Store your music online and listen everywhere

You’ve joined the streaming revolution, but still have that MP3 player you take to the gym. It has your pump-up playlist, all of the Phish live concerts, and the brand new recordings from your friend’s band. Keep things simple by using Google Play Music, which gives you subscription access to 30 million songs on any device and also offers you a place to store the music collection you already own, for free.

Today we are expanding the music storage limit on Google Play. Now you can store 50,000 songs for free and stream or download them them to your phone, tablet, computer or Chromecast.


Here’s how you can store your music online today:

  1. Sign in to Google Play Music - Go to your computer and visit play.google.com/music. Sign in with your Google account if needed. 
  2. Claim your free storage - If you’d like to try our subscription service too, click “Get Started.” Otherwise, click “No Thanks” to continue with the free storage. 
  3. Add your music collection - The setup process will guide you through adding our Chrome app, which provides seamless uploading. You can choose to simply upload your entire iTunes library or select other music folders. 
  4. Access your music everywhere - You can stream or download music to your Android, iPhone or iPad for easy offline listening. It’s also all available on the web when you’re on your computer. And best of all, when you upgrade to a new computer or phone, your music comes along, too. 
Not using Chrome? At step 3 the setup process will instead guide you through installing Music Manager. Don’t worry, you can still add 50,000 songs. 

Wondering what to do after you’ve stored all of your music safely online? Test drive our music subscription service to listen to any song on demand and find expert curated radio stations for any mood, activity or time of day. Encore!

Posted by Andrew Stromme, Google Play Music Product Manager

We'll see you at GDC 2015!

Posted by Greg Hartrell, Senior Product Manager of Google Play Games



The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is less than one week away in San Francisco. This year we will host our annual Developer Day at West Hall and be on the Expo floor in booth #502. We’re excited to give you a glimpse into how we are helping mobile game developers build successful businesses and improve user experiences.





Our Developer Day will take place in Room 2006 of the West Hall of Moscone Center on Monday, March 2. We're keeping the content action-oriented with a few presentations and lightning talks, followed by a full afternoon of hands on hacking with Google engineers. Here’s a look at the schedule:



Opening Keynote || 10AM: We’ll kick off the day by sharing to make your games more successful with Google. You’ll hear about new platforms, new tools to make development easier, and ways to measure your mobile games and monetize them.



Running A Successful Games Business with Google || 10:30AM: Next we’ll hear from Bob Meese, the Global Head of Games Business Development from Google Play, who’ll offer some key pointers on how to make sure you're best taking advantage of unique tools on Google Play to grow your business effectively.



Lightning Talks || 11:15AM: Ready to absorb all the opportunities Google has to offer your game business? These quick, 5-minute talks will cover everything from FlatBuffers to Google Cast to data interpolation. To keep us on track, a gong may be involved.



Code Labs || 1:30PM: After lunch, we’ll turn the room into a classroom setting where you can participate in a number of self-guided code labs focused on leveraging Analytics, Google Play game services, Firebase and VR with Cardboard. These Code Labs are completely self-paced and will be available throughout the afternoon. If you want admission to the code labs earlier, sign up for Priority Access here!



Also, be sure to check out the Google booth on the Expo floor to get hands on experiences with Project Tango, Niantic Labs and Cardboard starting on Wednesday, March 4. Our teams from AdMob, AdWords, Analytics, Cloud Platform and Firebase will also be available to answer any of your product questions.



For more information on our presence at GDC, including a full list of our talks and speaker details, please visit g.co/dev/gdc2015. Please note that these events are part of the official Game Developer's Conference, so you will need a pass to attend. If you can't attend GDC in person, you can still check out our morning talks on our livestream at g.co/dev/gdc-livestream.



Label: , , , , , , ,

Android Developer Story: GinLemon - Breaking through with Google Play

Posted by Letitia Lago, Google Play team



It’s not often that a developer is born from a summer holiday joke and a parent’s love of furniture making. But this is exactly how Vincenzo Colucci started GinLemon, a successful app business on Google Play.



