Book Title	Description
The Cat in the Hat	Classic Dr. Seuss tale transformed into an interactive learning adventure with kindergarten-level activities
Fairy Tales ~ Bedtime Stories	Beloved fairy tales come alive with interactive scenes and customizable reading modes
Nighty Night Forest	Help seven adorable forest animals prepare for bedtime in this charming 3D-2D hybrid world
Little Stories: Bedtime Books	Make your child the star with personalized tales featuring stunning illustrations and voice recording
Even Monsters Get Sick	Heartwarming story about friendship between a boy and his under-the-weather monster companion
Little Fox Music Box	Sing along to timeless children’s tunes brought to life with charming paper cutout animations
The Heart and the Bottle	Touching tale of curiosity and emotion, beautifully blending traditional and digital art
Mr. Wolf and the Ginger Cupcakes	Traditional fairy tale gets a delicious twist with stunning watercolor and pencil artwork
Cinderella	Timeless princess story reimagined with modern animations and enchanting music
Monster Games on StoryBots	Spooky castle adventure where your child becomes part of the bold, playful illustrations

video content

Start building for the next generation of Samsung Galaxy devices

Android Developers — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 21:11:41 +0000

Posted by J. Eason – Director, Product Management

The next generation of foldable and wearable devices from Samsung has arrived. Yesterday at Galaxy Unpacked, Samsung introduced the new Galaxy Z Fold7, Galaxy Z Flip7, and Galaxy Watch8 series. For Android developers, these devices represent an exciting new opportunity to create engaging and adaptive experiences that reach even more users on their favorite screens.

With new advancements in adaptive development and the launch of Wear OS 6, it has never been a better time to build for the expanding Android device ecosystem. Learn more about what these new devices mean for you and how you can get started.

Unfold your app’s adaptive potential on Samsung’s newest Galaxy devices

The launch of the Galaxy Z Fold7 and Z Flip7 on Android 16 means users are about to experience your app in more dynamic and versatile ways than before. This creates an opportunity to captivate them with experiences that adaptively respond to every fold and flip. And preparing your app for these features is easier than you think. Building adaptive apps isn’t just about rewriting your code, but about making strategic enhancements that ensure a seamless experience across screens.

Google and Samsung have collaborated to bring a more seamless and powerful desktop windowing experience to large screen devices and phones with connected displays in Android 16 across the Android ecosystem. These advancements will enhance Samsung DeX, starting with the new Galaxy Z Fold7 and Z Flip7, and also extend to the wider Android ecosystem.

To help you meet this moment, we’ve built a foundation of development tools to simplify creating compelling adaptive experiences. Create adaptive layouts that reflow automatically with the Compose Adaptive Layouts library and guide users seamlessly across panes with Jetpack Navigation 3. Make smarter top-level layout decisions using the newly expanded Window Size Classes. Then, iterate and validate your design in Android Studio, from visualizing your UI with Compose Previews to generating robust tests with natural language using Journeys with Gemini.

Build for a more personal and expressive era with Wear OS 6

The next chapter for wearables begins with the new Samsung Galaxy Watch8 series becoming the first device to feature Wear OS 6, the most power-efficient version of our wearable platform yet. This update is focused on giving you the tools to create more personal experiences without compromising on battery life. With version 4 of the Watch Face Format, you can unlock new creative possibilities like letting users customize their watch faces by selecting their own photos or adding fluid transitions to the display. And, to give you more flexibility in distribution, the Watch Face Push API allows you to create and manage your own watch face marketplace.

Beyond the watch face, you can provide a streamlined experience to users by embracing an improved always-on display and adding passkey support to your app with the Credential Manager API, which is now available on Wear OS.

Check out the latest changes to get started and test your app for compatibility using the Wear OS 6 emulator.

Get started building across screens, from foldables to wearables

With these new devices from Samsung, there are more reasons than ever to build experiences that excite users on their favorite Android screens. From building fully adaptive apps for foldables to creating more personal experiences on Wear OS, the tools are in your hands to create for the future of Android.

Explore all the resources you’ll need to build adaptive experiences at developer.android.com/adaptive-apps. And, start building for Wear OS today by checking out developer.android.com/wear and visiting the Wear OS gallery for inspiration.

Transition to using 16 KB page sizes for Android apps and games using Android Studio

Android Developers — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 21:00:00 +0000

Posted by Mayank Jain – Product Manager and Jomo Fisher – Software Engineer

Get ready to upgrade your app's performance as Android embraces 16 KB memory page sizes

Android’s transition to 16 KB Page size

Traditionally, Android has operated with the 4 KB memory page size. However many ARM CPUs (the most common processors for Android phones) support the larger 16 KB page size, offering improved performance gains. With Android 15, the Android operating system is page-size-agnostic, allowing devices to run efficiently with either 4 KB or 16 KB page size.

Starting November 1st, 2025, all new apps and app updates that use native C/C++ code targeting Android 15+ devices submitted to Google Play must support 16 KB page sizes. This is a crucial step towards ensuring your app delivers the best possible performance on the latest Android hardware. Apps without native C/C++ code or dependencies, that just use the Kotlin and Java programming languages, are already compatible, but if you're using native code, now is the time to act.

This transition to larger 16 KB page sizes translates directly into a better user experience. Devices configured with 16 KB page size can see an overall performance boost of 5-10%. This means faster app launch times (up to 30% for some apps, 3.16% on average), improved battery usage (4.56% reduction in power draw), quicker camera starts (4.48-6.60% faster), and even speedier system boot-ups (around 0.8 seconds faster). While there is a marginal increase in memory use, a faster reclaim path is worth it.

The native code challenge – and how Android Studio equips you

If your app uses native C/C++ code from the Android NDK or relies on SDKs that do, you'll need to recompile and potentially adjust your code for 16 KB compatibility. The good news? Once your application is updated for the 16 KB page size, the same application binary can run seamlessly on both 4 KB and 16 KB devices.

This table describes who needs to transition and recompile their apps

We’ve created several Android Studio tools and guides that can help you prepare for migrating to using 16 KB page size.

Detect compatibility issues

APK Analyzer: Easily identify if your app contains native libraries by checking for .so files in the lib folder. The APK Analyzer can also visually indicate your app's 16 KB compatibility. You can then determine and update libraries as needed for 16 KB compliance.

Alignment Checks: Android Studio also provides warnings if your prebuilt libraries or APKs are not 16 KB compliant. You should then use the APK Analyzer tool to review which libraries need to be updated or if any code changes are required. If you want to detect the 16 KB page size compatibility checks in your CI (continuous integration) pipeline, you can leverage scripts and command line tools.

Lint in Android Studio now also highlights the native libraries which are not 16 KB aligned.

Build with 16 KB alignment

Tools Updates: Rebuild your native code with 16 KB alignment. Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) version 8.5.1 or higher automatically enables 16 KB alignment by default (during packaging) for uncompressed shared libraries. Similarly, Android NDK r28 and higher compile 16 KB-aligned by default. If you depend on other native SDK’s, they also need to be 16 KB aligned. You might need to reach out to the SDK developer to request a 16 KB compliant SDK.

Fix code for page-size agnosticism

Eliminate Hardcoded Assumptions: Identify and remove any hardcoded dependencies on PAGE_SIZE or assumptions that the page size is 4 KB (e.g., 4096). Instead, use getpagesize() or sysconf(_SC_PAGESIZE) to query the actual page size at runtime.

Test in a 16 KB environment

Android Emulator Support: Android Studio offers a 16 KB emulator target (for both arm64 and x86_64) directly in the Android Studio SDK Manager, allowing you to test your applications before uploading to Google Play.

On-Device Testing: For compatible devices like Pixel 8 and 8 Pro onwards (starting with Android 15 QPR1), a new developer option allows you to switch between 4 KB and 16 KB page sizes for real-device testing. You can verify the page size using adb shell getconf PAGE_SIZE.

Don't wait – prepare your apps today

Leverage Android Studio’s powerful tools to detect issues, build compatible binaries, fix your code, and thoroughly test your app for the new 16 KB memory page sizes. By doing so, you'll ensure an improved end user experience and contribute to a more performant Android ecosystem.

As always, your feedback is important to us – check known issues, report bugs, suggest improvements, and be part of our vibrant community on LinkedIn, Medium, YouTube, or X.

Evolving Android’s early-access programs: Introducing the Canary channel

Android Developers — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 18:14:23 +0000

Posted by Dan Galpin – Android Developer Relations

To better support you and provide earlier, more consistent access to in-development features, we are announcing a significant evolution in our pre-release program. Moving forward, the Android platform will have a Canary release channel, which will replace the previous developer preview program. This Canary release channel will function alongside the existing beta program.

This change is designed to provide a more streamlined and continuous opportunity for you to try out new platform capabilities and provide feedback throughout the entire year, not just in the early months of a new release cycle.

Limitations of the previous developer preview model

The Developer Preview program has been a critical part of our release cycle, but its structure had inherent limitations:

Developer Previews were not tied to a release channel, and had to be manually flashed to devices every time the cycle would restart.

Because previews were tied to the next designated Android release, they were only available during the earliest part of the cycle. Once a platform version reached the Beta stage, the preview track would end, creating a gap where features that were promising but not yet ready for Beta had no official channel for feedback.

A continuous flow of features with the Canary channel

The new Android platform Canary channel addresses these challenges directly. By flashing your supported Pixel device to the Canary release channel, you can now receive a continuous, rolling stream of the latest platform builds via over-the-air (OTA) updates.

You can try out and provide input on new features and planned behavior changes in their earliest stages. These changes may not always make it into a stable Android release.

