And the winners of the Google Play Indie Games Contest in Europe are...

Posted by Matteo Vallone, Google Play Games Business Development

Today, at Saatchi Gallery in London, we hosted the final event of the first Google Play Indie Games Contest in Europe. The 20 finalists, selected from nearly 1000 submissions, came from 12 countries to showcase their games to an excited room of gamers, industry experts and press. Selected based on the votes of the attendees and the Google Play team, the Top 10 pitched in front of a jury of industry experts who chose the top winners.

Stay tuned for more pictures and a video of the event.

Without further ado, join us in congratulating the winners!

Winner & Unity prize winner:

Reigns, by Nerial, from the United Kingdom You are the King. For each decision, you only have two choices. Survive the exercise of power and the craziness of your advisors... as long as you can.

Runners up:

	The Battle of Polytopia, by Midjiwan AB, from Sweden A turn based strategic adventure. It's a game about ruling the world, fighting evil AI tribes, discovering new lands and mastering new technologies.
	Causality, by Loju, from the United Kingdom A puzzle about manipulating time, altering the sequence of events and changing the outcome of each level to help a group of astronauts find a route to safety.

The other top games selected by the event attendees and the Google Play team are:

	Blind Drive, by Lo-Fi People, from Israel You're driving blindfolded as a mysterious voice gives you suicidal commands on the phone. Survive on-rushing vehicles using only your hearing to guide you.
	Gladiabots, by GFX47, from France A competitive tactical game in which you design the AI of your robot squad. Use your own strategy, refine it online and fight for the top of the leaderboard.
	Happy Hop: Kawaii Jump, by Platonic Games, from Spain This isn't just an original one-tap endless hopper, it's also the cutest one. Ever wondered what's in the end of the rainbow? That would be Happy Hop.
	Lost in Harmony, by Digixart Entertainment, from France Experience music in a new way with the combination of rhythmic tapping and choreographic runner to go through two memorable journeys with Kaito and M.I.R.A.I.
	Paper Wings, by Fil Games, from Turkey A fast-paced arcade game which puts you in control of an origami bird. Avoid the hazards and collect the falling coins to keep your paper bird alive.
	Pinout, by Mediocre, from Sweden A breathtaking pinball arcade experience: race against time in a continuous journey through this canyon of pulsating lights and throbbing retro wave beats.
	Rusty Lake: Roots, by Rusty Lake, from Netherlands James Vanderboom's life drastically changes when he plants a special seed in the garden. Expand your bloodline by unlocking portraits in the tree of life.

Check out the prizes

The prizes of this contest were designed to help the winners showcase their art and grow their business on Android and Google Play, including:

• 
  YouTube influencer campaigns worth up to 100,000 EUR
  
  


• 
  Premium placements on Google Play
  
  


• 
  Tickets to Google I/O 2017 and other top industry events
  
  


• 
  Promotions on our channels
  
  


• 
  Special prizes for the best Unity game
  
  


• 
  And more!
  
  

What�s next?

The week is not over just yet for Indie games developers. Tomorrow we are hosting the Indie Games Workshop for all indie games developers from across EMEA in the new Google office in Kings Cross.

It�s been really inspiring to see the enthusiasm around this inaugural edition, and the quality and creativity of the indie games developed across the eligible European countries. We are looking forward to bringing a new edition of the contest to you in late 2017.

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Tips for building high-quality and accessible financial services apps

Posted by Joel Newman & Ashraf Hassan, Strategic Partnerships, Finance, Google Play



Millions of people around the globe have limited or no access to basic financial
services to enable them to manage their day-to-day finances. Mobile technology
can help bridge this gap by connecting historically underserved consumers with
high-quality tools to help them improve their financial health.




Often faced with an uncertain regulatory environment and/or a highly fragmented
financial marketplace, many developers struggle with building great app
experiences while also navigating this complex financial space. That's why we
recently worked with CFSI, the authority on consumer financial health, to create
the FinTech App Development Compass, a six-step guide for building high quality
mobile apps to make financial services more accessible on Google Play.




Below, we're sharing six tips to consider when building a financial services
app. For more, read the complete FinTech App Development Compass.




Tip 1: Know Your User


Understand who your consumer is and what difference your product can make in
their day-to-day life. What are their financial needs? How can your product
improve their financial health? How does your product fit within the context of
their financial lives?




Tip 2: Focus on Access


Responsibly expand access to your product. Consider how your product can fit
seamlessly into your users' routines. Consider your users' circumstances,
including that English may not be their first language and that they may be
using older devices with limited data plans.




Tip 3: Establish and Maintain Trust


Trust is at a premium in the financial space. Make sure you are developing
mutually beneficial financial solutions that deliver clear and consistent value.
Similarly, make sure you are using the latest security tools available from the
Android platform to secure your users' data.




Tip 4: Test and Iterate

Before releasing any product to the public, make sure it has been thoroughly
tested. From a financial perspective, be sure to measure the actual impact of
your product on users over time. From a technological perspective, be sure to
leverage Google Play alpha and beta channels for distributing apps before their
public release.

