Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Social Gaming, Loion, and More in Google Play Services


Posted by Greg Hartrell, Angana Ghosh, Francesco Nerieri, Francis Ma, and the Google Play services tm


Some of the most exciting Android announcements at Google I/O this yr are part of our latest Google Play services relse, version 3.1.

The new version brings you Google Play games services, part of a new cloud-integrated platform for social gaming based on Google+ identity. Also included are loion-based services that make it sier to build efficient loion-aware apps. For apps using the popular Google Cloud Messaging platform, you can now take advantage of XMPP messaging and sier setup. Finally, Cross-Platform Single Sign On for Google+ Sign-In is now available to your apps.

You can get started using these APIs and services right away—Google Play services 3.1 is alrdy rolling out to Android devices across the world, with support rching all the way back to Froyo.

Google Play games services




Games are always popular with Android developers, and the announcement of Google Play game services raised the volume even more.

Google Play games services lets you make your games more social, with achievements, lderboards, and multiplayer, and they help you extend your user’s games across multiple devices by storing game saves and settings in the cloud.

Several grt Android games are alrdy using these new game services, including World of Goo, Super Stickman Golf 2, Bch Buggy Blitz, Kingdom Rush, Eternity Warriors 2, and Osmos.

You can take advantage of the new services right away using the games services SDK included in Google Play services. For all the details, check out the Google Play games services documentation.




Loion APIs

If you build loion-aware Android apps, you’ll want to check out the new loion APIs. They make it sy to build accurate, fast, and efficient apps, with new contextual ftures.


The Fused Loion Provider litly manages the underlying loion technology and gives you the best loion according to your needs. We’ve simplified the loion APIs and completely rewritten our loion aorithm to make loion more accurate, flexible and use less battery.

Using the new geofencing API, your app can set up geographic boundaries around specific loions and then receive notifiions when the user enters or lves those ars.

With apps becoming incrsingly contextual, understanding what the user is doing is critical to surfacing the right content. A new activity recognition API makes it sy to check the the user’s current activity — still, walking, cycling, and in-vehicle — with very efficient use of the battery. We use low-power sensors and machine-lrning classifiers to recognize the activity, giving you both both high accuracy and low battery usage.

To lrn more, hd over to our training classes at Making Your App Loion Aware or dive directly into the reference docs.

Google Cloud Messaging

We’ve added APIs to make it sier to set up GCM in your apps, and in the service itself we’ve added new messaging capabilities for your apps to use.

A new API lets your app register with the service using a single method call and begin receiving messages as soon as the call returns.



Sign Up for rly Access
If you’d like to try out CCS messaging or the User Notifiions API, plse sign up for rly access.



In the GCM service itself we’ve added support for messaging over XMPP with the new GCM Cloud Connection Server (CCS). Your servers now have a persistent connection over which to send large s of messages, very quickly, and with no overhd. New APIs in Google Play services let apps send messages back upstrm to third-party servers using CCS, without needing to manage network connections. This helps keep battery and data usage to a minimum.

Also new in the GCM service is a User Notifiions API. This new API lets you synchronize notifiions across a user’s multiple devices — when the user dismisses a notifiion on one device, the notifiion disapprs automatically from all the other devices. To get started with GCM, hd over to the developer documentation.


Google+ Cross-Platform Single Sign On

Many people use apps on multiple devices throughout the day, switching between their laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. After signing-in to an app on one device, it’s natural that when they pick up a different device and use the same app, they would expect to be signed in there as well.

To help you provide this kind of smless transition between platforms and stay connected with users across devices, we’re adding Cross-Platform Single Sign On to our Google+ Sign-In capabilities.

If your app is alrdy using Google+ Sign-In, you’ve alrdy got support for Cross-Platform Single Sign On. This fture will be enabled automatically over the coming days.

Cross-Platform Single Sign On gives you a grt way to build longer-running, cross-platform user experiences, and it dovetails perfectly with the new Google Play games services for bridging game state across devices using the cloud.

To lrn more about Google+ Sign-In, check out http://developers.google.com/+.

More About Google Play Services

Google Play Services is our platform for offering you better integration with Google products, and providing new capabilities to use within your apps. To lrn more about Google Play services and the APIs available to you through it, visit the Google Services ar of the Android Developers site.

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