The Canary release channel will run in parallel with the beta program. The beta program remains the way for you to try a more polished set of likely soon-to-be-released features.

You can use the Canary builds with your CI to see if any of our in-development features cause unexpected problems with your app, maximizing the time we have to address your concerns.

Who should use the Canary channel?

The Canary channel is intended for developers that want to explore and test with the earliest pre-release Android APIs and potential behavior changes. Builds from the Canary channel will have passed our automated tests as well as experienced a short test cycle with internal users. You should expect bugs and breaking changes. These bleeding-edge builds will not be the best choice for someone to use as their primary or only device.

The existing beta channel will remain the primary way for you to make sure that your apps are both compatible with and take advantage of upcoming platform features.

Getting started and providing feedback

You can use the Android Flash Tool to get the most recent Canary build onto your supported Pixel device. Once flashed, you should expect OTA updates for the latest Canary builds as they become available. To exit the channel, flash a Beta or Public build to your device. This will require a data partition wipe.

Canary releases will be available on the Android Emulator through the Device Manager in Android Studio (currently, just in the Android Studio Canary channel), and Canary SDKs will be available for you to develop against through the SDK Manager.

Since most behavior changes require targeting a release, you can target Canary releases the way you can target any other platform SDK version, or use the Compatibility Framework with supported features to enable behavior changes in your apps.

Feedback is a critical component of this new program, so please file feature feedback and bug reports on your Canary experience through the Google Issue Tracker.

By transitioning to a true Canary channel, we aim to create a more transparent, collaborative, and efficient development process, giving you the seamless access you need to prepare for the future of Android.

Level up your game: Google Play's Indie Games Fund in Latin America returns for its 4th year

Android Developers — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Posted by Daniel Trócoli – Google Play Partnerships

We're thrilled to announce the return of Google Play's Indie Games Fund (IGF) in Latin America for its fourth consecutive year! This year, we're once again committing $2 million to empower another 10 indie game studios across the region. With this latest round of funding, our total investment in Latin American indie games will reach an impressive $8 million USD.

Since its inception, the IGF has been a cornerstone of our commitment to fostering growth for developers of all sizes on Google Play. We've seen firsthand the transformative impact this support has had, enabling studios to expand their teams, refine their creations, and reach new audiences globally.

What's in store for the Indie Games Fund in 2025?

Just like in previous years, selected small game studios based in Latin America will receive a share of the $2 million fund, along with support from the Google Play team.

As Vish Game Studio, a previously selected studio, shared: "The IGF was a pivotal moment for our studio, boosting us to the next level and helping us form lasting connections." We believe in fostering these kinds of pivotal moments for all our selected studios.

The program is open to indie game developers who have already launched a game, whether it's on Google Play, another mobile platform, PC, or console. Each selected recipient will receive between $150,000 and $200,000 to help them elevate their game and realize their full potential.

Check out all eligibility criteria and apply now! Applications will close at 12:00 PM BRT on July 31, 2025. To give your application the best chance, remember that priority will be given to applications received by 12:00 PM BRT on July 15, 2025.

Get ready for the next generation of gameplay powered by Play Games Services

Android Developers — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 21:15:02 +0000

Posted by Chris Wilk – Group Product Manager, Games on Google Play

To captivate players and grow your game, you need tools that enhance discovery and retention. Play Games Services (PGS) is your key to unlocking a suite of services that connect you with over 2 billion monthly active players. PGS empowers you to drive engagement through features like achievements and increase retention with promotions tailored to each gameplay progress. These tools are designed to help you deliver relevant and compelling content that keeps players coming back.

We are continuously evolving gaming on Play, and this year, we're introducing more PGS-powered experiences to give you deeper player insights and greater visibility in the Play Store. To access these latest advancements and ensure continued functionality, you must migrate from PGS v1 to PGS v2 by May 2026. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new:

Drive discovery and engagement by rewarding gameplay progress

We’re fundamentally transforming how achievements work in the Play Store, making them a key driver for a great gaming experience. Now deeply embedded across the store, achievements are easily discoverable via search filters and game detail pages, and further drive engagement when offered with Play Points.

At a minimum, you should have at least 15 achievements spread across the lifetime of the game, in the format of incremental achievements to show progress. Games that enable players to earn at least 5 achievements in the first 2 hours of gameplay are most successful in driving deeper engagement^*.

The most engaging titles offer 40 or more achievements with diverse types of goals including leveling up characters, game progression, hidden surprises, or even failed attempts. To help you get the most out of achievements, we’ve made it easier to create achievements with bulk configuration in Play Console.

For eligible titles^*, Play activates quests to reward players for completing achievements - for example with Play Points. Supercell activated quests for Hay Day, leading to an average 177% uplift in installs^*. You can tailor your quests to achieve specific campaign objectives, whether it's attracting high-value players or driving spend through repeated engagement, all while making it easy to jump back into your game.

Hay Day boosted new installs with achievement-based quests

Increase retention with tailored promotions

Promotional content is a vital tool for you to highlight new events, major content updates, and exciting offers within your game. It turns Play into a direct marketing channel to re-engage with your players. We've enhanced audience targeting capabilities so you can tailor your content to reach and convert the most relevant players.

By integrating PGS, you can use the Play Grouping API to create custom segments based on gameplay context^*. Using this feature, Kabam launched promotional content to custom audiences for Marvel Contest of Champions, resulting in a 4x increase in lapsed user engagement^*.

Marvel Contest of Champions increased retention with targeted promotional content

Start implementing PGS features today

PGS is designed to make the sign-in experience more seamless for players, automatically syncing their progress and identity across Android devices. With a single tap, they can pick up where they left off or start a new game from any screen. Whether you use your own sign-in solution, services from third parties, or a combination of both, we've made it easier to integrate Play Games Services with the Recall API.

To ensure a consistent sign-in experience for all players, we’re phasing out PGS v1.

All games currently using PGS v1 must migrate to PGS v2 by May 2026. After this date, you will no longer be able to publish or update games that use the v1 SDK.

Below you'll find the timeline to plan your migration:

Migration guide
Migration Overview Migrate to Play Games Services v2 (Java or Kotlin) Migrate to Play Games Services v2 (Unity)
May 2025	As announced at I/O, new apps using PGS v1 can no longer be published. While existing apps can release updates with v1 and the APIs are still functional, you’ll need to migrate by May 2026, and APIs will be fully shut down in 2028.
May 2026	APIs are still functional for users, but are no longer included in the SDK. New app versions compiled with the most recent SDK would fail in the build process if your code still uses the removed APIs. If your app still relies on any of these APIs, you should migrate to PGS v2 as soon as possible.
Q3 2028	APIs are no longer functional and will fail when a request is sent by an app.

Looking ahead, more opportunities powered by PGS

Coming soon, players will be able to generate unique, AI-powered avatars within their profiles – creating fun, diverse representations of their gaming selves. With PGS integration, developers can allow players to carry over their avatar within the game. This enables players to showcase their gaming identity across the entire gameplay experience, creating an even stronger motivation to re-engage with your game.

Gen AI avatar profiles create more player-centric experiences

PGS is the foundational tool for maximizing your business growth on Play, enabling you to tailor your content for each player and access the latest gameplay innovations on the platform. Stay tuned for more PGS features coming this year to provide an even richer player experience.

^* To be eligible, the title must participate in Play Points, integrate Play Games Services v2, and have achievements configured in Play Console.

^* Data source from partner. Average incremental installs over a 14-day period.

^* Data source from partner.

^* The Play Grouping API provides strong measures to protect privacy for end users, including user-visible notification when the API is first used, and opt-out options through My Activity.

Top 3 updates for Android developer productivity at Google I/O ‘25

Android Developers — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 18:39:43 +0000

Posted by Meghan Mehta – Android Developer Relations Engineer

#1 Agentic AI is available for Gemini in Android Studio

Gemini in Android Studio is the AI-powered coding companion that makes you more productive at every stage of the dev lifecycle. At Google I/O 2025 we previewed new agentic AI experiences: Journeys for Android Studio and Version Upgrade Agent. These innovations make it easier for you to build and test code. We also announced Agent Mode, which was designed to handle complex, multi-stage development tasks that go beyond typical AI assistant capabilities, invoking multiple tools to accomplish tasks on your behalf. We’re excited to see how you leverage these agentic AI experiences which are now available in the latest preview version of Android Studio on the canary release channel.

You can also use Gemini to automatically generate Jetpack Compose previews, as well as transform UI code using natural language, saving you time and effort. Give Gemini more context by attaching images and project files to your prompts, so you can get more relevant responses. And if you’re looking for enterprise-grade privacy and security features backed by Google Cloud, Gemini in Android Studio for businesses is now available. Developers and admins can unlock these features and benefits by subscribing to Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise editions.

#2 Build better apps faster with the latest stable release of Jetpack Compose

Compose is our recommended UI toolkit for Android development, used by over 60% of the top 1K apps on Google Play. We released a new version of our Jetpack Navigation library: Navigation 3, which has been rebuilt from the ground up to give you more flexibility and control over your implementation. We unveiled the new Material 3 Expressive update which provides tools to enhance your product's appeal by harnessing emotional UX, making it more engaging, intuitive, and desirable for your users. The latest stable Bill of Materials (BOM) release for Compose adds new features such as autofill support, auto-sizing text, visibility tracking, animate bounds modifier, accessibility checks in tests, and more! This release also includes significant rewrites and improvements to multiple sub-systems including semantics, focus and text optimizations.