Tip 5: Drive Positive User Behavior


Drive positive consumer behavior through smart design and communication.
Leverage the Android platform tools like Material Design and notifications to
steer users toward positive action or take financial action at appropriate
times.




Tip 6: Recognize the Value of Mutual Success


Remember that the best business models are win-win: If your users' financial
health improves, your company profits. Consider embedding financial impact and
technological tracking capabilities within your platform from the beginning.




For additional information, refer to the CFSI Compass Principles and get the Playbook for
Developers app to stay up-to-date with more features and best practices that
will help you grow a successful business on Google Play.

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Android Wear 2.0 is here with new hardware features!

Posted by Hoi Lam, Lead Developer Advocate, Android Wear

Today, we are releasing the final SDK for Android Wear 2.0. In this release, we have added support for the new hardware features announced yesterday. If you have not done so already, it really is time to publish your apps so as to not miss the consumer hardware launch tomorrow.

Throughout the developer preview program, you have given us a lot of constructive feedback as well as bug reports. Thank you again!

Android Wear 2.0 recap

Android Wear 2.0 is our biggest update since we launched Wear in 2014, with numerous platform and developer enhancements. Some of the highlights include:

• Material Design for Android Wear - A new system user interface and design guidelines, featuring a darker colour palette, vertical layout and visual components such as the WearableRecyclerView and WearableNavigationDrawer. We have also enhanced notifications on the watch with the new MessagingStyle rich notification style and inline actions.


• Watch Face Complications - Complications are areas of the watch face that display information other than time. Apps can supply data to supported watch faces by creating a ComplicationProviderService, and watch faces can render this data in a style that suits the watch face design.


• Standalone Android Wear apps and iOS support - Apps can now be downloaded directly to Wear devices via an on-watch Google Play Store. In addition, these apps can access the internet directly without relying on phone apps. This means that apps can now run on Android Wear devices that are paired to iOS devices.

New hardware support

The first two watches with Android Wear 2.0 give users more ways to interact with their smartwatches. In the final SDK, we have added API support for physical button locations and rotary input. At present, developers will need the new LG Watch Style or LG Watch Sport to test these new functionalities; however, we are working to add these new hardware features to the emulator. Stay tuned for updates! The SDK also includes a few other final bug fixes, such as support for more than three items in the Wearable Action Drawer.

App review changes

Now that Android Wear 2.0 is live, we'll soon update the Android Wear App Quality review process with two important changes. First, enhancing your phone app notifications for Android Wear will no longer be sufficient for passing the review. Second, it will soon be required that you upload a watch APK that's compatible with Android Wear 2.0. Only apps that pass these criteria will receive badging in Play Store on the phone and be eligible for top charts for Android Wear apps. These changes will ensure a more consistent experience for users and allow us to streamline the review process for you.

The journey doesn't stop here!

The Android Wear 2.0 developer preview lasted longer than we originally planned, but we think that the extra time has paid off in a big way. Thank you once again for your input and patience. You helped us achieve a higher quality bar than we could have achieved on our own.



We have integrated the Android Wear 2.0 Developer Preview documentation into the main Wear developer documentation site and we continue to maintain links to the factory images for the preview devices. For developer related bugs, please continue to file developer bug reports or post comments in our Android Wear Developers community.



From the Android Wear team: Thank you again for your feedback and support!

Android Things Developer Preview 2

Posted by Wayne
Piekarski, Developer Advocate for IoT

Today we are releasing Developer Preview 2 (DP2) for Android Things, bringing
new features and bug fixes to the platform. We are committed to providing
regular updates to developers, and aim to have new preview releases
approximately every 6-8 weeks. Android Things is a comprehensive solution to
building Internet of Things (IoT) products with the power of Android. Now any
Android developer can quickly build a smart device using Android APIs and Google
services, while staying highly secure with updates direct from Google. It
includes familiar tools such as Android Studio, the Android Software Development
Kit (SDK), Google Play Services, and Google Cloud Platform. Android Things
supports a System-on-Module (SoM) architecture, where a core computing module
can be initially used with development boards and then easily scaled to large
production runs with custom designs, while continuing to use the same Board
Support Package (BSP) from Google.

New features and bug fixes

Thanks to great developer feedback from our Developer Preview 1, we have now
added support for USB Audio to the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for Intel
Edison and Raspberry Pi 3. NXP Pico already contains direct support for audio on
device. We have also resolved many bugs related to Peripheral I/O (PIO). Other
feature requests such as Bluetooth support are known issues, and the team is
actively working to fix these. We have added support for the Intel Joule platform, which offers the most
computing power in our lineup to date.

Native I/O and user drivers

There are many developers who use native C or C++ code to develop IoT software,
and Android Things supports the standard Android NDK. We have now released a
library to provide native access to the Peripheral
API (PIO), so developers can easily use their existing native code. The documentation
explains the new API, and the sample provides a
demonstration of how to use it.

An important new feature that was made available with Android Things DP1 was
support for user
drivers. Developers can create a user driver in their APK, and then bind it
to the framework. For example, your driver code could read a GPIO pin and
trigger a regular Android KeyEvent, or read in an external GPS via a serial port
and feed this into the Android location APIs. This allows any application to
inject hardware events into the framework, without customizing the Linux kernel
or HAL. We maintain a repository
of user drivers for a variety of common hardware interfaces such as sensors,
buttons, and displays. Developers are also able to create their own drivers and
share them with the community.

