Android Developers Have Risen to the Challenge

Tweet

I'm thrilled to share the news that developers from over 70 countries submitted 1,788 entries to the Android Developer Challenge!

Here are a few facts that I thought were interesting. When we announced the Android Developer Challenge back in January, developers started submitting entries right away but it wasn't until the April 14 deadline approached that the flood really began. The rate of submissions spiked in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, reaching as high as 170+ submissions per hour.

What I find truly amazing is how global the interest in the challenge has been. Developers from the United States submitted one-third of the total applications while the rest came from countries such as Germany, Japan, China, India, Canada, France, UK, and many others. The entries are also very diverse representing many application areas, from games to social-networking applications, to utilities, to productivity and developer tools, and many more. On behalf of the Open Handset Alliance, I want to thank everyone who has submitted entries to the challenge. We look forward to reviewing all of them.

Now that the applications are in, over 100 judges will soon receive judging packets and laptops that we've preloaded with all the submissions, for a consistent, fair environment to judge the submissions. The majority of the judges are from member companies of the Open Handset Alliance, in addition to non-alliance mobile industry experts who have all graciously volunteered their time. I'd like to thank these judges too for all the time they will be putting into this.

In May, we'll be informing the 50 Semi-finalists who will be awarded $25,000 each. Until then, the team and I will have our hands full.

Android at the 2010 Game Developers Conference

Tweet

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!

Android at the Game Developer's Conference

Tweet

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

Android 2.2 and developers goodies.

Tweet

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 improvementsThe 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 supportThis 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 supportThe 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.