We are pleased to announce the release of Games in Motion, an open source game sample to demonstrate how developers can make fun games using Google Fit and Android Wear. Do you ever go on a jog and feel like there is a lack of incentive to help you run better? What if you were a secret agent and had to use your speed and your nifty gadget to complete missions?
With Games in Motion, you can enhance your exercise with missions and actions on your Android Wear device, while logging your jogs to the cloud.
Games in Motion is written in Java programming language using Android Studio. It demonstrates multiple Android technologies.
Android Wear bridges notifications from a phone or tablet to a paired Android Wear device. The notifications are stacked so we can show multiple stats at the same time.
Google Fit API collects and processes fitness data and sessions. This allows us to use the fitness data to show user progress. All exercise sessions done in Games in Motion will be recorded to Google Fit as well.
Audio Focus is used to make sure we transition smoothly between in-app audio and audio from other apps, such as music-playing apps.
JUnit tests are present for the data-driven parser, which demonstrates how unit testing can be done within Android Studio.
You can download the latest open source release from GitHub. We hope to inspire similar Android games, where multiple different form factors are combined for a fun experience.
The Google Play Developer Console makes a wealth of data available to you so you have the insight needed to successfully publish, grow, and monetize your apps and games. We appreciate that some developers want to access and analyze their data beyond the visualization offered today in the Developer Console, which is why we’ve made financial information, crash data, and user reviews available for export. We're now also making all the statistics on your apps and games (installs, ratings, GCM usage, etc.) accessible via Google Cloud Storage.
New Reports section in the Google Play Developer Console
We’ve added a Reports tab to the Developer Console so that you can view and access all available data exports in one place.
A reliable way to access Google Play data
This is the easiest and most reliable way to download your Google Play Developer Console statistics. You can access all of your reports, including install statistics, reviews, crashes, and revenue.
Programmatic access to Google Play data
This new Google Cloud Storage access will open up a wealth of possibilities. For instance, you can now programmatically:
import install and revenue data into your in-house dashboard
run custom analysis
import crashes and ANRs into your bug tracker
import reviews into your CRM to monitor feedback and reply to your users
Your data is available in a Google Cloud Storage bucket, which is most easily accessed using gsutil. To get started, follow these three simple steps to access your reports:
Authenticate to your account using your Google Play Developer Console credentials.
Find your reporting bucket ID on the new Reports section.
Your bucket ID begins with: pubsite_prod_rev (example:pubsite_prod_rev_1234567890)
Use the gsutil ls command to list directories/reports and gsutil cp to copy the reports. Your reports are organized in directories by package name, as well as year and month of their creation.
Note about data ownership on Google Play and Cloud Platform: Your Google Play developer account is gaining access to a dedicated, read-only Google Cloud Storage bucket owned by Google Play. If you’re a Google Cloud Storage customer, the rest of your data is unaffected and not connected to your Google Play developer account. Google Cloud Storage customers can find out more about their data storage on the terms of service page.
Today, we’re excited to give you new tools to build better apps with the rollout of Google Play services 7.3. With new Android Wear APIs, the addition of nutrition data to Google Fit, improvements to retrieving the user’s activity and location, and better support for optional APIs, there’s a lot to explore in this release.
Android Wear
Google Play services 7.3 extends the Android Wear network by enabling you to connect multiple Wear devices to a single mobile device.
While the DataApi will automatically sync DataItems across all nodes in the Wear network, the directed nature of the MessageApi is faced with new challenges. What node do you send a message to when the NodeApi starts showing multiple nodes from getConnectedNodes()? This is exactly the use case for the new CapabilityApi, which allows different nodes to advertise that they provide a specific functionality (say, the phone node being able to download images from the internet). This allows you to replace a generic NodeListener with a more specific CapabilityListener, getting only connection results and a list of nodes that have the specific functionality you need. We’ve updated the Sending and Receiving Messages training to explore this new functionality.