These optimizations are available to you with no code changes other than upgrading your Compose dependency. If you’re looking to try out new Compose functionality, the alpha BOM offers new features that we're working on including pausable composition, updates to LazyLayout prefetch, context menus, and others. Finally, we've added Compose support to CameraX and Media3, making it easier to integrate camera capture and video playback into your UI with Compose idiomatic components.

#3 The new Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) shared module template helps you share business logic

KMP enables teams to deliver quality Android and iOS apps with less development time. The KMP ecosystem continues to grow: last year alone, over 900 new KMP libraries were published. At Google I/O we released a new Android Studio KMP shared module template to help you craft and manage business logic, updated Jetpack libraries and new codelabs (Getting started with Kotlin Multiplatform and Migrating your Room database to KMP) to help you get started with KMP. We also shared additional announcements at KotlinConf.

Learn more about what we announced at Google I/O 2025 to help you build better apps, faster.

Top announcements to know from Google Play at I/O ‘25

Android Developers — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 17:18:18 +0000

Posted by Raghavendra Hareesh Pottamsetty – Google Play Developer and Monetization Lead

At Google Play, we're dedicated to helping people discover experiences they'll love, while empowering developers like you to bring your ideas to life and build successful businesses. This year, Google I/O was packed with exciting announcements designed to do just that. For a comprehensive overview of everything we shared, be sure to check out our blog post recapping What's new in Google Play.

Today, we'll dive specifically into the latest updates designed to help you streamline your subscriptions offerings and maximize your revenue on Play. Get a quick overview of these updates in our video below, or read on for more details.

#1: Subscriptions with add-ons: Streamlining subscriptions for you and your users

We're excited to announce multi-product checkout for subscriptions, a new feature designed to streamline your purchase flow and offer a more unified experience for both you and your users. This enhancement allows you to sell subscription add-ons right alongside your base subscriptions, all while maintaining a single, aligned payment schedule.

The result? A simplified user experience with just one price and one transaction, giving you more control over how your subscribers upgrade, downgrade, or manage their add-ons. Learn more about how to create add-ons.

You can now sell base subscriptions and add-ons together in a single, streamlined transaction

#2: Showcasing benefits in more places across Play: Increasing visibility and value

We're also making it easier for you to retain more of your subscribers by showcasing subscription benefits in more key areas across Play. This includes the Subscriptions Center, within reminder emails, and even during the purchase and cancellation processes. This increased visibility has already proved effective, reducing voluntary churn by 2%. To take advantage of this powerful new capability, be sure to enter your subscription benefits details in Play Console.

To help reduce voluntary churn, we’re showcasing your subscriptions benefits across Play

#3: New grace period and account hold duration: Decreasing involuntary churn

Another way we’re helping you maximize your revenue is by extending grace periods and account hold durations to tackle unintended subscription losses, which often occur when payment methods unexpectedly decline.

Now, you can customize both the grace period (when users retain access while renewal is attempted) and the account hold period (when access is suspended). You can set a grace period of up to 30 days and an account hold period of up to 60 days. However, the total combined recovery period (grace period + account hold) cannot exceed 60 days.

This means instead of an immediate cancellation, your users have a longer window to update their payment information. Developers who've already extended their decline recovery period—from 30 to 60 days—have seen impressive results, with an average 10% reduction in involuntary churn for renewals. Ready to see these results for yourself? Adjust your grace period and account hold durations in Play Console today.

Developers who extend their decline recovery period see an average 10% reduction in involuntary churn

But that’s not all. We’re constantly investing in ways to help you optimize conversion throughout the entire buyer lifecycle. This includes boosting purchase-readiness by prompting users to set up payment methods and verification right from device setup, and we've integrated these prompts into highly visible areas like the Play and Google account menus. Beyond that, we're continuously enabling payments in more markets and expanding payment options. Our AI models are even working to optimize in-app transactions by suggesting the right payment method at the right time, and we're bringing buyers back with effective cart abandonment reminders.

That’s it for our top announcements from Google I/O 2025, but there’s so many more updates to discover from this year’s event. Check out What's new in Google Play to learn more, and to dive deeper into the session details, view the Google Play I/O playlist for all the announcements.

Fresh Resources for Web Designers and Developers (June 2025)

Thoriq Firdaus — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 13:00:17 +0000

It’s time again to share some cool resources and tools for our fellow developers. There are so many cool tools out there to help you build faster, write better code, and stay organized.

In this post, we’ve picked some handy open-source tools made for developers like you, whether you’re working with Tailwind, writing notes, learning DevOps, or building with AI. These tools are simple to try, fun to explore, and can make your coding life a lot easier.

So without further ado, let’s jump in to see the full list.

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Click Here for More Resources

Check out our complete collection of hand-picked tools for designers and developers.

PrismPHP

PrismPHP is a Laravel package that makes it easy to add AI features to your app using LLMs. It gives developers a simple and consistent way to generate text and work with AI in Laravel. You can use it to build smart features like a to-do app where users manage tasks through natural language. PrismPHP supports services like OpenAI, DeepSeek, Gemini, Groq, and even AWS Bedrock.

Luma

Luma is a deployment tool that allows you to ship Docker containers to their own servers with zero downtime. It supports blue-green deployments, automatic SSL via Let’s Encrypt, health checks, rollbacks, and multi-server setups. Configured with a simple YAML file, Luma works with both apps and services, giving developers full control without vendor lock-in. It’s built with TypeScript and Go, and can be installed as an npm package.

Crawlee

Crawlee is a web scraping and browser automation library for JavaScript and Python. It supports both HTTP and headless browser crawling, handles proxies, sessions, and retries, and includes a CLI, queue management, and pluggable storage. Designed to avoid bot detection, it’s great for scraping dynamic sites, APIs, and files.

FairPM

FAIR Package Manager is an open-source project backed by the Linux Foundation that promotes decentralized, federated software distribution. It includes a WordPress plugin to bypass centralized services, a protocol spec, and a mini-repo plugin to self-host packages. The goal is to give developers more control over how software is shared and installed, especially within WordPress and similar ecosystems.

Google Stitch

Stitch is a free AI tool from Google that allows you to turn text or image prompts into web and mobile UI designs within minutes. It is powered by Gemini 2.5 Pro. You can customize themes, refine designs via chat, and export code or send layouts to Figma. This is a great tool for quickly generating UI mockups and prototypes, especially for developers and designers looking to streamline their workflow.

Google AIStudio

Google AI Studio is a free tool that allows you to quickly build and test AI features using Gemini, Google’s powerful new AI model. It supports text, images, video, and code, and connects with Google Cloud tools to make it easy to fine-tune and launch your own AI apps.

FileKey

Filekey is a tool that allows you to encrypt and share files securely using passkeys. It works fully offline and keeps your data private with zero-knowledge encryption. You can use passkeys stored in tools like iCloud Keychain or Yubikey to lock and unlock your files safely.

AG UI

AG-UI is a lightweight protocol that helps AI agents and front-end apps to connect in real time, making it easier to handle live updates, user input, and collaboration smoothly. It supports different communication methods including WebSockets and Server-Sent Events, and it works with popular tools like React and Vue.

What’s new in Web UI

Google has announced some new features that are coming to the browser. These new features will allow you to build stunning, responsive experiences with just a few lines of code. You can finally remove thousands of lines of JavaScript as you can achieve the same results with with just a few lines of clean, declarative HTML and CSS. Check out the video to learn more about these new features.

TinyLLM

TinyLLM is a project-based course that will teach you how to serve Qwen2-7B LLM from scratch. Across three weeks, you’ll start with basic Python, move to custom C++/Metal optimizations, and end with batching for speed, all without high-level libraries. It’s built for macOS with the Apple Silicon. A perfect source for systems engineers and developers who want to understand the inner workings of LLMs.

FastMCP

FastMCP is a lightweight Python framework for building MCP servers and tools. It abstracts the protocol complexity so that you can focus on your logic using the decorators. It supports various transports and includes features like proxying and auth. Visit https://gofastmcp.com to get started.

Dozzle

Dozzle is a real-time, self-hosted Docker log viewer with a clean web UI. It’s fast, lightweight, and requires no log storage. It also includes features like search, split views, live stats, multi-user auth, and support Swarm mode and Kubernetes. It comes as just a 7 MB Docker container and can be run with a single command.

JSON Schema to TypeScript

json-schema-to-typescript is a tool that allows you to convert JSON Schema to TypeScript types. It also supports YAML input, beside JSON, it can smartly handle references, and gives you clean, customizable .d.ts output. A handy tool for keeping your TypeScript projects type-safe and in sync with your JSON data.

DevOps Exercise

DevOps Exercise is a massive collection of 2600+ questions and challenges covering everything from Linux, Docker, and Kubernetes to AWS, Terraform, and CI/CD. It includes hands-on scenarios, project ideas, and practical exercises to help you build a strong DevOps foundation. Perfect for DevOps interview prep or leveling up your real-world skills.

Tailwind Animate

tailwind-animate is a modern Tailwind CSS plugin for smooth, utility-based animations built for Tailwind v4.0. It provides a CSS-first architecture by including a CSS file with custom utilities for animations as well as some composable utility classes for duration, delay, and more. A handy library if you want to add animations to your Tailwind projects without writing custom CSS.

Goose

Goose is an open-source AI tool that goes beyond code suggestions. It can automate full development tasks like debugging, testing, and deployment. It runs locally, supports any LLM or API via MCP, and is fully extensible. A great tool for any developers who want to automate their workflows and improve productivity.

Memos

Memos is a privacy-first, self-hosted note-taking app for individuals and teams. It supports Markdown, letting you write notes in a simple, readable format. Built with Go and React, Memos stores all data locally, no cloud storage, and no tracking. It’s a perfect solution if you want to keep their notes private and secure, or if you want to see how to build a note-taking app with modern web technologies with Go and React.

