Android 1.6 SDK is here

I am happy to let you know that Android 1.6 SDK is available for download. Android 1.6, which is based on the donut branch from the Android Open Source Project, introduces a number of new features and technologies. With support for CDMA and additional screen sizes, your apps can be deployed on even more mobile networks and devices. You will have access to new technologies, including framework-level support for additional screen resolutions, like QVGA and WVGA, new telephony APIs to support CDMA, gesture APIs, a text-to-speech engine, and the ability to integrate with Quick Search Box. What's new in Android 1.6 provides a more complete overview of this platform update.

The Android 1.6 SDK requires a new version of Android Development Tools (ADT). The SDK also includes a new tool that enables you to download updates and additional components, such as new add-ons or platforms.

You can expect to see devices running Android 1.6 as early as October. As with previous platform updates, applications written for older versions of Android will continue to run on devices with Android 1.6. Please test your existing apps on the Android 1.6 SDK to make sure they run as expected.

Over the next several weeks, we will publish a series of blog posts to help you get ready for the new developer technologies in Android 1.6. The following topics, and more, will be covered: how to adapt your applications to support different screen sizes, integrating with Quick Search Box, building gestures into your apps, and using the text-to-speech engine.

If you are interested to see some highlights of Android 1.6, check out the video below.

Happy coding!

Some News from Android Market

I'm pleased to let you know about several updates to Android Market. First, we will soon introduce new features in Android Market for Android 1.6 that will improve the overall experience for users. As part of this change, developers will be able to provide screenshots, promotional icons and descriptions that will better show off applications and games.

We have also added four new sub-categories for applications: sports, health, themes, and comics. Developers can now choose these sub-categories for both new and existing applications via the publisher website. Finally, we have added seller support for developers in Italy. Italian developers can go to the publisher website to upload applications and target any of the countries where paid applications are currently available to users.

To take advantage of the upcoming Android Market refresh, we encourage you to visit the Android Market publisher website and upload additional marketing assets. Check out the video below for some of the highlights.

ADC2 Submissions Closing Monday!

Don't forget to submit your ADC2 apps by midnight PST on Monday, August 31! Remember that this is Pacific time in the US (GMT - 7) so be sure to convert the deadline into your local timezone.

Also, even if you've already submitted your apps, please double check and make sure that your app is in the "Submitted" state in the UI! If it says "Unsubmitted", it will NOT be considered as an entry.

Android Developer Challenge 2 open for submissions

The time has come! The submission site for Android Developer Challenge 2 is now open. You can now submit applications for the Challenge at http://market.android.com/adc. Full instructions are also available on the site.

The key thing to remember is that all submissions must be entered by 11:59:59pm Pacific Time in the United States on August 31, 2009. If your applications are not submitted by that time, they won't be eligible for participation. Please carefully note what time that is in your local time zone.

It's very important that your apps only use published APIs. Some users might be judging your submissions on new phones you haven't seen or tested. If your apps depend on unpublished APIs, they might not work on some of these phones. Please note that you won't be able to submit new versions of your apps after the deadline!

Since you'll be competing against developers around the world for users' attention, it is important to focus on the fit and finish of your app. Your apps will be judged by users as a final product and not just a cool demo.

As a final note, if you've uploaded a version of your app to Android Market, you'll need to use a different Android package name for the version you submit to the Challenge.

I look forward to see all the great apps and innovations from you all.

ADC 2 Updates

Since the announcement of Android Developer Challenge 2 in May, Android phones continue to be deployed in countries worldwide. Android phones are currently available in over 20 countries, with more on the way. As I've mentioned earlier, we'll be including real-world users of these phones to help review and score your submissions. It is important to remember that your apps will be reviewed by judges around the world on actual devices; thus, be sure to make it extremely easy for users/judges to access your apps with minimum setup.

Some of you have been asking for clarifications on what we mean by "open only to applications that have not been published". To be specific, applications that are available on Android Market before August 1, 2009 will not be eligible to participate in the contest. Users have already been providing comments for apps that are currently available on Android Market, so it wouldn't make sense for them to "judge" the same apps again in this contest. In addition, apps that include or that are based on open source projects are fully welcomed, as long as the application itself is not on Android Market until August 1, 2009.

If you want to find out more details about ADC 2, you can find everything at the ADC 2 page along with the Terms and Conditions. For the moment, the most important thing to know is that ADC 2 submissions will be due August 31. I can't wait to see what you all come up with this time.

Happy coding -- and good luck!

Introducing Android 1.5 NDK, Release 1

Many of you have been asking for the ability to call into native code from your Android applications. I'm glad to announce that developers can now download the Android Native Development Kit from the Android developer site.

As you know, Android applications run in the Dalvik virtual machine. The NDK allows developers to implement parts of these applications using native-code languages such as C and C++. This can provide benefits to certain kinds of applications.

The NDK provides:

• a set of tools and build files used to generate native code libraries from C and C++ sources
• a way to embed the corresponding native libraries into application packages files (.apks) that can be deployed on Android devices
• a set of native system headers and libraries that will be supported in all future releases of the Android platform, starting from Android 1.5 documentation, samples and tutorials

This release of the NDK supports the ARMv5TE machine instruction set and provides stable headers for:

• libc, the standard C library
• libm, the standard math library
• the JNI interface
• libz, the common ZLib compression library
• liblog, used to send logcat messages to the kernel

Keep in mind that using the NDK will not be relevant for all Android applications. As a developer, you will need to balance its benefits against its drawbacks, which are numerous! Your application will be more complicated, have reduced compatibility, have no access to framework APIs, and be harder to debug. That said, some applications that have self-contained, CPU-intensive operations that don't allocate much memory may still benefit from increased performance and the ability to reuse existing code. Some examples are signal processing, intensive physics simulations, and some kinds of data processing.

For any questions on the NDK, please join the Android NDK forum.

Have fun.

Activities and Tasks Design Guidelines

For our third post in the series of Android UI, we're releasing Activity and Task Design Guidelines. This section of our guidelines aims to help you understand basic concepts of activities and tasks, how they work, and how to enrich the user experience you are creating.

We've packed a lot into this section, which is targeted at designers and developers. You'll see examples that will illustrate how to use our core principles and mechanisms, such as multitasking, activity reuse, intents, and the back stack.

Additionally, we are providing some best practices around our UI patterns such as notifications. For example, we'll show you how to design a notification so that it will take the user to the screen they expect. This behavior needs to be thought out, and doesn't necessarily just happen by default.

With helpful pointers to the API's and this documentation, we look forward to building your understanding of what it means to design and develop an Android UI.