Identifying App Installations

[The contents of this post grew out of an internal discussion featuring many of the usual suspects who’ve been authors in this space. — Tim Bray]In the Android group, from time to time we hear complaints from developers about problems they’re having coming up with reliable, stable, unique device identifiers. This worries us, because we think that tracking such identifiers isn’t a good idea, and that there are better ways to achieve...

In-app Billing Launched on Android Market

[This post is by Eric Chu, Android Developer Ecosystem. —Dirk Dougherty]Today, we're pleased to announce the launch of Android Market In-app Billing to developers and users. As an Android developer, you will now be able to publish apps that use In-app Billing and your users can make purchases from within your apps.In-app Billing gives you more ways to monetize your apps with try-and-buy, virtual goods,...

In-App Billing on Android Market: Ready for Testing

[This post is by Eric Chu, Android Developer Ecosystem. —Dirk Dougherty]Back in January we announced our plan to introduce Android Market In-app Billing this quarter. We're pleased to let you know that we will be launching In-app Billing next week.In preparation for the launch, we are opening up Android Market for upload and end-to-end testing of your apps that use In-app Billing. You can now upload...

Memory Analysis for Android Applications

[This post is by Patrick Dubroy, an Android engineer who writes about programming, usability, and interaction on his personal blog. — Tim Bray]The Dalvik runtime may be garbage-collected, but that doesn't mean you can ignore memory management. You should be especially mindful of memory usage on mobile devices, where memory is more constrained. In this article, we're going to take a...

Application Stats on Android Market

[This post is by Eric Chu, Android Developer Ecosystem. —Dirk Dougherty]On the Android Market team, it’s been our goal to bring you improved ways of seeing and understanding the installation performance of your published applications. We know that this information is critical in helping you tune your development and marketing efforts. Today I’m pleased to let you know about an important new feature...

Android 3.0 Hardware Acceleration

[This post is by Romain Guy, who likes things on your screen to move fast. —Tim Bray]One of the biggest changes we made to Android for Honeycomb is the addition of a new rendering pipeline so that applications can benefit from hardware accelerated 2D graphics. Hardware accelerated graphics is nothing new to the Android platform, it has always been used for windows composition or OpenGL games...

Renderscript Part 2

[This post is by R. Jason Sams, an Android engineer who specializes in graphics, performance tuning, and software architecture. —Tim Bray]In Introducing Renderscript I gave a brief overview of this technology. In this post I’ll look at “compute” in more detail. In Renderscript we use “compute” to mean offloading of data processing from Dalvik code to Renderscript code which may run on the...

Fragments For All

[This post is by Xavier Ducrohet, Android SDK Tech Lead. — Tim Bray]A few weeks ago, Dianne Hackborn wrote about the new Fragments API, a mechanism that makes it easier for applications to scale across a variety of screen sizes.However, as Dianne noted, this new API, which is part of Honeycomb, does not help developers whose applications target earlier versions of Android.Today we’ve released a static library that exposes the same...