Tailwind Merge

tailwind-merge is a small JavaScript tool that helps you combine Tailwind CSS class names and avoid conflicting CSS classes. It’s useful when you have dynamic or conditional classes, like in React apps. It works with the latest Tailwind versions, supports TypeScript, and is fast and lightweight.

TailwindCSS for React Aria Components

tailwindcss-react-aria-components is a Tailwind CSS plugin that makes it easier to style React Aria components. It gives you shorter class names for states like selected or disabled, so you don’t have to write long data selectors. It also adds autocomplete support in editors, making styling faster and more convenient. It works with both Tailwind v3 and v4 and helps keep your code clean while following accessibility best practices.

WordPress MCP

WordPress MCP is a plugin by Automattic that exposes WordPress features via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing AI models and tools to interact with WordPress programmatically. A handy tool if you’re looking to build AI-powered apps that connects to WordPress to create, manage, or update content, and more.

The post Fresh Resources for Web Designers and Developers (June 2025) appeared first on Hongkiat.

How Mecha BREAK is driving PC-only growth on Google Play Games

Android Developers — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 17:19:15 +0000

Posted by Kosuke Suzuki – Director, Games on Google Play

On July 1, Amazing Seasun Games is set to unveil its highly anticipated action shooting game - Mecha BREAK, with a multiplatform launch across PC and Console. A key to their PC growth strategy is Google Play Games on PC, enabling the team to build excitement with a pre-registration campaign, maximize revenue with PC earnback, and ensure a secure, top-tier experience on PC.

Building momentum with pre-registration

With a legacy of creating high-quality games since 1995, Amazing Seasun Games has already seen Mecha BREAK attract over 3.5 million players during the last beta test. To build on this momentum, the studio is bringing their game to Google Play Games on PC to open pre-registration and connect with its massive player audience.

"We were excited to launch on Google Play Games on PC. We want to make sure all players can enjoy the Mecha BREAK experience worldwide."
- Kris Kwok, Executive Producer of Mecha BREAK and CEO of Amazing Seasun Games

Mecha BREAK pre-registration on Google Play Games on PC homepage

Accelerating growth with the Native PC program

Mecha BREAK's launch strategy includes leveraging the native PC earnback, a program that gives native PC developers the opportunity to unlock up to 15% in additional earnback.

Beyond earnback, the program offers comprehensive support for PC game development, distribution, and growth. Developers can manage PC builds in Play Console, simplifying the process of packaging PC versions, configuring releases, and managing store listings. Now, you can also view PC-specific sales reports, providing a more precise analysis of your game's financial performance.

Delivering a secure and high quality PC experience

Mecha BREAK is designed to deliver an intense and high-fidelity experience on PC. Built on a cutting-edge, proprietary 3D engine, the game offers players three unique modes of fast-paced combat on land and in the air.

Diverse combat styles: Engage in six-on-six hero battles, three-on-three matches, or the unique PvPvE extraction mode "Mashmak".

Free customization options: Create personalized characters with a vast array of colors, patterns and gameplay styles, from close-quarters brawlers to long-range tactical units.

Mecha BREAK offers a high-fidelity experience on PC

The decision to integrate with Google Play Games on PC was driven by the platform's robust security infrastructure, including tools such as Play Integrity API, supporting large-scale global games like Mecha BREAK.

"Mecha BREAK’s multiplayer setting made Google Play Games a strong choice, as we expect exceptional operational stability and performance. The platform also offers advanced malware protection and anti-cheat capabilities."
- Kris Kwok, Executive Producer of Mecha BREAK and CEO of Amazing Seasun Games

Bring your game to Google Play Games on PC

This year, the native PC program is open to all PC games, including PC-only titles. If you're ready to expand your game's reach and accelerate its growth, learn more about the eligibility requirements and how to join the program today.

Agentic AI takes Gemini in Android Studio to the next level

Android Developers — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 17:00:00 +0000

Posted by Sandhya Mohan – Product Manager, and Jose Alcérreca – Developer Relations Engineer

Software development is undergoing a significant evolution, moving beyond reactive assistants to intelligent agents. These agents don't just offer suggestions; they can create execution plans, utilize external tools, and make complex, multi-file changes. This results in a more capable AI that can iteratively solve challenging problems, fundamentally changing how developers work.

At Google I/O 2025, we offered a glimpse into our work on agentic AI in Android Studio, the integrated development environment (IDE) focused on Android development. We showcased that by combining agentic AI with the built-in portfolio of tools inside of Android Studio, the IDE is able to assist you in developing Android apps in ways that were never possible before. We are now incredibly excited to announce the next frontier in Android development with the availability of 'Agent Mode' for Gemini in Android Studio.

These features are available in the latest Android Studio Narwhal Feature Drop Canary release, and will be rolled out to business tier subscribers in the coming days. As with all new Android Studio features, we invite developers to provide feedback to direct our development efforts and ensure we are creating the tools you need to build better apps, faster.

Agent Mode

Gemini in Android Studio's Agent Mode is a new experimental capability designed to handle complex development tasks that go beyond what you can experience by just chatting with Gemini.

With Agent Mode, you can describe a complex goal in natural language — from generating unit tests to complex refactors — and the agent formulates an execution plan that can span multiple files in your project and executes under your direction. Agent Mode uses a range of IDE tools for reading and modifying code, building the project, searching the codebase and more to help Gemini complete complex tasks from start to finish with minimal oversight from you.

To use Agent Mode, click Gemini in the sidebar, then select the Agent tab, and describe a task you'd like the agent to perform. Some examples of tasks you can try in Agent Mode include:

Build my project and fix any errors
Extract any hardcoded strings used across my project and migrate to strings.xml
Add support for dark mode to my application
Given an attached screenshot, implement a new screen in my application using Material 3

The agent then suggests edits and iteratively fixes bugs to complete tasks. You can review, accept, or reject the proposed changes along the way, and ask the agent to iterate on your feedback.

Gemini breaks tasks down into a plan with simple steps. It also shows the list of IDE tools it needs to complete each step.

While powerful, you are firmly in control, with the ability to review, refine and guide the agent’s output at every step. When the agent proposes code changes, you can choose to accept or reject them.

The Agent waits for the developer to approve or reject a change.

Additionally, you can enable “Auto-approve” if you are feeling lucky

Top 3 things to know for AI on Android at Google I/O ‘25

Android Developers — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 16:59:48 +0000

Posted by Kateryna Semenova – Sr. Developer Relations Engineer

AI is reshaping how users interact with their favorite apps, opening new avenues for developers to create intelligent experiences. At Google I/O, we showcased how Android is making it easier than ever for you to build smart, personalized and creative apps. And we’re committed to providing you with the tools needed to innovate across the full development stack in this evolving landscape.

This year, we focused on making AI accessible across the spectrum, from on-device processing to cloud-powered capabilities. Here are the top 3 announcements you need to know for building with AI on Android from Google I/O ‘25:

#1 Leverage the efficiency of Gemini Nano for on-device AI experiences

For on-device AI, we announced a new set of ML Kit GenAI APIs powered by Gemini Nano, our most efficient and compact model designed and optimized for running directly on mobile devices. These APIs provide high-level, easy integration for common tasks including text summarization, proofreading, rewriting content in different styles, and generating image description. Building on-device offers significant benefits such as local data processing and offline availability at no additional cost for inference. To start integrating these solutions explore the ML Kit GenAI documentation, the sample on GitHub and watch the "Gemini Nano on Android: Building with on-device GenAI" talk.

#2 Seamlessly integrate on-device ML/AI with your own custom models

The Google AI Edge platform enables building and deploying a wide range of pretrained and custom models on edge devices and supports various frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, and Jax, allowing for more customization in apps. The platform now also offers improved support of on-device hardware accelerators and a new AI Edge Portal service for broad coverage of on-device benchmarking and evals. If you are looking for GenAI language models on devices where Gemini Nano is not available, you can use other open models via the MediaPipe LLM Inference API.

Serving your own custom models on-device can pose challenges related to handling large model downloads and updates, impacting the user experience. To improve this, we’ve launched Play for On-Device AI in beta. This service is designed to help developers manage custom model downloads efficiently, ensuring the right model size and speed are delivered to each Android device precisely when needed.

For more information watch “Small language models with Google AI Edge” talk.

#3 Power your Android apps with Gemini Flash, Pro and Imagen using Firebase AI Logic

For more advanced generative AI use cases, such as complex reasoning tasks, analyzing large amounts of data, processing audio or video, or generating images, you can use larger models from the Gemini Flash and Gemini Pro families, and Imagen running in the cloud. These models are well suited for scenarios requiring advanced capabilities or multimodal inputs and outputs. And since the AI inference runs in the cloud any Android device with an internet connection is supported. They are easy to integrate into your Android app by using Firebase AI Logic, which provides a simplified, secure way to access these capabilities without managing your own backend. Its SDK also includes support for conversational AI experiences using the Gemini Live API or generating custom contextual visual assets with Imagen. To learn more, check out our sample on GitHub and watch "Enhance your Android app with Gemini Pro and Flash, and Imagen" session.

These powerful AI capabilities can also be brought to life in immersive Android XR experiences. You can find corresponding documentation, samples and the technical session: "The future is now, with Compose and AI on Android XR".

