Licensing Service Technology Highlights

We’ve just announced the introduction of a licensing server for Android Market. This should address one of the concerns we’ve heard repeatedly from the Android developer community.The impact and intent, as outlined in the announcement, are straightforward. If you want to enable your app to use the licensing server, there’s no substitute for reading the authoritative documentation: Licensing Your Applications....

Licensing Service For Android Applications

[This post is by Eric Chu, Android Developer Ecosystem. — Tim Bray]In my conversations with Android developers, I often hear that you’d like better protection against unauthorized use of your applications. So today, I’m pleased to announce the release of a licensing service for applications in Android Market. This simple and free service provides a secure mechanism to manage access to all Android...

Adjustment to Market Legals

Please note that we have updated the Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement (DDA). This is in preparation for some work we’re doing on introducing new payment options, which we think developers will like.In the spirit of transparency, we wanted to highlight the changes:In Section 13.1, “authorized carriers” have been added as an indemnified party. Section 13.2 is new in its entirety, covering indemnity for payment processors for claims related...

Multithreading For Performance

[This post is by Gilles Debunne, an engineer in the Android group who loves to get multitasked. — Tim Bray]A good practice in creating responsive applications is to make sure your main UI thread does the minimum amount of work. Any potentially long task that may hang your application should be handled in a different thread. Typical examples of such tasks are network operations, which involve unpredictable...

Market Statistics Adjustments

If you look closely today, you'll notice that some per-app Android Market statistics have lower values; not big differences, but noticeable in a few cases. We discovered last week that, starting in early June, certain events had been double-counted: installs, uninstalls, impressions, and so on. The most obvious symptom was (for paid apps) a discrepancy between the number of installs and the number of reported sales through Checkout.The underlying...

Android Market Welcomes Korea!

As of today, Android Market is open for business to application buyers in the Republic of Korea. We hope that this will make the outstanding Android devices now available in that nation even more useful and fun. We welcome the people of Korea, acknowledged everywhere as one of the world's most-wired societies, to the world of Andro...

How to have your (Cup)cake and eat it too

[This post is by Adam Powell, his second touchy-feely outing in just a few weeks. I asked him to send me a better picture than we ran last time, and got this in response. Photo by our own Romain Guy. — Tim Bray]Android developers concerned with targeting every last device with their apps are no doubt familiar with this chart:On July 1, 2010 this was the breakdown of active devices running different...

Apps on SD Card: The Details

[This post is by Suchi Amalapurapu, an engineer who worked on this feature. — Tim Bray]Android 2.2 supports application installation on external storage devices like the SD card. This should give users room for many more apps, and will also benefit certain categories, like games, that need huge assets.(Note that not all of the contents of an “SD-card-resident” APK are actually on the card; the dex files, private data directories, and native shared...

Android 2.2 SDK refresh

As you may have noticed, the source code for Android 2.2, which we call Froyo, has been released.The Android 2.2 SDK that was released at Google I/O contained a preview of the Froyo system image and today, we are releasing an update to bring it into sync with the system image pushed to Nexus One devices.I encourage all developers to use the SDK manager to update to this versi...

Android Love at OSCON

Android developers who aren't already going should take a moment to check out the OSCON 2010 schedule, and give serious thought to a trip to Portland in a couple of weeks. OSCON is one of the world's premiere events for those who care about Open Source, and one of my personal favorite conferences, with a powerful community vibe. And this year, the Android drums are sounding.There are a bunch of mobile and Android-related sessions, both pure and...