Google Play Services 7.5

Google Maps Lite Mode and Android Wear

Courtesy of Google Developers Blog

Google Maps can how be used in Full and Lite mode on Android Wear. Lite mode allows you to use various static images of Google Maps in your app. This allows you to create lists of items and show a Lite Map against each of them.

There is a nice short video on Maps Lite mode on YouTube and more can be read here.

This is basically like JobScheduler except backwards compatible. I covered it recently in my article “8 ways to do asynchronous processing in Android and counting”. The idea is that you can schedule long running or resource hungry Services to run when certain conditions are met, such as the phone is charging and you are on an unmetered network like Wifi. There is code on how to use this at this link.

Android Pay will enable Android users to simply and securely use their Android phone to pay in stores or in thousands of Android Pay partner apps. With new APIs in M, it’s easy for you to add fingerprint authorization to your app and have it work consistently across a range of devices and sensors. There is a new FingerPrintManager class that lets you receive a callback when a user authorizes payment or any other action using the fingerprint reader. It also lets you completely customize the UI or use the default UI.

You can look at the sample code from Google or watch this video for more.

Google Cloud Messaging API gained a topic based messaging system where by your app can subscribe to certain messages and ignore others. Previously this filtering had to be handled manually. What this means is that your shopping app can specify that the user is male or female and only interested in clothes and hence only show push notifications targeting a female audience.

GcmPubSub.getInstance(context).subscribe(regToken, "/topics/clothing/women", null);

You can go further and specify categories under the topics for which you wish to receive notifications. For example: /topics/clothing/women/jeans or /topic/clothing/women/jackets.

There is also a sample app here.

App invites is all about inviting your friends to checkout or beta test an app. Your users recommend your app to their friends using personalized, contextual invitations powered by Google. It’s perhaps best explained in the video below at the 2:53 mark.

In short, you can now cast content from a mobile device to a TV (for example) and still show different content on your mobile device. This would allow you to do things such as allow a user to play a game on their TV while using the phone as a controller.

Check out the Google developers blog for more information on Google Cast Remote Display API’s.

Smart Lock for Password basically remembers when you have saved a password for a particular website or web application in Chrome and automatically signs you in when you access the site on your Phone or download an app for that site or web application. In Google’s own words:

Smart Lock for Passwords builds on the Chrome Password Manager, adding a new CredentialsApi API and UI on Android to retrieve saved credentials as part of your login process and saving new credentials for later use on other Android devices and any Chrome browser. Both password-based and Identity Provider (IDP, like Google Sign-In) credentials are supported. Keep your users logged in as they move between and to new devices; don’t let them drop off, get frustrated, or end up with multiple accounts.

The main change here is that there are a lot more exercise types to choose from and Google fit can even keep track of resistance and repetitions. The JavaDoc will even include details on how to perform them. You can check out the exercises supported here.

Finally

These are just some of the major items that I feel all Android Developers should be aware of. As you probably noted, there was not much mentioned here regarding development for Android Auto or Android TV (other than the Google Cast).

I would recommend looking at the list of videos from 100 Days of Google Developers as it talks about a lot of features introduced at Google I/O 2015.

There is a lot more included in the Google Play Services and especially in the Google Cloud Messaging and Maps API. Also worth looking at is the NotificationBuilder changes that now let you pass a Bitmap as an icon.

Last note, look at the official Android Developer blog for details on everything Android related from Google I/O and read the Developing for Android series by Google Developers on Medium. The Developing for Android series may seem basic, but it covers a wide range of topics that will help developers no matter what your experience level.

Can you think of any other APIs or features that Android Developers should be aware of? Let me know in the comments.