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Android Developer Story: Shifty Jelly drives double-digit growth with material design and expansion to the car and wearables

Posted by Lily Sheringham, Google Play team


Pocket Casts is a leading podcasting app on Google Play built by Australian-based mobile development company Shifty Jelly. The company recently achieved $1 million in sales for the first time, reaching more than 500K users.


According to the co-founder Russell Ivanovic, the adoption of material design played a significant role in driving user engagement for Pocket Casts by streamlining the user experience. Moreover, users are now able to access the app beyond the smartphone -- in the car with Android Auto, on a watch with Android Wear or on the TV with Google Cast. The rapid innovation of Android features helped Pocket Casts increase sales by 30 percent.


We chatted with co-founders and Android developers Russell and Philip Simpson to learn more about how they are growing their business with Android.




Here are some of the features Pocket Casts used:

  • Material Design: Learn more about material design and how it helps you create beautiful, engaging apps.

  • Android Wear: Extend your app to Android Wear devices with enhanced notifications or a standalone wearable app.

  • Android Auto: Extend your app to an interface that’s optimized for driving with Android Auto.

  • Google Cast: let your users cast your app’s content to Google Cast devices like Chromecast, Android TV, and speakers with Google Cast built-in.


And check out the Pocket Casts app on Google Play!



Editing NEW AAP DESIGN (Fire and Laser from After Effects CC)

Editing NEW AAP DESIGN (Fire and Laser from After Effects CC)


An update on Eclipse Android Developer Tools

Posted by Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android


Over the past few years, our team has focused on improving the development experience for building Android apps with Android Studio. Since the launch of Android Studio, we have been impressed with the excitement and positive feedback. As the official Android IDE, Android Studio gives you access to a powerful and comprehensive suite of tools to evolve your app across Android platforms, whether it's on the phone, wrist, car or TV.


To that end and to focus all of our efforts on making Android Studio better and faster, we are ending development and official support for the Android Developer Tools (ADT) in Eclipse at the end of the year. This specifically includes the Eclipse ADT plugin and Android Ant build system.


Time to Migrate



If you have not had the chance to migrate your projects to Android Studio, now is the time. To get started, download Android Studio. For many developers, migration is as simple as importing your existing Eclipse ADT projects in Android Studio with File → New→ Import Project as shown below:











For more details on the migration process, check out the migration guide. Also, to learn more about Android Studio and the underlying build system, check out this overview page.


Next Steps



Over the next few months, we are migrating the rest of the standalone performance tools (e.g. DDMS, Trace Viewer) and building in additional support for the Android NDK into Android Studio.


We are focused on Android Studio so that our team can deliver a great experience on a unified development environment. Android tools inside Eclipse will continue to live on in the open source community via the Eclipse Foundation. Check out the latest Eclipse Andmore project if you are interested in contributing or learning more.


For those of you that are new to Android Studio, we are excited for you to integrate Android Studio into your development workflow. Also, if you want to contribute to Android Studio, you can also check out the project source code. To follow all the updates on Android Studio, join our Google+ community.









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