Notes

We've got a great release for you today with two major updates!

First of all the mobile app build service now supports building signed release APKs for Android! This prepares an APK ready for publishing to the Google Play store. Exporting to Cordova now allows you to choose Signed release APK and some new signing options will appear. These include a tool to create a keystore which is used for signing the APK. Be sure to read the warnings about keeping your keystore safe - if you lose it, you may be unable to publish any more updates to your app. This feature now streamlines the Android publishing process avoiding the need to use complicated command-line tools to sign your APK. We'll have documentation and a blog to cover it in more detail soon!

Secondly there's a major new optimisation in the C3 runtime: it now compiles expressions to JavaScript to optimise expression evaluation in events to new performance heights. It's a completely new architecture and the expressions code has been almost completely rewritten for the new compiler system - but it should still be 100% backwards compatible. For particularly intensive projects with thousands of instances, loops or functions, this can bring performance gains of 20-50%. This is a really interesting bit of technology and we'll have a blog post covering this in detail out soon as well!

Finally we've now implemented the Instant Games and Facebook plugins for the C3 runtime. We're still working our way through the remaining plugins and hope to finish them all in the near future.

It's a big release and we have a lot to talk about! Keep an eye on our blog for more news throughout the week.