Updated SDK Tools and ADT revision 17

Today we are releasing an update to the SDK Tools and the Eclipse plugin. Revision 17 brings a lot of new features and bug fixes in various areas such as Lint, the build system as well as the emulator.

Lint is a static checker which analyzes Android projects for a variety of issues around correctness, security, performance, usability and accessibility, checking your XML resources, bitmaps, ProGuard configuration files, source files and even compiled bytecode. It can be run from within Eclipse or from the command line.
New for r17:

• Added check for Android API calls that require a version of Android higher than the minimum supported version. You can use the new @TargetApi annotation to specify local overrides for conditionally loaded code. For more information, read here.
• Added over 40 new Lint rules for a total of over 80, including checks for performance, XML layouts, manifest and file handling. For a full list read here.
• Added ability to suppress Lint warnings in Java code with the new @SuppressLint annotation, and in XML files with the new tools: namespace prefix and ignore attribute. For more information, read here.
• Improved HTML and XML reporting and Eclipse integration. For more information, read here.

We’ve also made improvements to the build systems for Eclipse and Ant:

• Added strict dependency support for 3rd party Jar files. You can read more information here.
• Added support for custom views with custom attributes in libraries. Layouts using custom attributes must use the namespace URI http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto instead of the URI that includes the app package name. This URI is replaced with the app specific one at build time.
• Added a feature that allows you to run some code only in debug mode. Builds now generate a class called BuildConfig containing a DEBUG constant that is automatically set according to your build type. You can check the (BuildConfig.DEBUG) constant in your code to run debug-only functions such as outputting debug logs.

The emulator is seeing some big improvements as well:

• Thanks to contributions to AOSP from Intel, the emulator now supports running x86 system images in virtualization mode on Windows and Mac OS X. This allows the emulator running at near native speed. The drivers are available through the SDK Manager. Read more here.
• After adding webcam support and sensor emulation, we are adding experimental support for Multi-Touch input through a tethered Android device. (Read more here)

Finally, we are also releasing an updated Support Library with the following improvements:

• ShareCompat provides easy helper classes for both sending and receiving content for social sharing apps.
• NavUtils and TaskStackBuilder provide cross-version support for implementing the Android Design guidelines for navigating within your app including the action bar's "Up" button.
• NotificationCompat.Builder provides a compatibility implementation of Android 3.0's Notification.Builder helper class for creating standardized system notifications.
• A new Library Project adds support for GridLayout back to API level 7 and higher.

You can get more information about these changes in the SDK Tools Release Notes and ADT Release Notes.

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Android 4.0 Platform and Updated SDK Tools

Today we are announcing Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich — a new version of the platform that brings a refined, unified user experience for phones, tablets, and more.

Android 4.0 builds on the things people love most about Android — efficient multitasking, rich notifications, customizable home screens, resizable widgets, and deep interactivity — and adds powerful new ways of communicating and sharing. It includes many great features for users, including social and sharing integration, network data usage control, innovative connectivity and camera options, and an updated set of standard apps.

For developers, Android 4.0 introduces many new capabilities and APIs. Here are some highlights:

Unified UI toolkit: A single set of UI components, styles, and capabilities for phones, tablets, and other devices.

Rich communication and sharing: New social and calendar APIs, Android Beam for NFC-based instant sharing, Wi-Fi Direct support, Bluetooth Health Device Profile support.

Deep interactivity and customization: Improved notifications, lockscreen with camera and music controls, and improved app management in the launcher.

New graphics, camera, and media capabilities: Image and video effects, precise camera metering and face detection, new media codecs and containers.

Interface and input: Hardware-accelerated 2D drawing, new grid-based layout, improved soft keyboard, spell-checker API, stylus input support, and better mouse support.

Improved accessibility: New accessibility APIs and text-to-speech APIs for writing new engines.

Enhancements for enterprise: Keychain and VPN APIs for managing credentials and connections, a new administrator policy for disabling the camera.

For a complete overview of what’s new for users and developers, please read the Android 4.0 Platform Highlights.

Alongside the new Android platform, we are releasing new versions of the SDK Tools (r14) and ADT Plugin (14.0) for Eclipse. Among the highlights are:

• Improved build performance in Ant and Eclipse


• Improved layout and XML editors

To get started developing on Android 4.0, visit the Android Developers site for information about the Android 4.0 platform, the SDK Tools, and the ADT Plugin.

If you have already developed and published apps, we encourage you to download the Android 4.0 platform now, to begin testing your app before devices arrive in stores.