The choice of Android was an obvious one to Vincenzo, although he didn’t have experience with Android development at the start — he learned it by downloading the tools and playing with the examples.



From his original scratch card app, to the global success of Smart Launcher, Vincenzo is proof that great apps can come from personal passion and the willingness to do something a little different.



Find out more about Vincenzo’s journey in this video.





Vincenzo and the team he has built around Smart Launcher are working on a major update, which will be free and they hope to release in March. They also have Smart Locker, a series of lock screens with some unique features, in development and other projects in the pipeline.



To learn about creating apps for Google Play and building your own app business, check out The Secrets to App Success on Google Play [ebook], a detailed playbook on the best practices and tools you can use to maximize the reach, retention, and revenue of your new app.



Label:

Building for Android Wear: Depth and Flexibility

Posted by Timothy Jordan, Developer Advocate



With so many recent updates and improvements to Android Wear, it's high time to share an updated overview of the platform. We're certainly not done—there's a lot more to come—but this is the picture today as you start or continue developing your groundbreaking Android Wear user experiences.






The Android Wear platform emphasizes depth and flexibility. Built on Android, it allows developers to use familiar APIs to create useful, performant, and imaginative apps that run directly on the watch. In the spirit of Android, you have the freedom to make substantial changes to the user experience, including the creation of custom watch faces. There are three main categories of experiences you can build: apps, custom watch faces, and notifications.



Apps



Apps that are built for Android Wear run directly on the watch and can do nearly anything a phone can, from tracking your run to giving you a little entertainment while waiting for the bus. Some even work without a connection to the phone, such as fitness and music apps. There are libraries to help you move data between the phone and the wearable, as well as create stunning and adaptable UIs. Here's a list of some of the great features you have access to:














































Feature		Documentation
Full screen activities with touch eventsCreating Custom UIs for Wear Devices
Notifications and custom actionsUI Patterns for Android Wear
Custom Watch facesCreating Watch Faces
Layouts for round and square devicesCreating Custom UIs for Wear Devices
OpenGLDisplaying Graphics with OpenGL ES
Sensors
  • Accelerometer

  • Gyroscope

  • Compass

  • Barometer

  • Heart rate sensor
SensorManager
HapticsVibrator
MicrophoneAudioRecord
Voice actionsAdding Voice Capabilities
GPSDetecting Location on Android Wear
Offline storing of data / musicTransferring Assets
Media playback controlsMediaSession, MediaController
Framework based on Android 5.0 API 21Android 5.0 APIs
Standalone or synchronized appsSending and Syncing Data





Watch Faces



The ability to create custom watch faces gives you direct access to the most prominent UI element on a user's most personal device. The API is simple enough to build watch faces quickly and flexible enough to allow personalization. Again, given the depth and flexibility of the Android platform, you can create something for the user that's both beautiful and packed with unique features.



The development journey starts with the simplicity of bringing your design to the wrist. At the core of the watch face API is the onDraw method that allows you to draw whatever design you can think of to the canvas at a high enough frame rate to deliver fluid animation. This will come through at full fidelity while the watch is in interactive mode.





At other times, when the watch is in ambient mode, you're able to draw a more discreet version of the watch face. Additional preferences can be set to arrange the system UI elements appropriately for your design. Once those basics are covered, the limits are your imagination! You can go further with additions like the moon phase, current weather, or fitness stats. Watchmakers call these items "complications" -- but with Android they're hardly complicated. Once you have the data, just draw it on the canvas as you did the time.





Notifications



Of course, Android Wear Notifications are the easiest way to get started in the world of wearables. If you've got an Android app with notifications -- they already work on a Wear watch. If you've already enhanced your notification with actions, this is even better and also automatically already works. You can take things further with Wear-specific functionality like Stacks, Pages, and Voice Replies that make your notifications richer experiences on the wrist.



The user experiences you build for Wear get to take advantage of the power and flexibility of the Android platform. It's easy to get started and possible to create truly groundbreaking UI for your users. Together, we can create an ecosystem of user experiences as diverse as the watches they run on and the people who wear them.