TensorFlow for Android Things

One of the most interesting features of Android Things is the ability to easily
deploy machine learning and computer vision. We have created a highly requested
sample
that shows how to use TensorFlow on
Android Things devices. This sample demonstrates accessing the camera,
performing object recognition and image classification, and speaking out the
results using text-to-speech (TTS). An early-access TensorFlow inference library
prebuilt for ARM and x86 is provided for you to easily add TensorFlow to any
Android app with just a single line in your build.gradle file.

TensorFlow sample
identifying a dog's breed (American Staffordshire terrier) 

on a Raspberry Pi 3
with camera

Feedback

Thank you to all the developers who submitted feedback for the previous
developer preview. Please continue to send us your feedback by filing bug
reports and feature
requests, and ask any questions on stackoverflow.
To download images for Developer Preview 2, visit the Android Things download
page, and find the changes in the release
notes. You can also join Google's IoT
Developers Community on Google+, a great resource to keep up to date and
discuss ideas, with over 2900 new members.

Get ready for Google Developer Day at GDC 2017

Posted by Noah Falstein, Chief Game Designer at Google

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) kicks off on Monday, February 27th with our
annual Google
Developer Day. Join us as we demonstrate how new devices, platforms, and
tools are helping developers build successful businesses and push the limits of
mobile gaming on Android.

Expect exciting announcements, best practices, and tips covering a variety of
topics including Google Play, Daydream VR, Firebase, Cloud Platform, machine
learning, monetization, and more. In the afternoon, we'll host panels to hear
from developers first-hand about their experiences launching mobile games,
building thriving communities, and navigating the successes and challenges of
being an indie developer.

Visit our site for more info and the Google
Developer Day schedule. These events are part of the official Game
Developer's Conference, so you will need a pass to attend. For those who can't
make it in person, watch the live stream on YouTube
starting at 10am PST on Monday, February 27th.

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Fashion gets a digital upgrade with the Google Awareness API

Posted by Jeremy Brook, Group Creative Business Partner, the ZOO

Last summer,
we made the Awareness API
available to all developers through Google Play services for the first time,
providing a powerful and unified sensing platform that enables apps to be aware
of all aspects of a user's environment. By using a combination of context
signals, such as location, physical activity, weather and nearby beacons,
developers can better understand their users individually and provide more
engaging and customized mobile app experiences.

We have already seen some great implementations of the API in obvious scenarios,
such as shopping for a new home in the neighborhood or recommending a music
playlist while starting a jog. For New York Fashion Week, we explored other
creative integrations of the Awareness API and collaborated with H&M Group's
digital fashion house Ivyrevel and
its Fashion Tech Lab to bring couture into the digital age with the 'Data
Dress,' a personalized dress designed entirely based on a user's context signals.

Currently under development, the Android app specifically uses the Snapshot
API within the platform to passively monitor each user's daily activity and
lifestyle with their permission. Where do you regularly eat out for dinner or
hang out with friends? Are they more casual or formal meetups? What's the usual
weather when you're outside? After the course of a week, the user's context
signals are passed through an algorithm that creates a digitally tailored dress
design for the user to purchase.

The Android app is launching in closed alpha stage, and is currently being
tested by selected global style influencers including Ivyrevel's co-founder Kenza Zouiten. If
you want a truly 'tailored' digital experience, sign up here to participate in a future trial of the
app before the public release.

Introducing Associate Android Developer Certification by Google

Posted by JP Souchak, Program Manager



The Associate Android Developer Certification program was announced at Google I/O
2016, and launched a few months later. Since then, over 322 Android
developers spanning 61 countries have proven their competency and earned the
title of Google Certified Associate Android Developer.




To establish a professional standard for what it means to be an Associate
Android developer in the current job market, Google created this certification,
which allows us to recognize developers who have proven themselves to uphold
that standard.




We conducted a job task analysis to determine the required
competencies and content of the certification exam. Through field research
and interviews with experts, we identified the knowledge, work practices, and
essential skills expected of an Associate Android developer.




The certification process consists of a performance-based exam and an exit
interview. The certification fee includes three exam attempts. The cost for
certification is $149 USD, or 6500 INR if you reside in India. After payment,
the exam will be available for download, and you have 48 hours to complete and
submit it for grading.




In the exam, you will implement missing features and debug an Android app using
Android
Studio. If you pass, you will undergo an exit interview where, you will
answer questions about your exam and demonstrate your knowledge of Associate
Android Developer competencies.




Check out this short video for a quick overview of the Associate Android
Developer certification process:

Earning your AAD Certification signifies that you possess the skills expected of
an Associate Android developer, as determined by Google. You can showcase your
credential on your resume and display your digital badge on your social media
profiles. As a member of the AAD Alumni Community, you will also have access to
program benefits focused on increasing your visibility as a certified developer.




Test your Android development skills and earn the title of Google Certified
Associate Android Developer. Visit g.co/devcertification to get started!