Check out the video below for a closer look at Android 4.0 in action.

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Final Android 3.0 Platform and Updated SDK Tools

We are pleased to announce that the full SDK for Android 3.0 is now available to developers. The APIs are final, and you can now develop apps targeting this new platform and publish them to Android Market. The new API level is 11.

For an overview of the new user and developer features, see the Android 3.0 Platform Highlights.

Together with the new platform, we are releasing updates to our SDK Tools (r10) and ADT Plugin for Eclipse (10.0.0). Key features include:

• UI Builder improvements in the ADT Plugin:
• New Palette with categories and rendering previews. (details)
• More accurate rendering of layouts to more faithfully reflect how the layout will look on devices, including rendering status and title bars to more accurately reflect screen space actually available to applications.
• Selection-sensitive action bars to manipulate View properties.
• Zoom improvements (fit to view, persistent scale, keyboard access) (details).
• Improved support for <merge> layouts, as well as layouts with gesture overlays.
• Traceview integration for easier profiling from ADT. (details)
• Tools for using the Renderscript graphics engine: the SDK tools now compiles .rs files into Java Programming Language files and native bytecode.

To get started developing or testing applications on Android 3.0, visit the Android Developers site for information about the Android 3.0 platform, the SDK Tools, and the ADT Plugin.

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Android 2.3.3 Platform, New NFC Capabilities

Several weeks ago we released Android 2.3, which introduced several new forms of communication for developers and users. One of those, Near Field Communications (NFC), let developers get started creating a new class of contactless, proximity-based applications for users.

NFC is an emerging technology that promises exciting new ways to use mobile devices, including ticketing, advertising, ratings, and even data exchange with other devices. We know there’s a strong interest to include these capabilities into many applications, so we’re happy to announce an update to Android 2.3 that adds new NFC capabilities for developers. Some of the features include:

• A comprehensive NFC reader/writer API that lets apps read and write to almost any standard NFC tag in use today.
• Advanced Intent dispatching that gives apps more control over how/when they are launched when an NFC tag comes into range.
• Some limited support for peer-to-peer connection with other NFC devices.

We hope you’ll find these new capabilities useful and we’re looking forward to seeing the innovative apps that you will create using them.

Android 2.3.3 is a small feature release that includes a new API level, 10.
Going forward, we expect most devices shipping with an Android 2.3 platform to run Android 2.3.3 (or later). For an overview of the API changes, see the Android 2.3.3 Version Notes. The Android 2.3.3 SDK platform for development and testing is available through the Android SDK Manager.

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Android 3.0 Platform Preview and Updated SDK Tools

Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) is a new version of the Android platform that is designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes, particularly tablets. It introduces a new “holographic” UI theme and an interaction model that builds on the things people love about Android — multitasking, notifications, widgets, and others — and adds many new features as well.

Besides the user-facing features it offers, Android 3.0 is also specifically designed to give developers the tools and capabilities they need to create great applications for tablets and similar devices, together with the flexibility to adapt existing apps to the new UI while maintaining compatibility with earlier platform versions and other form-factors.

Today, we are releasing a preview of the Android 3.0 SDK, with non-final APIs and system image, to allow developers to start testing their existing applications on the tablet form-factor and begin getting familiar with the new UI patterns, APIs, and capabilties that will be available in Android 3.0.

Here are some of the highlights:

UI framework for creating great apps for larger screen devices: Developers can use a new UI components, new themes, richer widgets and notifications, drag and drop, and other new features to create rich and engaging apps for users on larger screen devices.

High-performance 2D and 3D graphics: A new property-based animation framework lets developers add great visual effects to their apps. A built-in GL renderer lets developers request hardware-acceleration of common 2D rendering operations in their apps, across the entire app or only in specific activities or views. For adding rich 3D scenes, developers take advantage of a new 3D graphics engine called Renderscript.

Support for multicore processor architectures: Android 3.0 is optimized to run on either single- or dual-core processors, so that applications run with the best possible performance.

Rich multimedia: New multimedia features such as HTTP Live streaming support, a pluggable DRM framework, and easy media file transfer through MTP/PTP, give developers new ways to bring rich content to users.

New types of connectivity: New APIs for Bluetooth A2DP and HSP let applications offer audio streaming and headset control. Support for Bluetooth insecure socket connection lets applications connect to simple devices that may not have a user interface.

Enhancements for enterprise: New administrative policies, such as for encrypted storage and password expiration, help enterprise administrators manage devices more effectively.

