Android Experiments: A celebration of creativity and code

Posted by Roman Nurik, Design Advocate, and Richard The, Google Creative Lab

Android was created as an open and flexible platform, giving people more ways to come together to imagine and create. This spirit of invention has allowed developers to push the boundaries of mobile development and has helped make Android the go-to platform for creative projects in more places—from phones, to tablets, to watches, and beyond. We set out to find a way to celebrate the creative, experimental Android work of developers everywhere and inspire more developers to get creative with technology and code.

Today, we’re excited to launch Android Experiments: a showcase of inspiring projects on Android and an open invitation for all developers to submit their own experiments to the gallery.

The 20 initial experiments show a broad range of creative work–from camera experiments to innovative Android Wear apps to hardware hacks to cutting edge OpenGL demos. All are built using platforms such as the Android SDK and NDK, Android Wear, the IOIO board, Cinder, Processing, OpenFrameworks and Unity. Each project creatively examines in small and big ways how we think of the devices we interact with every day.

Today is just the beginning as we’re opening up experiment submissions to creators everywhere. Whether you’re a student just starting out, or you’ve been at it for a while, and no matter the framework it uses or the device it runs on, Android Experiments is open to everybody.

Check out Android Experiments to view the completed projects, or to submit one of your own. While we can’t post every submission, we’d love to see what you’ve created.

Follow along to see what others build at AndroidExperiments.com.

EyeEm Improves User Engagement through Android Design

By Leticia Lago, Google Play team

EyeEm is a global community for photographers that goes beyond sharing photos with friends: photographers can share tips, take part in missions, and sell their photos. To win more customers, a design that best showcases photos from the community is very important for this Berlin-based company.

With the idea of bringing a beautiful, simple experience to their fast growing base of Android users, the team recently embarked on a redesign of their app. Following the Android design principles, they stripped back the UI and simplified navigation. This allowed them to deliver a more streamlined app experience, along with a clean, crisp design that presents photos beautifully. And it paid off. According to Ramzi Rizk, EyeEm co-founder and CTO, “Our new design helped improve user growth and retention across the board, in every single metric we have.”

In the following video, Rizk and colleague Matias Castello, Product Head of Mobile, talk about their experience applying Android design to their app and the improvements in user engagement it has achieved:

Resources to help you with design

To learn more about how to design your apps for Android devices and achieve great user engagement and retention, be sure to check out these resources:

• Android Design — all the information you need to understand and implement Android design principles in your app.



• Design.Bytes — presented by the Google designers who created Material Design and apps, such as the Google I/O 2014 app, these videos provide a fun and informative introduction to Android design.

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