Figure 1: Firebase AI Logic integration architecture

Get inspired and start building with AI on Android today

We released a new open source app, Androidify, to help developers build AI-driven Android experiences using Gemini APIs, ML Kit, Jetpack Compose, CameraX, Navigation 3, and adaptive design. Users can create personalized Android bot with Gemini and Imagen via the Firebase AI Logic SDK. Additionally, it incorporates ML Kit pose detection to detect a person in the camera viewfinder. The full code sample is available on GitHub for exploration and inspiration. Discover additional AI examples in our Android AI Sample Catalog.

The original image and Androidifi-ed image

Choosing the right Gemini model depends on understanding your specific needs and the model's capabilities, including modality, complexity, context window, offline capability, cost, and device reach. To explore these considerations further and see all our announcements in action, check out the AI on Android at I/O ‘25 playlist on YouTube and check out our documentation.

We are excited to see what you will build with the power of Gemini!

New in-car app experiences

Android Developers — Thu, 22 May 2025 17:15:07 +0000

Posted by Noam Gefen – Product Manager, Android for Cars, Sole Alborno – Product Manager, Gemini, and Ben Sagmoe – Developer Relations Engineer, Android for Cars

The in-car experience continues to evolve rapidly, and Google remains committed to pushing the boundaries of what's possible. At Google I/O 2025, we're excited to unveil the latest advancements for drivers, car manufacturers, and developers, furthering our goal of a safe, seamless, and helpful connected driving experience.

Today's car cabins are increasingly digital, offering developers exciting new opportunities with larger displays and more powerful computing. Android Auto is now supported in nearly all new cars sold, with almost 250 million compatible vehicles on the road.

We're also seeing significant growth in cars powered by Android Automotive OS with Google built-in. Over 50 models are currently available, with more launching this year. This growth is fueled by a thriving app ecosystem, including over 300 apps already available on the Play Store. These include apps optimized for a safe and seamless experience while driving as well as entertainment apps for while you're parked and waiting in your car—many of which are adaptive mobile apps that have been seamlessly brought to cars through the Car Ready Mobile Apps Program.

A vibrant developer community is essential to delivering these innovative in-car experiences utilizing the different screens within the car cabin. This past year, we've focused on key areas to help empower developers to build more differentiated experiences in cars across both platforms, as we embark on the Gemini era in cars.

Gemini for Cars

Exciting news for in-car experiences: Gemini, Google's advanced AI, is coming to vehicles! This unlocks a new era of safe and helpful interactions on the go.

Gemini enables natural voice conversations and seamless multitasking, empowering drivers to get more done simply by speaking naturally. Imagine effortlessly finding charging stations or navigating to a location pulled directly from an email, all with just your voice.

You can learn how to leverage Gemini's potential to create engaging in-car experiences in your app.

Navigation apps can integrate with Gemini using three core intent formats, allowing you to start navigation, display relevant search results, and execute custom actions, such as enabling users to report incidents like traffic congestion using their voice.

Gemini for cars will be rolling out in the coming months. Get ready to build the next generation of in-car AI experiences!

New developer programs and tools

Last year, we introduced car app quality tiers to inspire developers to create high quality in-car experiences. By developing your app in compliance with the Car ready tier, you can bring video, gaming, or browser apps to run while parked in cars with Google built-in with almost no additional effort. Learn more about Car Ready Mobile Apps.

Your app can further shine in cars within the Car optimized and Car differentiated tiers to unlock experiences while the car is in motion, and also when transitioning between parked and driving modes, while utilizing the different screens within the modern car cabin. Check the car app quality guidelines for details.

To start with, across both Android Auto and for cars with Google built-in, we've made some exciting improvements for Car App Library:

The Weather app category has graduated from beta: any developer can now publish weather apps to production tracks on both Android Auto and cars with Google Built-in. Before you publish your app, check that it meets the quality guidelines for weather apps.

Designing templated apps is easier than ever with the Car App Templates Design Kit we just published on Figma.

Two new templates, the SectionedItemTemplate and MediaPlaybackTemplate, are now available in the Car App Library 1.8 alpha release for use on Android Auto. These templates are a great fit for building templated media apps, allowing for increased customization in layout and browsing structure.

On Android Auto, many new app categories and capabilities are now in beta:

We are adding support for Building media apps with the Car App Library, enabling media app developers to build both richer and more complete experiences that users are used to on their phones. During beta, developers can build and publish media apps built using the Car App Library to internal testing and closed testing tracks. You can also express interest in being an early access partner to publish to production while the category is in beta. See Build a templated media app to learn more and get started.

The communications category is in beta. We've simplified calling integration for calling apps by utilizing the CallsManager Jetpack API. Together with the templates provided by the Car App Library, this enables communications apps to build features like full message history, upcoming meetings list, rich in-call views, and more. During beta, developers can build and publish communications apps to internal testing and closed testing tracks. You can also express interest in being an early access partner to publish to production while the category is in beta.

Games are now supported in Android Auto, while parked, on phones running Android 15 and above. You can already find some popular titles like Angry Birds 2, Farm Heroes Saga, Candy Crush Soda Saga and Beach Buggy Racing 2. To add support for Android Auto to your own app, see Build games for cars and Add support for Android Auto to your parked app. The Games category is in Beta and developers can publish games to internal testing and closed testing tracks. You can also express interest in being an early access partner to publish to production while the category is in beta.

Finally, we have further simplified building, testing and distribution experience for developers building apps for Android Automotive OS cars with Google built-in:

Games Category now in Beta for Google Built-In, allowing developers to distribute their adaptive games to cars. You can express interest to release the production track. Google Play Games Services (v2) are now available on Cars with Google built-in, enabling seamless login flows, cross device save states, and more. Get started with Google Play Games Services to learn more.

Distribution through Google Play is more flexible than ever. It’s now possible for apps in the parked categories to distribute in the same APK or App Bundle to cars with Google built-in as to phones, including through the mobile release track. Learn more on how to Distribute to cars.

Android Automotive OS on Pixel Tablet is now generally available, giving you a physical device option for testing Android Automotive OS apps without buying or renting a car. Additionally, the most recent system images include support for acting as an Android Auto receiver, meaning you can use the same device to test both your app’s experience on Android Auto and Android Automotive OS. Apply for access to these images.

The road ahead

You can look forward to more updates later this year, including:

Video apps will be supported on Android Auto, starting with phones running Android 16 on select compatible cars. If your app is already adaptive, enabling your app experience while parked only requires minimal steps to distribute to cars.

For Android Automotive OS cars running Android 14+ with Google built-in, we are working with car manufacturers to add additional app compatibility, to enable thousands of adaptive mobile apps in the next phase of the Car Ready Mobile Apps Program.

Updated design documentation that visualizes car app quality guidelines and integration paths to simplify designing your app for cars.

Google Play Services for cars with Google built-in are expanding to bring them on-par with mobile, including:

Passkeys and Credential Manager

Quick Share

Audio while driving for video apps: For cars with Google built-in, we're working with OEMs to enable audio-only listening for video apps while driving. Sign up to express interest in participating in the early access program.If you’d like to prepare for this feature’s general availability, you can work through the audio while driving codelab or check out the Build video apps for Android Automotive OS page

Firebase Test Lab is adding Android Automotive OS devices to its device catalog, making it possible to test on real car hardware without needing to buy or rent a car. Sign up to express interest in becoming an early access partner.

Pre-launch reports for Android Automotive OS are coming soon to the Play Console, helping you ensure app quality before distributing your app to cars.

Be sure to keep up to date through goo.gle/cars-whats-new on these features and more as we continuously invest in the future of Android in the car. Stay tuned for more resources to help you build innovative and engaging experiences for drivers and passengers.

Ready to publish your car app? Check our guidance for distributing to cars.

Explore this announcement and all Google I/O 2025 updates on io.google starting May 22.

Announcing Kotlin Multiplatform Shared Module Template

Android Developers — Tue, 20 May 2025 22:03:26 +0000

Posted by Ben Trengrove - Developer Relations Engineer, Matt Dyor - Product Manager

To empower Android developers, we’re excited to announce Android Studio’s new Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) Shared Module Template. This template was specifically designed to allow developers to use a single codebase and apply business logic across platforms. More specifically, developers will be able to add shared modules to existing Android apps and share the business logic across their Android and iOS applications.

This makes it easier for Android developers to craft, maintain, and most importantly, own the business logic. The KMP Shared Module Template is available within Android Studio when you create a new module within a project.

Shared Module Templates are found under the New Module tab

A single code base for business logic

Most developers have grown accustomed to maintaining different code bases, platform to platform. In the past, whenever there’s an update to the business logic, it must be carefully updated in each codebase. But with the KMP Shared Module Template:

Developers can write once and publish the business logic to wherever they need it.
Engineering teams can do more faster.
User experiences are more consistent across the entire audience, regardless of platform or form factor.
Releases are better coordinated and launched with fewer errors.

Customers and developer teams who adopt KMP Shared Module Templates should expect to achieve greater ROI from mobile teams who can turn their attention towards delighting their users more and worrying about inconsistent code less.

KMP enthusiasm

The Android developer community remains very excited about KMP, especially after Google I/O 2024 where Google announced official support for shared logic across Android and iOS. We have seen continued momentum and enthusiasm from the community. For example, there are now over 1,500 KMP libraries listed on JetBrains' klibs.io.

Our customers are excited because KMP has made Android developers more productive. Consistently, Android developers have said that they want solutions that allow them to share code more easily and they want tools which boost productivity. This is why we recommend KMP; KMP simultaneously delivers a great experience for Android users while boosting ROI for the app makers. The KMP Shared Module Template is the latest step towards a developer ecosystem where user experience is consistent and applications are updated seamlessly.