For an complete overview of the new user and developer features, see the Android 3.0 Platform Highlights.

Additionally, we are releasing updates to our SDK Tools (r9), NDK (r5b), and ADT Plugin for Eclipse (9.0.0). Key features include:

• UI Builder improvements in the ADT Plugin:
  • Improved drag-and-drop in the editor, with better support for included layouts.
  • In-editor preview of objects animated with the new animation framework.
  • Visualization of UI based on any version of the platform. independent of project target. Improved rendering, with better support for custom views.

To find out how to get started developing or testing applications using the Android 3.0 Preview SDK, see the Preview SDK Introduction. Details about the changes in the latest versions of the tools are available on the SDK Tools, the ADT Plugin, and NDK pages on the site.

Note that applications developed with the Android 3.0 Platform Preview cannot be published on Android Market. We’ll be releasing a final SDK in the weeks ahead that you can use to build and publish applications for Android 3.0.

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Android 2.3 Platform and Updated SDK Tools

Today we're announcing a new version of the Android platform — Android 2.3 (Gingerbread). It includes many new platform technologies and APIs to help developers create great apps. Some of the highlights include:

Enhancements for game development: To improve overall responsiveness, we’ve added a new concurrent garbage collector and optimized the platform’s overall event handling. We’ve also given developers native access to more parts of the system by exposing a broad set of native APIs. From native code, applications can now access input and sensor events, EGL/OpenGL ES, OpenSL ES, and assets, as well a new framework for managing lifecycle and windows. For precise motion processing, developers can use several new sensor types, including gyroscope.

Rich multimedia: To provide a great multimedia environment for games and other applications, we’ve added support for the new video formats VP8 and WebM, as well as support for AAC and AMR-wideband encoding. The platform also provides new audio effects such as reverb, equalization, headphone virtualization, and bass boost.

New forms of communication: The platform now includes support for front-facing camera, SIP/VOIP, and Near Field Communications (NFC), to let developers include new capabilities in their applications.

For a complete overview of what’s new in the platform, see the Android 2.3 Platform Highlights.

Alongside the new platform, we are releasing updates to the SDK Tools (r8), NDK, and ADT Plugin for Eclipse (8.0.0). New features include:

Simplified debug builds: Developers can easily generate debug packages without having to manually configure the application’s manifest, making workflow more efficient.

Integrated ProGuard support: ProGuard is now packaged with the SDK Tools. Developers can now obfuscate their code as an integrated part of a release build.

HierarchyViewer improvements: The HierarchyViewer tool includes an updated UI and is now accessible directly from the ADT Plugin.

Preview of new UI Builder: An early release of a new visual layout editor lets developers create layouts in ADT by dragging and dropping UI elements from contextual menus. It’s a work in progress and we intend to iterate quickly on it.

To get started developing or testing applications on Android 2.3, visit the Android Developers site for information about the Android 2.3 platform, the SDK Tools, the ADT Plugin and the new NDK.

Check out the video below to learn more about the new developer features in Android 2.3.

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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 version.

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Android 2.2 and developers goodies.

Today at Google I/O we announced that Android 2.2 is right around the corner. This is our seventh platform release since we launched Android 1.0 in September 2008. We wanted to highlight five areas in particular:

Performance & speed: The new Dalvik JIT compiler in Android 2.2 delivers between a 2-5X performance improvement in CPU-bound code vs. Android 2.1 according to various benchmarks.

New enterprise capabilities: We’ve added Exchange capabilities such as account auto-discovery and calendar sync. Device policy management APIs allow developers to write applications that can control security features of the device such as the remote wipe, minimum password, lockscreen timeout etc.

Faster, more powerful browser: We have brought the V8 JavaScript engine to the Android browser as part of 2.2. This has resulted in a 2-3X improvement in JavaScript performance vs. 2.1.

Rich set of new APIs and services: New data backup APIs enable apps to participate in data backup and restore, allowing an application's last data to be restored when installed on a new or a reset device. Apps can utilize Android Cloud to Device Messaging to enable mobile alert, send to phone, and two-way push sync functionality. Developers can now declare whether their app should be installed on internal memory or an SD card. They can also let the system automatically determine the install location. On the native side, a new API now gives access to Skia bitmaps.

Additions to Android Market: Android Market provides Android Application Error Reports, a new bug reporting feature, giving developers access to crash and freeze reports from users. Developers will be able to access these reports via their account on the Android Market publisher website.

For a complete list of everything we’ve included in Android 2.2, please see the platform highlights.

