Phones are our most personal devices we bring with us everywhere, but until now it's been hard for apps to adjust their experience to a user's continually changing environment and activity. We've heard from developer after developer that they're spending valuable engineering time to combine various signals like location and sensor data just to determine when the user has started or ended an activity like walking or driving.Even worse, when apps are independently and continuously checking for changes in user activity, battery life suffers. That's why today, we're excited to make the Activity Recognition Transition API available to all Android developers - a simple API that does all the processing for you and just tells you what you actually care about: when a user's activity has changed....
QuickBooks Self-Employed helps self-employed workers maximize their deductions at tax time by importing transactions and automatically tracking car mileage. Before the Transition API, we created our own solution to track mileage that combined GPS, phone sensors, and other metadata, but due to the wide variability in Android devices, our algorithm wasn't 100% accurate and some users reported missing or incomplete trips. We were able to build a proof-of-concept using the Transition API in a matter of days and it has now replaced our existing solution, offering a more reliable solution that also reduced our battery consumption. The Transition API frees us up to focus our efforts on being the best possible tax solution," say Pranay Airan and Mithun Mahadevan from Intuit.
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Google Play Instant is still in closed beta and we look forward to opening it more broadly later this year. It provides a collection of extensions to the instant apps framework that better support the needs of game developers; including a higher APK size limit to 10MB, progressive download support for executable code and game assets, and support for NDK and game engines using existing tool chains. We're also working with popular game development platform Unity, and others including Cocos, to add IDE support making it easy for developers to build instant apps. Developers can sign up for more information about Google Play Instant as it becomes available.