Large scale KMP adoptions

This KMP Shared Module Template is new, but KMP more broadly is a maturing technology with several large-scale migrations underway. In fact, KMP has matured enough to support mission critical applications at Google. Google Docs, for example, is now running KMP in production on iOS with runtime performance on par or better than before. Beyond Google, Stone’s 130 mobile developers are sharing over 50% of their code, allowing existing mobile teams to ship features approximately 40% faster to both Android and iOS.

KMP was designed for Android development

As always, we've designed the Shared Module Template with the needs of Android developer teams in mind. Making the KMP Shared Module Template part of the native Android Studio experience allows developers to efficiently add a shared module to an existing Android application and immediately start building shared business logic that leverages several KMP-ready Jetpack libraries including Room, SQLite, and DataStore to name just a few.

Come check it out at KotlinConf

Releasing Android Studio’s KMP Shared Module Template marks a significant step toward empowering Android development teams to innovate faster, to efficiently manage business logic, and to build high-quality applications with greater confidence. It means that Android developers can be responsible for the code that drives the business logic for every app across Android and iOS. We’re excited to bring Shared Module Template to KotlinConf in Copenhagen, May 21 - 23.

Get started with KMP Shared Module Template

To get started, you'll need the latest edition of Android Studio. In your Android project, the Shared Module Template is available within Android Studio when you create a new module. Click on “File” then “New” then “New Module” and finally “Kotlin Multiplatform Shared Module” and you are ready to add a KMP Shared Module to your Android app.

We appreciate any feedback on things you like or features you would like to see. If you find a bug, please report the issue. Remember to also follow us on X, LinkedIn, Blog, or YouTube for more Android development updates!

On-device GenAI APIs as part of ML Kit help you easily build with Gemini Nano

Android Developers — Tue, 20 May 2025 19:38:53 +0000

Posted by Caren Chang - Developer Relations Engineer, Chengji Yan - Software Engineer, Taj Darra - Product Manager

We are excited to announce a set of on-device GenAI APIs, as part of ML Kit, to help you integrate Gemini Nano in your Android apps.

To start, we are releasing 4 new APIs:

Summarization: to summarize articles and conversations
Proofreading: to polish short text
Rewriting: to reword text in different styles
Image Description: to provide short description for images

Key benefits of GenAI APIs

GenAI APIs are high level APIs that allow for easy integration, similar to existing ML Kit APIs. This means you can expect quality results out of the box without extra effort for prompt engineering or fine tuning for specific use cases.

GenAI APIs run on-device and thus provide the following benefits:

Input, inference, and output data is processed locally
Functionality remains the same without reliable internet connection
No additional cost incurred for each API call

To prevent misuse, we also added safety protection in various layers, including base model training, safety-aware LoRA fine-tuning, input and output classifiers and safety evaluations.

How GenAI APIs are built

There are 4 main components that make up each of the GenAI APIs.

Gemini Nano is the base model, as the foundation shared by all APIs.
Small API-specific LoRA adapter models are trained and deployed on top of the base model to further improve the quality for each API.
Optimized inference parameters (e.g. prompt, temperature, topK, batch size) are tuned for each API to guide the model in returning the best results.
An evaluation pipeline ensures quality in various datasets and attributes. This pipeline consists of: LLM raters, statistical metrics and human raters.

Together, these components make up the high-level GenAI APIs that simplify the effort needed to integrate Gemini Nano in your Android app.

Evaluating quality of GenAI APIs

For each API, we formulate a benchmark score based on the evaluation pipeline mentioned above. This score is based on attributes specific to a task. For example, when evaluating the summarization task, one of the attributes we look at is “grounding” (ie: factual consistency of generated summary with source content).

To provide out-of-box quality for GenAI APIs, we applied feature specific fine-tuning on top of the Gemini Nano base model. This resulted in an increase for the benchmark score of each API as shown below:

Use case in English	Gemini Nano Base Model	ML Kit GenAI API
Summarization	77.2	92.1
Proofreading	84.3	90.2
Rewriting	79.5	84.1
Image Description	86.9	92.3

In addition, this is a quick reference of how the APIs perform on a Pixel 9 Pro:

	Prefix Speed (input processing rate)	Decode Speed (output generation rate)
Text-to-text	510 tokens/second	11 tokens/second
Image-to-text	510 tokens/second + 0.8 seconds for image encoding	11 tokens/second

Sample usage

This is an example of implementing the GenAI Summarization API to get a one-bullet summary of an article:

val articleToSummarize = "We are excited to announce a set of on-device generative AI APIs..."

// Define task with desired input and output format
val summarizerOptions = SummarizerOptions.builder(context)
    .setInputType(InputType.ARTICLE)
    .setOutputType(OutputType.ONE_BULLET)
    .setLanguage(Language.ENGLISH)
    .build()
val summarizer = Summarization.getClient(summarizerOptions)

suspend fun prepareAndStartSummarization(context: Context) {
    // Check feature availability. Status will be one of the following: 
    // UNAVAILABLE, DOWNLOADABLE, DOWNLOADING, AVAILABLE
    val featureStatus = summarizer.checkFeatureStatus().await()

    if (featureStatus == FeatureStatus.DOWNLOADABLE) {
        // Download feature if necessary.
        // If downloadFeature is not called, the first inference request will 
        // also trigger the feature to be downloaded if it's not already
        // downloaded.
        summarizer.downloadFeature(object : DownloadCallback {
            override fun onDownloadStarted(bytesToDownload: Long) { }

            override fun onDownloadFailed(e: GenAiException) { }

            override fun onDownloadProgress(totalBytesDownloaded: Long) {}

            override fun onDownloadCompleted() {
                startSummarizationRequest(articleToSummarize, summarizer)
            }
        })    
    } else if (featureStatus == FeatureStatus.DOWNLOADING) {
        // Inference request will automatically run once feature is      
        // downloaded.
        // If Gemini Nano is already downloaded on the device, the   
        // feature-specific LoRA adapter model will be downloaded very  
        // quickly. However, if Gemini Nano is not already downloaded, 
        // the download process may take longer.
        startSummarizationRequest(articleToSummarize, summarizer)
    } else if (featureStatus == FeatureStatus.AVAILABLE) {
        startSummarizationRequest(articleToSummarize, summarizer)
    } 
}

fun startSummarizationRequest(text: String, summarizer: Summarizer) {
    // Create task request  
    val summarizationRequest = SummarizationRequest.builder(text).build()

    // Start summarization request with streaming response
    summarizer.runInference(summarizationRequest) { newText -> 
        // Show new text in UI
    }

    // You can also get a non-streaming response from the request
    // val summarizationResult = summarizer.runInference(summarizationRequest)
    // val summary = summarizationResult.get().summary
}

// Be sure to release the resource when no longer needed
// For example, on viewModel.onCleared() or activity.onDestroy()
summarizer.close()

For more examples of implementing the GenAI APIs, check out the official documentation and samples on GitHub:

Use cases

Here is some guidance on how to best use the current GenAI APIs:

For Summarization, consider:

Conversation messages or transcripts that involve 2 or more users

Articles or documents less than 4000 tokens (or about 3000 English words). Using the first few paragraphs for summarization is usually good enough to capture the most important information.

For Proofreading and Rewriting APIs, consider utilizing them during the content creation process for short content below 256 tokens to help with tasks such as:

Refining messages in a particular tone, such as more formal or more casual

Polishing personal notes for easier consumption later

For the Image Description API, consider it for:

Generating titles of images

Generating metadata for image search

Utilizing descriptions of images in use cases where the images themselves cannot be displayed, such as within a list of chat messages

Generating alternative text to help visually impaired users better understand content as a whole

GenAI API in production

Envision is an app that verbalizes the visual world to help people who are blind or have low vision lead more independent lives. A common use case in the app is for users to take a picture to have a document read out loud. Utilizing the GenAI Summarization API, Envision is now able to get a concise summary of a captured document. This significantly enhances the user experience by allowing them to quickly grasp the main points of documents and determine if a more detailed reading is desired, saving them time and effort.

Supported devices

GenAI APIs are available on Android devices using optimized MediaTek Dimensity, Qualcomm Snapdragon, and Google Tensor platforms through AICore. For a comprehensive list of devices that support GenAI APIs, refer to our official documentation.

Learn more

Start implementing GenAI APIs in your Android apps today with guidance from our official documentation and samples on GitHub: AI Catalog GenAI API Samples with Compose, ML Kit GenAI APIs Quickstart.

Peacock built adaptively on Android to deliver great experiences across screens

Android Developers — Tue, 20 May 2025 19:38:22 +0000

Posted by Sa-ryong Kang and Miguel Montemayor - Developer Relations Engineers

Peacock is NBCUniversal’s streaming service app available in the US, offering culture-defining entertainment including live sports, exclusive original content, TV shows, and blockbuster movies. The app continues to evolve, becoming more than just a platform to watch content, but a hub of entertainment.

Today’s users are consuming entertainment on an increasingly wider array of device sizes and types, and in particular are moving towards mobile devices. Peacock has adopted Jetpack Compose to help with its journey in adapting to more screens and meeting users where they are.

Disclaimer: Peacock is available in the US only. This video will only be viewable to US viewers.

Adapting to more flexible form factors

The Peacock development team is focused on bringing the best experience to users, no matter what device they’re using or when they want to consume content. With an emerging trend from app users to watch more on mobile devices and large screens like foldables, the Peacock app needs to be able to adapt to different screen sizes. As more devices are introduced, the team needed to explore new solutions that make the most out of each unique display permutation.

The goal was to have the Peacock app to adapt to these new displays while continually offering high-quality entertainment without interruptions, like the stream reloading or visual errors. While thinking ahead, they also wanted to prepare and build a solution that was ready for Android XR as the entertainment landscape is shifting towards including more immersive experiences.