Developers can now download the Android 2.2 SDK and Android NDK, Revision 4 from the Android developer site.

Tools update

We are releasing new version of the Android SDK Tools, Revision 6, Eclipse plug-in ADT 0.9.7 and Android NDK, Revision 4.

Android SDK Tools, Revision 6, Eclipse plug-in 0.9.7

These new versions include support for library projects that will help you share code and resources across several Android projects.

Android NDK, Revision 4

Workflow improvements
The new NDK brings a host of workflow improvement, from compilation, to debugging. Starting with 2.2, the NDK enables debugging native code on production devices.

ARMv7 instruction set support
This release enables the generation of machine code for the ARMv7-A instruction set. Benefits include higher performance, as well as full use of the hardware FPU for devices that support it.

ARM Advanced SIMD (a.k.a. NEON) instruction support
The NEON instruction set extension can be used to perform scalar computations on integers and floating points. However, it is an optional CPU feature and will not be supported by all Android ARMv7-A based devices. The NDK includes a tiny library named "cpufeatures" that can be used by native code to test at runtime the features supported by the device's target CPU.

For more information, please see the releases notes for the SDK Tools, ADT, and NDK.

As I said at the beginning, Android 2.2 will be here soon, and some devices will get the update in the coming weeks. I invite application developers to download the new SDK and tools and test your applications today.

Check out the video below to learn more about Android 2.2.

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Android NDK r3

The third release of the Android Native Development Kit (NDK) is now available for download from the Android developer site.

It can be used to target devices running Android 1.5 and higher. In addition to a few bug fixes and improvements, this release includes the following new features:

Toolchain improvement

The toolchain binaries have been refreshed for this release with GCC 4.4.0, which should generate slightly more compact and efficient machine code than the previous one (4.2.1).

Note that the GCC 4.4.0 C++ frontend is more pedantic, and may refuse to compile certain rare and invalid template declarations that were accepted by 4.2.1. To alleviate the problem, this NDK still provides the 4.2.1 binaries, which can optionally be used to build your machine code.

OpenGL ES 2.0 support

Applications targeting Android 2.0 (API level 5) or higher can now directly access OpenGL ES 2.0 features. This brings the ability to control graphics rendering through vertex and fragment shader programs, using the GLSL shading language.

A new trivial sample, named "hello-gl2", demonstrates how to render a simple triangle using both shader types.

Name simplification

This NDK release is just called "r3", for "Revision 3", to indicate that it is not limited to a specific Android platform/API level. Some developers thought that the previous release's name (1.6_r1) was confusing and indicated that it could only be used to target Android 1.6, which was not true.

Enjoy!

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Android at the Game Developer's Conference

Tuesday, March 9 marks the start of the 2010 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and Android will be there! There has been a lot of interest about Android from the game development community, and our presence at GDC is intended to provide developers everything they need to get started with the platform. We are hosting several technical sessions and participating in two industry panels.

We also want to meet you and answer your questions about Android game development, so we've set aside time for "office hours." Android team engineers will be on-hand to answer your questions, and if you have a game in development for Android, we'd love to see a demo.

Below, you can see the technical sessions that we're hosting and industry panels that we're participating in. We look forward to seeing you at GDC2010!

Technical sessions

Tuesday, March 9

Bootstrapping Games on Android
Chris Pruett
Everything you need to know about games on Android in 60 minutes.
1:45 PM - 2:45 PM
Room 309, South Hall

Wednesday, March 10

Bring Your Games to Android
Jack Palevich
An in-depth look at writing and porting C++ games using the NDK and a thin Java shell.
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Room 302, South Hall

Get the Most out of Android Media APIs
Dave Sparks & Jason Sams
Tips and tricks for optimizing your sound, video, and graphics for compatibility, efficiency, and battery life.
11:45 AM - 12:45 PM
Room 302, South Hall

Android Office Hours
The Android team
Come meet the team, ask us your questions, and show off your games!
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Room 302, South Hall

Industry panels

Wednesday, March 10

GamesBeat2010: A sea of mobile devices
Eric Chu
Industry experts weigh in on the future of mobile game development.
4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Moscone Convention Center

Thursday, March 11

After the iPhone...what?
Dave Sparks
Audio experts discuss the nitty gritty technical details of alternative gaming platforms.
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Room 112, North Hall

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Android at Mobile World Congress

I'm happy to announce that we'll be hosting a very special Android Developer Lab at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona on Wednesday, February 17th as part of the inaugural App Planet event.

