ADC 2 Round 1 Scoring Complete

The response to round one of the Android Developer Challenge 2 has been phenomenal! We originally expected that it would take two weeks to get all the necessary data to complete scoring. Over the last 10 days, more than 26,000 Android users reviewed and submitted our target of over 100 scores per application. With this enthusiastic support of the Android community, we are closing the first round...

Gestures on Android 1.6

Touch screens are a great way to interact with applications on mobile devices. With a touch screen, users can easily tap, drag, fling, or slide to quickly perform actions in their favorite applications. But it's not always that easy for developers. With Android, it's easy to recognize simple actions, like a swipe, but it's much more difficult to handle complicated gestures, which also require developers...

Now available: Android 1.6 NDK

Today Android 1.6 NDK, release 1 is available for download from the Android developer site.To recap, the NDK is a companion to the SDK that provides tools to generate and embed native ARM machine code within your application packages. This native code has the same restrictions as the VM code, but can execute certain operations much more rapidly. This is useful if you're doing heavy computations, digital...

Zipalign: an easy optimization

The Android 1.6 SDK includes a tool called zipalign that optimizes the way an application is packaged. Doing this enables Android to interact with your application more efficiently and thus has the potential to make your application and the overall system run faster. We strongly encourage you to use zipalign on both new and already published applications and to make the optimized version available—even if your application targets a previous version...

A Note on Google Apps for Android

Lately we've been busy bees in Mountain View, as you can see from the recent release of Android 1.6 to the open-source tree, not to mention some devices we're working on with partners that we think you'll really like. Of course, the community isn't sitting around either, and we've been seeing some really cool and impressive things, such as the custom Android builds that are popular with many enthusiasts. Recently there's been some discussion about...

ADC 2 Judging Has Begun!

I am happy to announce that Android Developer Challenge 2's first round of judging has begun!As a reminder, user voting determines which apps will make it to the second round. Voting will occur through an application called Android Developer Challenge 2, which is now available for download from Android Market. Android Developer Challenge 2 presents apps for each user to download and score according...

An introduction to Text-To-Speech in Android

We've introduced a new feature in version 1.6 of the Android platform: Text-To-Speech (TTS). Also known as "speech synthesis", TTS enables your Android device to "speak" text of different languages.Before we explain how to use the TTS API itself, let's first review a few aspects of the engine that will be important to your TTS-enabled application. We will then show how to make your Android application talk and how to configure the way it speaks.Languages...