Another new addition for Android Wear is the ChannelApi, which provides a bidirectional data connection between two nodes. While assets are the best way to efficiently add binary data to the data layer for synchronization to all devices, this API focuses on sending larger binary data directly between specific nodes. This comes in two forms: sending full files via the sendFile() method (perfect for later offline access) or opening an OutputStream to stream real time binary data. We hope this offers a flexible, low level API to complement the DataApi and MessageApi.
We’ve updated our samples with these changes in mind so go check them out here!
Google Fit
Google Fit makes building fitness apps easier with fitness specific APIs on retrieving sensor data like current location and speed, collecting and storing activity data in Google Fit’s open platform, and automatically aggregating that data into a single view of the user’s fitness data.
To make it even easier to retrieve up-to-date information, Google Play Services 7.3 adds a new method to the HistoryApi: readDailyTotal(). This automatically aggregates data for a given DataType from midnight on the current day through now, giving you a single DataPoint. For TYPE_STEP_COUNT_DELTA, this method does not require any authentication, making it possible to retrieve the current number of steps for today from any application whether on mobile devices or on Android Wear - great for watch faces!
Google Fit is also augmenting its existing data types with granular nutrition information, including protein, fat, cholesterol, and more. By leveraging these details about the user’s diet, developers can help users stay more informed about their health and fitness.
Location
LocationRequest is the heart of the FusedLocationProviderApi, encapsulating the type and frequency of location information you’d like to receive. An important, but small change to LocationRequest is the addition of a maximum wait time for location updates via setMaxWaitTime(). By using a value at least two times larger than the requested interval, the system can batch location updates together, reducing battery usage and, on some devices, actually improving location accuracy.
For any ongoing location requests, it is important to know that you will continue to get good location data back. The SettingsApi is still incredibly useful for confirming that user settings are optimal before you put in a LocationRequest, however, it isn’t the best approach for continual monitoring. For that, you can use the new LocationCallback class in place of your existing LocationListener to receive LocationAvailability updates in addition to location updates, giving you a simple callback whenever settings might have changed which will affect the current set of LocationRequests. You can also use FusedLocationProviderApi’s getLocationAvailability() to retrieve the current state on demand.
Connecting to Google Play services
One of the biggest benefits of GoogleApiClient is that it provides a single connection state, whether you are connecting to a single API or multiple APIs. However, this made it hard to work with APIs that might not be available on all devices, such as the Wearable API. This release makes it much easier to work with APIs that may not always be available with the addition of an addApiIfAvailable() method ensuring that unavailable APIs do not hold up the connection process. The current state for each API can then be retrieved via getConnectionResult(), giving you a way to check at runtime whether an API is available and connected.
While GoogleApiClient’s connection process already takes care of checking for Google Play services availability, if you are not using GoogleApiClient, you’ll find many of the static utility methods in GooglePlayServicesUtil such as isGooglePlayServicesAvailable() have now been moved to the singleton GoogleApiAvailability class. We hope the move away from static methods helps you when writing tests, ensuring your application can properly handle any error cases.
SDK is now available!
Google Play services 7.3 is now available: get started with updated SDK now!
You’ve invested time and effort into making your app an awesome experience, and we want to help people find the great content you’ve created. App Indexing has already been helping people engage with your Android app after they’ve installed it — we now have 30 billion links within apps indexed. Starting this week, people searching on Google can also discover your app if they haven’t installed it yet. If you’ve implemented App Indexing, when indexed content from your app is relevant to a search done on Google on Android devices, people may start to see app install buttons for your app in search results. Tapping these buttons will take them to the Google Play store where they can install your app, then continue straight on to the right content within it.
With the addition of these install links, we are starting to use App Indexing as a ranking signal for all users on Android, regardless of whether they have your app installed or not. We hope that Search will now help you acquire new users, as well as re-engage your existing ones. To get started, visit g.co/AppIndexing and to learn more about the other ways you can integrate with Google Search, visit g.co/DeveloperSearch.
