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Play Store lays out new rules to curb intrusive full screen ads
Also modernizes several policies about misinformation, impersonation, and monetization
Google Play regularly revises its policies in response to both new and old problems that can be found among apps in the marketplace. Many of the changes may only impact developers, with some will also having indirect effects that show up for users; but there are a few that many people will benefit from right away.
Play as you Download expands to more phones as Google simplifies mobile game development
There's a big drive to help developers become more profitable
The 2022 Google for Games Developer Summit is kicking off with the traditional series of announcements about the company's upcoming plans and projects. Like some previous events, the central theme is focused on removing limits by bringing Android games to more devices with more form factors, and in less time.
Google and Apple both set to ban apps using this sketchy monetization SDK
X-Mode has been caught selling customer location data to government contractors
Apple and Google have both taken the exceptional step of banning any apps that include X-Mode's software from their respective app stores, according to The Wall Street Journal. The news comes after investigations revealed location data gathered by X-Mode in those apps were sold to parties with ties to the US government and national security efforts. Play Store developers have one week to comply before the banhammer falls.
Android Studio Emulator updated with enhanced support for foldables
There are also new performance enhancements
Android Studio is the main SDK for developing Android applications and games, and it has a built-in device emulator for testing projects across a wide range of hardware setups. Google just released a massive update for the Android Emulator with improved support for foldable devices, performance enhancements, and a few bug fixes.
Starting with Android P, Google began slowly closing the door on the use of non-public APIs. The process began with method calls that had little or no known usage among app developers, but things changed when Android Q expanded the list of restricted interfaces to cover a larger selection. Now with Android 11, the crackdown continues as the Android team adds even more non-public APIs to the restricted list.
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We're always on the lookout for what's to come with the future of Android, and if you're a developer, you may want to check out Android Studio right now. The Android R Preview SDK just appeared in the SDK Manager, meaning there's likely some new stuff to poke through.
Microsoft revealed two upcoming dual-screen devices last year: the Android-based Surface Duo, and the larger Surface Neo running Windows 10X. Today the company released a preview SDK for the Surface Duo, so developers can start working on apps that take advantage of both displays.
Twitter and Facebook have both been targeted by malicious mobile SDKs on Android that accessed personal data, such as email addresses and user names. The companies have since informed Google about the issue, and Facebook sent cease and desist letters to the data collection firms behind the SDKs, oneAudience and MobiBurn.
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GDC 2019 is next month, and in preparation for the event, the official schedule has been made available on the GDC Conference website. Notably, one of the sessions on the calendar is supposed to cover a first look at a new SDK from Microsoft that will allow mobile game developers to integrate the Xbox Live service into their titles.
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- With Android Q Beta 2, Google claims to have further tweaked these restrictions, so developers skirting the rules with undocumented/blacklisted APIs should double check to make sure they won't run into issues on Beta 2.
Google's been trying to crack down harder on unofficial, non-public APIs a lot harder since Android P, and that pressure is set to further increase with Android Q. The hammer has dropped: If your app targets Android Q, there's a much larger pile of non-SDK APIs that it can't include. And if Google sticks to its previous schedule, that means you'll need to cut that non-public API use by next fall.
WiFi streaming is all the rage these days, and Spotify has long had a proprietary solution that works with certain speakers. Spotify Connect has only been available to Premium subscribers in the past, but that's about to change.
Analytics is a big business. It's not just about building a product, you need to know how to optimize it. Time can be spent more efficiently when you have the data required to point you in the direction of problems. To that end, Cloudflare—of DDoS mitigation fame—is releasing the Cloudflare Mobile SDK to help app developers better optimize networking performance.
From the ashes of the popular CyanogenMod custom ROM, LineageOS has emerged as a worthy successor, providing users the same near stock experience with a few useful customization options. Now, Lineage is introducing an SDK in a bid to get developers building interesting things based on its own APIs.
Google announced this week that two of its projects are going open source. Code for both DeepLab-V3+, the latest version of Google's semantic image segmentation AI model, and Resonance Audio, Google's spatial audio SDK, is now freely available.
You might remember our intermittent coverage of Android Automotive — not to be confused with the near-identically named Android Auto. The (really) short version is that Android Automotive is a full Android implementation in a car, rather than just a dumb projection of your phone. And, according to the folks at XDA, Google might be building an emulator for it in the Android SDK.
One of the reasons Amazon's Alexa assistant has become so popular is because it can be integrated into nearly everything. We've seen phones, speakers, and even refrigerators with Alexa. Now Google is opening up Google Assistant to the same level of accessibility, with the new Google Assistant SDK.
This should come as no surprise to anyone, but Google has released the final version of the Android Wear 2.0 SDK. It adds support for everything announced with the LG Watch Style and Watch Sport yesterday, and also makes a few revisions to some of the app approval processes. On that note, there are two things in this final version to pay attention to (if you're a developer).
One of the many announcements at Microsoft's Windows Developer Day was "Project Rome," a way for Universal Windows Platform applications (apps from the Windows Store) to have cross-device services. In addition to supporting all the various Windows 10 platforms (PC, Windows Mobile, Xbox, etc), Microsoft has also released the Project Rome SDK for Android.