There will be technical presentations throughout the day and a developer lounge where you can talk to Android team members and meet others in the growing Android developer community.

Whether you’re already developing Android apps, you're an experienced mobile developer, or you’re considering making your first foray into writing mobile applications, the Android Developer Lab will provide access to the resources you need to create innovative and compelling apps for the Android platform.

Space is limited in the technical sessions, so if you're attending MWC and want to come by the Android Developer Lab, make sure to sign up now.

Also, we're offering a limited number of complimentary passes that provide access to the Android Developer Lab, the rest of App Planet, and the general exhibition areas for MWC. Sign up to be considered to receive a pass.

Hope to see you in Barcelona!

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Android Developer Labs World Tour

Late last year, we held a series of developer labs to give you a chance to ask questions and play with some new hardware. One of the most common questions we received was, "When are you going to visit my city?" It's a good question, and we're pleased to answer it today.

The Android team is embarking on a world tour, which will include cities in Europe, North America, and Asia.

At each stop, we'll be delivering an update on the state of the Android platform—including a look at the latest Android hardware. It's a great opportunity to meet like-minded Android app developers, play with the latest Android devices, test your apps, and ask Android team members any questions you might have. You can find out more on the Android Developer Lab site.

Here's the line-up of Android Developer Lab locations for February and March 2010:

North America

• Austin, Texas – Feb 4
• Seattle, Washington – Feb 8
• Waterloo, Ontario, Canada – Feb 8
• Washington, D.C. – Feb 9
• Mountain View, California – Feb 10
• Cambridge, Massachusetts – Feb 11
• New York, New York – Feb 12

Europe

• London, UK – Feb 2
• Paris, France – Feb 8
• Berlin, Germany – Feb 10
• Zurich, Switzerland – Feb 12
• Madrid, Spain – Feb 13

Asia

• Singapore – Feb 28
• Taipei, Taiwan – March 3
• Hong Kong – March 5

If you'd like to attend, you'll need to request a spot by February 1st. Space is limited, so please wait for an email to confirm that you have a spot in the lab.

While we're on the road, we're also going to stop by and speak at the following local Android user groups:

• Stockholm, Sweden – Feb 4
• London, UK – Feb 5
• Chicago, Illinois, USA – Feb 6

We're looking forward to meeting you in person!

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Android at the 2010 Game Developers Conference

2009 has been a great year for Android Market. With the support of developers like you, Android Market now has more than 20,000 applications. Of these applications, games have proven to be particularly popular with Android users. Seven of the ten most popular paid applications on Android Market are games, so there's a significant opportunity for game developers as the number of Android devices continues to grow at a rapid pace.

To better support this trend, we are increasing our support of Android game development. As a first step, we will be presenting a number of Android sessions at the Game Developers Conference on March 9th and 10th in San Francisco. The sessions will be technical and will include everything you need to know about Android game development in Java or C++. Engineers from the Android team will also be available to answer your questions. Whether you are new to the platform or already have games in development, we would love to meet you face-to-face, answer your questions, and see what you're working on. Be sure to keep checking the GDC site because we'll be adding more sessions.

But that's not all. Google and GDC will also be providing complimentary Android phones to attendees who register for All Access or Tutorials and Summits passes by the Early Bird deadline of February 4, 2010. Qualified attendees will receive either a Nexus One or a Verizon Droid by Motorola, so they can quickly apply what they learn from the various Android sessions. You can find more details about the Android phone offer on the GDC site.

Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to develop awesome games for Android, and this is a first step. Hope to see you at GDC!

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IRC office hours update

You may recall that we announced IRC Office Hours for Android app developers back in December. We just want to provide a quick update that upcoming office hours will be held on Thursdays from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. PST, instead of twice weekly. These will be held in the #android-dev channel on irc.freenode.net as before.



Please post your questions on Stack Overflow with "from-irc" tag in addition to "android" tag one day before office hours. We will follow up on those specific questions during office hours, and will also post answers after.



We hope to see you there!

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Android 2.1 SDK

Today, we are releasing the SDK component for Android 2.1, so that developers can take advantage of the new features introduced in Android 2.1. Please read the Android 2.1 release notes for more details. You can download the Android 2.1 component through the SDK Manager.

In addition to the new SDK, a new USB driver that supports Nexus One is also available today through the SDK Manager. The USB driver page contains more information.

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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, I'm happy to announce that we're working with Stack Overflow to improve developer support, especially for developers new to Android. In essence, the Android tag on Stack Overflow will become an official Android app development Q&A medium. We encourage you to post your beginner-level technical questions there. It's also important to point out that we don't plan to change the android-developers group, so intermediate and expert users should still feel free to post there.