Building a future-proof experience with Jetpack Compose

In order to build a scalable solution that would help the Peacock app continue to evolve, the app was migrated to Jetpack Compose, Android’s toolkit for building scalable UI. One of the essential tools they used was the WindowSizeClass API, which helps developers create and test UI layouts for different size ranges. This API then allows the app to seamlessly switch between pre-set layouts as it reaches established viewport breakpoints for different window sizes.

The API was used in conjunction with Kotlin Coroutines and Flows to keep the UI state responsive as the window size changed. To test their work and fine tune edge case devices, Peacock used the Android Studio emulator to simulate a wide range of Android-based devices.

Jetpack Compose allowed the team to build adaptively, so now the Peacock app responds to a wide variety of screens while offering a seamless experience to Android users. “The app feels more native, more fluid, and more intuitive across all form factors,” said Diego Valente, Head of Mobile, Peacock and Global Streaming. “That means users can start watching on a smaller screen and continue instantly on a larger one when they unfold the device—no reloads, no friction. It just works.”

Preparing for immersive entertainment experiences

In building adaptive apps on Android, John Jelley, Senior Vice President, Product & UX, Peacock and Global Streaming, says Peacock has also laid the groundwork to quickly adapt to the Android XR platform: “Android XR builds on the same large screen principles, our investment here naturally extends to those emerging experiences with less developmental work.”

The team is excited about the prospect of features unlocked by Android XR, like Multiview for sports and TV, which enables users to watch multiple games or camera angles at once. By tailoring spatial windows to the user’s environment, the app could offer new ways for users to interact with contextual metadata like sports stats or actor information—all without ever interrupting their experience.

Build adaptive apps

Learn how to unlock your app's full potential on phones, tablets, foldables, and beyond.

Explore this announcement and all Google I/O 2025 updates on io.google starting May 22.

What's New in Jetpack Compose

Android Developers — Tue, 20 May 2025 19:37:48 +0000

Posted by Nick Butcher – Product Manager

At Google I/O 2025, we announced a host of features, performance, stability, libraries, and tools updates for Jetpack Compose, our recommended Android UI toolkit. With Compose you can build excellent apps that work across devices. Compose has matured a lot since it was first announced (at Google I/O 2019!) and we're now seeing 60% of the top 1,000 apps in the Play Store such as MAX and Google Drive use and love it.

New Features

Since I/O last year, Compose Bill of Materials (BOM) version 2025.05.01 adds new features such as:

Autofill support that lets users automatically insert previously entered personal information into text fields.
Auto-sizing text to smoothly adapt text size to a parent container size.
Visibility tracking for when you need high-performance information on a composable's position in its root container, screen, or window.
Animate bounds modifier for beautiful automatic animations of a Composable's position and size within a LookaheadScope.
Accessibility checks in tests that let you build a more accessible app UI through automated a11y testing.

LookaheadScope {
    Box(
        Modifier
            .animateBounds(this@LookaheadScope)
            .width(if(inRow) 100.dp else 150.dp)
            .background(..)
            .border(..)
    )
}

For more details on these features, read What’s new in the Jetpack Compose April ’25 release and check out these talks from Google I/O:

If you’re looking to try out new Compose functionality, the alpha BOM offers new features that we're working on including:

Pausable Composition (see below)
Updates to LazyLayout prefetch
Context Menus
New modifiers: onFirstVisible, onVisbilityChanged, contentType
New Lint checks for frequently changing values and elements that should be remembered in composition

Please try out the alpha features and provide feedback to help shape the future of Compose.

Material Expressive

At Google I/O, we unveiled Material Expressive, Material Design’s latest evolution that helps you make your products even more engaging and easier to use. It's a comprehensive addition of new components, styles, motion and customization options that help you to build beautiful rich UIs. The Material3 library in the latest alpha BOM contains many of the new expressive components for you to try out.

Learn more to start building with Material Expressive.

Adaptive layouts library

Developing adaptive apps across form factors including phones, foldables, tablets, desktop, cars and Android XR is now easier with the latest enhancements to the Compose adaptive layouts library. The stable 1.1 release adds support for predictive back gestures for smoother transitions and pane expansion for more flexible two pane layouts on larger screens. Furthermore, the 1.2 (alpha) release adds more flexibility for how panes are displayed, adding strategies for reflowing and levitating.

Compose Adaptive Layouts Updates in the Google Play app

Learn more about building adaptive android apps with Compose.

Performance

With each release of Jetpack Compose, we continue to prioritize performance improvements. The latest stable release includes significant rewrites and improvements to multiple sub-systems including semantics, focus and text optimizations. Best of all these are available to you simply by upgrading your Compose dependency; no code changes required.

Internal benchmark, run on a Pixel 3a

We continue to work on further performance improvements, notable changes in the latest alpha BOM include:

Pausable Composition allows compositions to be paused, and their work split up over several frames.
Background text prefetch enables text layout caches to be pre-warmed on a background thread, enabling faster text layout.
LazyLayout prefetch improvements enabling lazy layouts to be smarter about how much content to prefetch, taking advantage of pausable composition.

Together these improvements eliminate nearly all jank in an internal benchmark.

Stability

We've heard from you that upgrading your Compose dependency can be challenging, encountering bugs or behaviour changes that prevent you from staying on the latest version. We've invested significantly in improving the stability of Compose, working closely with the many Google app teams building with Compose to detect and prevent issues before they even make it to a release.

Google apps develop against and release with snapshot builds of Compose; as such, Compose is tested against the hundreds of thousands of Google app tests and any Compose issues are immediately actioned by our team. We have recently invested in increasing the cadence of updating these snapshots and now update them daily from Compose tip-of-tree, which means we’re receiving feedback faster, and are able to resolve issues long before they reach a public release of the library.

Jetpack Compose also relies on @Experimental annotations to mark APIs that are subject to change. We heard your feedback that some APIs have remained experimental for a long time, reducing your confidence in the stability of Compose. We have invested in stabilizing experimental APIs to provide you a more solid API surface, and reduced the number of experimental APIs by 32% in the last year.

We have also heard that it can be hard to debug Compose crashes when your own code does not appear in the stack trace. In the latest alpha BOM, we have added a new opt-in feature to provide more diagnostic information. Note that this does not currently work with minified builds and comes at a performance cost, so we recommend only using this feature in debug builds.

class App : Application() {
   override fun onCreate() {
        // Enable only for debug flavor to avoid perf impact in release
        Composer.setDiagnosticStackTraceEnabled(BuildConfig.DEBUG)
   }
}

Libraries

We know that to build great apps, you need Compose integration in the libraries that interact with your app's UI.

A core library that powers any Compose app is Navigation. You told us that you often encountered limitations when managing state hoisting and directly manipulating the back stack with the current Compose Navigation solution. We went back to the drawing-board and completely reimagined how a navigation library should integrate with the Compose mental model. We're excited to introduce Navigation 3, a new artifact designed to empower you with greater control and simplify complex navigation flows.

We're also investing in Compose support for CameraX and Media3, making it easier to integrate camera capture and video playback into your UI with Compose idiomatic components.

@Composable
private fun VideoPlayer(
    player: Player?, // from media3
    modifier: Modifier = Modifier
) {
    Box(modifier) {
        PlayerSurface(player) // from media3-ui-compose
        player?.let {
            // custom play-pause button UI
            val playPauseButtonState = rememberPlayPauseButtonState(it) // from media3-ui-compose
            MyPlayPauseButton(playPauseButtonState, Modifier.align(BottomEnd).padding(16.dp))
        }
    }
}

To learn more, see the media3 Compose documentation and the CameraX samples.

Tools

We continue to improve the Android Studio tools for creating Compose UIs. The latest Narwhal canary includes:

Resizable Previews instantly show you how your Compose UI adapts to different window sizes
Preview navigation improvements using clickable names and components
Studio Labs

16 things to know for Android developers at Google I/O 2025

Android Developers — Tue, 20 May 2025 19:03:41 +0000

Posted by Matthew McCullough – VP of Product Management, Android Developer

Today at Google I/O, we announced the many ways we’re helping you build excellent, adaptive experiences, and helping you stay more productive through updates to our tooling that put AI at your fingertips and throughout your development lifecycle. Here’s a recap of 16 of our favorite announcements for Android developers; you can also see what was announced last week in The Android Show: I/O Edition. And stay tuned over the next two days as we dive into all of the topics in more detail!

Building AI into your Apps

1: Building intelligent apps with Generative AI

Generative AI enhances apps' experience by making them intelligent, personalized and agentic. This year, we announced new ML Kit GenAI APIs using Gemini Nano for common on-device tasks like summarization, proofreading, rewrite, and image description. We also provided capabilities for developers to harness more powerful models such as Gemini Pro, Gemini Flash, and Imagen via Firebase AI Logic for more complex use cases like image generation and processing extensive data across modalities, including bringing AI to life in Android XR, and a new AI sample app, Androidify, that showcases how these APIs can transform your selfies into unique Android robots! To start building intelligent experiences by leveraging these new capabilities, explore the developer documentation, sample apps, and watch the overview session to choose the right solution for your app.

New experiences across devices

2: One app, every screen: think adaptive and unlock 500 million screens

Mobile Android apps form the foundation across phones, foldables, tablets and ChromeOS, and this year we’re helping you bring them to cars and XR and expanding usages with desktop windowing and connected displays. This expansion means tapping into an ecosystem of 500 million devices – a significant opportunity to engage more users when you think adaptive, building a single mobile app that works across form factors. Resources, including Compose Layouts library and Jetpack Navigation updates, help make building these dynamic experiences easier than before. You can see how Peacock, NBCUniveral’s streaming service (available in the US) is building adaptively to meet users where they are.