Check out the developer videos and documentation for more, and share your thoughts on the Android Wear Developers community. We can’t wait to see the innovative user experiences you will build on Android Wear.



Label: , , , ,

Beta Channel for the Android WebView


Posted by Richard Coles, Software Engineer, Google London



Many Android apps use a WebView for displaying HTML content. In Android 5.0 Lollipop, Google has the ability to update WebView independently of the Android platform. Beginning today, developers can use a new beta channel to test the latest version of WebView and provide feedback.

WebView updates bring numerous bug fixes, new web platform APIs and updates from Chromium. If you’re making use of the WebView in your app, becoming a beta channel tester will give you an early start with new APIs as well as the chance to test your app before the WebView rolls out to your users.

The first version offered in the beta channel will be based on Chrome 40 and you can find a full list of changes on the chromium blog entry.

To become a beta tester, join the community which will enable you to sign up for the Beta program; you’ll then be able to install the beta version of the WebView via the Play Store. If you find any bugs, please file them on the Chromium issue tracker.



Label: ,

The Guardian — Understanding and engaging mobile users

Posted by Leticia Lago, Google Play team



The Guardian is a global news organization with one of the world's largest quality English-speaking news websites, theguardian.com. It has more than 100 million monthly unique browsers and app users, two thirds of which come from outside the UK. With a longstanding reputation for agenda-setting journalism, the publication is most recently renowned for its Pulitzer Prize and Emmy-winning coverage of the disclosures made by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The Guardian’s early adoption of a digital-first policy and continued digital innovation means it has also become a respected name among developers and tech audiences. In the last year, it has launched a redesigned app and new website and been among a handful of publishers to develop its own Glassware.



The Guardian app is taking advantage of unique Google Play and Android features to drive user engagement. Their mobile app readers are now 10 to 20 times more engaged than their average web users. Improving engagement has also helped them lift the rating for their app from 4.0 to 4.4 on Google Play.



Anthony Sullivan, Director of Product, and Tom Grinsted, Product Manager, share some best practices for increasing app engagement in this video.






To learn more, be sure to check out these resources to better engage your users:



  • Convert installs to active users [video] — hear from Matteo Vallone, Partner Development Manager for Google Play, about the best practices for engaging and retaining users through intents, identity, context, and rich notifications as well as delivering a cross-platform user experience.

  • Adding Wearable Features to Notifications [tutorial] — learn how to add notifications to Android Wear devices, including how to make use of the Wear notification features: voice commands, stacks, and pages.

  • Beta testing [help] — discover how to make use of the alpha and beta testing features offered by Google Play, and get feedback from real users.

  • Build your community (of testers) [guide] — get advice on how to build communities on G+ or other social networks, then tap into their skills and enthusiasm to help with testing your app.


Label: , ,

Trulia sees 30% more engagement using notifications and further innovates with Android Wear

Posted by Laura Della Torre, Google Play team



Trulia’s mission is to make it as easy as possible for home buyers, sellers, owners and renters to navigate the real estate market. Originally a website-based company, Trulia is keenly aware that its users are migrating to mobile. Today, more than 50 percent of Trulia’s business comes from mobile and growth shows no sign of slowing, so they know that’s where they need to innovate.



In the following video, Jonathan McNulty, VP of Consumer Product, and Lauren Hirashima, Mobile Product Manager, at Trulia, talked about how the company successfully leveraged notifications on Android to increase app engagement by 30 percent and has seen 2x the amount of engagement on Android relative to other platforms:





Trulia continues to focus on improving their mobile experience, using Google’s geo-fencing technology to create Nearby Home Alerts, which lets users know when they walk near a new listing. Combined with Android Wear, Trulia now makes it possible for users to see details and photos about a property and call or email the agent, all directly from their watch.



Find out more about using rich notifications on Android and developing for Android Wear. And check out The Secrets to App Success on Google Play (ebook) which contains a chapter dedicated to the best practices and tools you can use to increase user engagement and retention in your app.



Label: , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)