I think that this will be a great new resource for novice Android developers, and our team is really excited to participate in the growth of the Android developer community on Stack Overflow. I hope to see you all there!

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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 blog posts into technical articles; watch for more of these to appear in the future.

In addition, we just released a new batch of sample code, available now as a ZIP file download on the samples index page. And we're working on updating the way in which we distribute official sample code; more on that some other time.

The new sample code includes:

• Multiple Resolutions: a simple example showing how to use resource directory qualifiers to support multiple screen configurations and Android SDK versions.
• Wiktionary and WiktionarySimple: sample applications that illustrate how to create an interactive home screen widget.
• Contact Manager: an example on using the new ContactsContract interface to query and manipulate a user's various accounts and contact providers.
• Bluetooth Chat: a fun little demo that allows two users to have a 1 on 1 chat over Bluetooth. It demonstrates how to discover devices, initiate a connection, and transfer data.
• API Demos > App > Activity > QuickContactsDemo: a demo showing how to use the android.widget.QuickContactsBadge class, new in Android 2.0.
• API Demos > App > Activity > SetWallpaper: a demo showing how to use the new android.app.WallpaperManager class to allow users to change the system wallpaper.
• API Demos > App > Text-To-Speech: a sample using Text-To-Speech (speech synthesis) to make your application talk.
• NotePad (now with Live Folders): this sample now includes code for creating Live Folders.

We hope these new samples can be a valuable resource for learning some of the newer features in Android 1.6 and 2.0. Let us know in the android-developers Google Group if you have any questions about these new samples or about the new Resources tab.

Thanks for tuning in, and 'til next time, happy coding!

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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 new
device dashboard. It provides information about deployed Android-powered devices that is helpful to developers as they build and update their apps. The dashboard provides the relative distribution of Android platform versions on devices running Android Market.

Android Platform Percentage of Devices 1.1 0.3% 1.5 27.7% 1.6 54.2% 2.0 2.9% 2.0.1 14.8%

The above graph shows the relative number of Android devices that have accessed Android Market during the first 14 days of December 2009.

From a developer's perspective, there are a number of interesting points on this graph:

• At this point, there's little incentive to make sure a new application is
  backward compatible with Android 1.0 and Android 1.1.
• Close to 30% of the devices are running Android 1.5. To take advantage of this significant install base, you may consider support for Android 1.5.
• Starting with Android 1.6, devices can have different screen densities & sizes. There are several devices out there that fall in this category, so make sure to adapt your application to support different screen sizes and take advantage of devices with small, low density (e.g QVGA) and normal, high density (e.g. WVGA) screens. Note that Android Market will not list your application on small screen devices unless its manifest explicitly indicates support for "small" screen sizes. Make sure you properly configure the emulator and test your application on different screen sizes before uploading to Market.
• A new SDK for Android 2.0.1 was released two weeks ago. All Android 2.0 devices will be updated to 2.0.1 before the end of the year, so if your application uses features specific to Android 2.0, you are encouraged to update it to take advantage of the latest Android 2.0.1 API instead.

In summary, Android 1.5, 1.6, and 2.0.1 are the 3 versions of the platform that are deployed in volume. Our goal is to provide you with the tools and information to make it easy for you to target specific versions of the platform or all the versions that are deployed in volume.

We plan to update the dashboard regularly to reflect deployment of new Android platforms. We also plan to expand the dashboard to include other information like devices per screen size and so on.

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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 two sessions each week:

• 12/15/09 Tuesday, 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. PST
• 12/17/09, Thursday 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. PST
• 12/22/09, Tuesday 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. PST
• 01/06/10 Wednesday 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. PST
• 01/07/10 Thursday 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. PST

Check Wikipedia for a helpful list of IRC clients. Alternatively, you could use a web interface such as the one at freenode.net. We will try to answer as many as we can get through in the hour.

We hope to see you there!

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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 in local time):

• Mountain View, CA - Nov 9
• New York, NY - Nov 16
• London, UK - Nov 17
• Tokyo, JP - Nov 18
• Taipei, TW - Nov 20

Due to limited space, developers who have already published an application in Android Market will be given priority. You can request a spot on a first-come, first-serve basis by going to this page. We will send a follow-up email with venue information and other registration details to those who have secured a spot.

Thank you for your continued excitement in Android. We look forward to meeting many of you in the coming weeks!

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