Exercising Our Remote Application Removal Feature

[This post is by Rich Cannings, Android Security Lead. — Tim Bray]Every now and then, we remove applications from Android Market due to violations of our Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement or Content Policy. In cases where users may have installed a malicious application that poses a threat, we’ve also developed technologies and processes to remotely remove an installed application from devices. If an application is removed in this way,...

Android Market Problem

Earlier today we had a brief outage in Android Market. For a period of about thirty minutes, some users were unable to find any apps. The problem was detected and corrected, and we believe the user experience is now back to normal. We apologize for the outa...

The Froyo Code Drop

[This post is by Jean-Baptiste Queru, who moves truck-loads of source code in and out of the Googleplex. — Tim Bray]Today is one of those days that has my heart racing; we’ve just released the source code for Android 2.2. This is a big step forward for the entire Android ecosystem. Please don’t melt the servers down again while trying to download that latest source code.This blog typically talks about...

Hands-on at OSCON

This year at OSCON we and O’Reilly are co-presenting Android Hands-on. The event is on the evening of Wednesday, July 21 after the Expo-hall reception. Led by Google Android experts, the Hands-on will run from 7:00 pm-10:00 pm, and will be intense, technical, and structured. The goal is that you leave the room with foundation skills for writing interesting code for an open-source stack that runs on a pocket-sized Internet-connected device.Some specific...

Future-Proofing Your App

[This post is by Reto Meier AKA @retomeier, who wrote the book on Android App development. — Tim Bray]As a developer, I’m excited by Android’s potential as a single development platform that can make my apps available on a wide range of devices. From smartphones to televisions, Android is now being used on an increasingly diverse collection of hardware.Last year’s Android SDK 1.6 release was the first...

Game Development for Android: A Quick Primer

[This post is by Chris Pruett, an outward-facing Androider who focuses on the world of games. — Tim Bray]If you attended Google I/O this year, you might have noticed the large number of game developers showing off their stuff in the Android part of the Developer Sandbox. Unity, EA, Com2Us, Polarbit, Laminar Research, and several others demonstrated high-end games running on Android devices. Part...

Download Count Problems

Something is apparently wrong in the Android Market. We are getting multiple reports of erroneous download counts. The right people are aware of the situation and are working on it.[Update, Monday morning: The fix was rolled in early Sunday and it seems as though app developers have their missing downloads bac...

Blogging Round the World

It seems that once or twice a week, I run across an Android-developer-oriented site that I hadn’t previously noticed. There are already a few aggregators and directories, and I think we’re going to need more. But for the moment, here are three pieces of bloggy Android goodness, from Florida, Odessa (Ukraine!), and Sydney. What they have in common is that I previously hadn't encountered any of them.Font MagicThis is from Florida-based Jeff Vera’s...

Making Sense of Multitouch

!-- -->[This post is by Adam Powell, one of our more touchy-feely Android engineers. — Tim Bray]The word “multitouch” gets thrown around quite a bit and it’s not always clear what people are referring to. For some it’s about hardware capability, for others it refers to specific gesture support in software. Whatever you decide to call it, today we’re going to look at how to make your apps and views...

Application Visibility Issues

Recently we became aware that some Android applications were not visible on the Android Market. While we were internally troubleshooting and qualifying the fix and communicating with our hardware partners, developers were trying hard to get our help through various technical support sites. Regrettably, we fell short of our own standard for customer support by not communicating the issue to our developers and how we were working to resolve it.We’re...

Allowing applications to play nice(r) with each other: Handling remote control buttons

[This post is by Jean-Michel Trivi, an engineer working on the Android Media framework, whose T-shirt of the day reads “all your media buttons are belong to you”. — Tim Bray]Many Android devices come with the Music application used to play audio files stored on the device. Some devices ship with a wired headset that features transport control buttons, so users can for instance conveniently pause and...