Disclaimer: Peacock is available in the US only. This video will only be viewable to US viewers.

3: Material 3 Expressive: design for intuition and emotion

The new Material 3 Expressive update provides tools to enhance your product's appeal by harnessing emotional UX, making it more engaging, intuitive, and desirable for users. Check out the I/O talk to learn more about expressive design and how it inspires emotion, clearly guides users toward their goals, and offers a flexible and personalized experience.

4: Smarter widgets, engaging live updates

Measure the return on investment of your widgets (available soon) and easily create personalized widget previews with Glance 1.2. Promoted Live Updates notify users of important ongoing notifications and come with a new Progress Style standardized template.

5: Enhanced Camera & Media: low light boost and battery savings

This year's I/O introduces several camera and media enhancements. These include a software low light boost for improved photography in dim lighting and native PCM offload, allowing the DSP to handle more audio playback processing, thus conserving user battery. Explore our detailed sessions on built-in effects within CameraX and Media3 for further information.

6: Build next-gen app experiences for Cars

We're launching expanded opportunities for developers to build in-car experiences, including new Gemini integrations, support for more app categories like Games and Video, and enhanced capabilities for media and communication apps via the Car App Library and new APIs. Alongside updated car app quality tiers and simplified distribution, we'll soon be providing improved testing tools like Android Automotive OS on Pixel Tablet and Firebase Test Lab access to help you bring your innovative apps to cars. Learn more from our technical session and blog post on new in-car app experiences.

7: Build for Android XR's expanding ecosystem with Developer Preview 2 of the SDK

We announced Android XR in December, and today at Google I/O we shared a bunch of updates coming to the platform including Developer Preview 2 of the Android XR SDK plus an expanding ecosystem of devices: in addition to the first Android XR headset, Samsung’s Project Moohan, you’ll also see more devices including a new portable Android XR device from our partners at XREAL. There’s lots more to cover for Android XR: Watch the Compose and AI on Android XR session, and the Building differentiated apps for Android XR with 3D content session, and learn more about building for Android XR.

XREAL’s Project Aura

8: Express yourself on Wear OS: meet Material Expressive on Wear OS 6

This year we are launching Wear OS 6: the most powerful and expressive version of Wear OS. Wear OS 6 features Material 3 Expressive, a new UI design with personalized visuals and motion for user creativity, coming to Wear, Android, and Google apps later this year. Developers gain access to Material 3 Expressive on Wear OS by utilizing new Jetpack libraries: Wear Compose Material 3, which provides components for apps and Wear ProtoLayout Material 3 which provides components and layouts for tiles. Get started with Material 3 libraries and other updates on Wear.

Some examples of Material 3 Expressive on Wear OS experiences

9: Engage users on Google TV with excellent TV apps

You can leverage more resources within Compose's core and Material libraries with the stable release of Compose for TV, empowering you to build excellent adaptive UIs across your apps. We're also thrilled to share exciting platform updates and developer tools designed to boost app engagement, including bringing Gemini capabilities to TV in the fall, opening enrollment for our Video Discovery API, and more.

Developer productivity

10: Build beautiful apps faster with Jetpack Compose

Compose is our big bet for UI development. The latest stable BOM release provides the features, performance, stability, and libraries that you need to build beautiful adaptive apps faster, so you can focus on what makes your app valuable to users.

Compose Adaptive Layouts Updates in the Google Play app

11: Kotlin Multiplatform: new Shared Template lets you build across platforms, easily

Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) enables teams to reach new audiences across Android and iOS with less development time. We’ve released a new Android Studio KMP shared module template, updated Jetpack libraries and new codelabs (Getting started with Kotlin Multiplatform and Migrating your Room database to KMP) to help developers who are looking to get started with KMP. Shared module templates make it easier for developers to craft, maintain, and own the business logic. Read more on what's new in Android's Kotlin Multiplatform.

12: Gemini in Android Studio: AI Agents to help you work

Gemini in Android Studio is the AI-powered coding companion that makes Android developers more productive at every stage of the dev lifecycle. In March, we introduced Image to Code to bridge the gap between UX teams and software engineers by intelligently converting design mockups into working Compose UI code. And today, we previewed new agentic AI experiences, Journeys for Android Studio and Version Upgrade Agent. These innovations make it easier to build and test code. You can read more about these updates in What’s new in Android development tools.

13: Android Studio: smarter with Gemini

In this latest release, we're empowering devs with AI-driven tools like Gemini in Android Studio, streamlining UI creation, making testing easier, and ensuring apps are future-proofed in our ever-evolving Android ecosystem. These innovations accelerate development cycles, improve app quality, and help you stay ahead in a dynamic mobile landscape. To take advantage, upgrade to the latest Studio release. You can read more about these innovations in What’s new in Android development tools.

And the latest on driving business growth

14: What’s new in Google Play

Get ready for exciting updates from Play designed to boost your discovery, engagement and revenue! Learn how we’re continuing to become a content-rich destination with enhanced personalization and fresh ways to showcase your apps and content. Plus, explore powerful new subscription features designed to streamline checkout and reduce churn. Read I/O 2025: What's new in Google Play to learn more.

15: Start migrating to Play Games Services v2 today

Play Games Services (PGS) connects over 2 billion gamer profiles on Play, powering cross-device gameplay, personalized gaming content and rewards for your players throughout the gaming journey. We are moving PGS v1 features to v2 with more advanced features and an easier integration path. Learn more about the migration timeline and new features.

16: And of course, Android 16

We unpacked some of the latest features coming to users in Android 16, which we’ve been previewing with you for the last few months. If you haven’t already, make sure to test your apps with the latest Beta of Android 16. Android 16 includes Live Updates, professional media and camera features, desktop windowing and connected displays, major accessibility enhancements and much more.

Check out all of the Android and Play content at Google I/O

This was just a preview of some of the cool updates for Android developers at Google I/O, but stay tuned to Google I/O over the next two days as we dive into a range of Android developer topics in more detail. You can check out the What’s New in Android and the

What’s new in Wear OS 6

Android Developers — Tue, 20 May 2025 19:03:24 +0000

Posted by Chiara Chiappini – Developer Relations Engineer

This year, we’re excited to introduce Wear OS 6: the most power-efficient and expressive version of Wear OS yet.

Wear OS 6 introduces the new design system we call Material 3 Expressive. It features a major refresh with visual and motion components designed to give users an experience with more personalization. The new design offers a great level of expression to meet user demand for experiences that are modern, relevant, and distinct. Material 3 Expressive is coming to Wear OS, Android, and all your favorite Google apps on these devices later this year.

The good news is that you don’t need to compromise battery for beauty: thanks to Wear OS platform optimizations, watches updating from Wear OS 5 to Wear OS 6 can see up to 10% improvement in battery life.¹

Wear OS 6 developer preview

Today we’re releasing the Developer Preview of Wear OS 6, the next version of Google’s smartwatch platform, based on Android 16.

Wear OS 6 brings a number of developer-facing changes, such as refining the always-on display experience. Check out what’s changed and try the new Wear OS 6 emulator to test your app for compatibility with the new platform version.

Material 3 Expressive on Wear OS

Some examples of Material 3 Expressive on Wear OS experiences

Material 3 Expressive for the watch is fully optimized for the round display. We recommend developers embrace the new design system in their apps and tiles. To help you adopt Material 3 Expressive in your app, we have begun releasing new design guidance for Wear OS, along with corresponding Figma design kits.

As a developer, you can get access the Material 3 Expressive on Wear OS using new Jetpack libraries:

Wear Compose Material 3 that provides components for apps.
Wear ProtoLayout Material 3 that provides components and layouts for tiles.

These two libraries provide implementations for the components catalog that adheres to the Material 3 Expressive design language.

Make it personal with richer color schemes using themes

Dynamic color theme updates colors of apps and Tiles

The Wear Compose Material 3 and Wear Protolayout Material 3 libraries provide updated and extended color schemes, typography, and shapes to bring both depth and variety to your designs. Additionally, your tiles now align with the system font by default (on Wear OS 6+ devices), offering a more cohesive experience on the watch.

Both libraries introduce dynamic color theming, which automatically generates a color theme for your app or tile to match the colors of the watch face of Pixel watches.

Make it more glanceable with new tile components

Tiles now support a new framework and a set of components that embrace the watch's circular form factor. These components make tiles more consistent and glanceable, so users can more easily take swift action on the information included in them.

We’ve introduced a 3-slot tile layout to improve visual consistency in the Tiles carousel. This layout includes a title slot, a main content slot, and a bottom slot, designed to work across a range of different screen sizes:

Some examples of Tiles with the 3-slot tile layout.

Highlight user actions and key information with components optimized for round screen

The new Wear OS Material 3 components automatically adapt to larger screen sizes, building on the Large Display support added as part of Wear OS 5. Additionally, components such as Buttons and Lists support shape morphing on apps.

The following sections highlight some of the most exciting changes to these components.

Embrace the round screen with the Edge Hugging Button

We introduced a new EdgeButton for apps and tiles with an iconic design pattern that maximizes the space within the circular form factor, hugs the edge of the screen, and comes in 4 standard sizes.

Screenshot representing an EdgeButton in a scrollable screen.

Fluid navigation through lists using new indicators

The new TransformingLazyColumn from the Foundation library makes expressive motion easy with motion that fluidly traces the edges of the display. Developers can customize the collapsing behavior of the list when scrolling to the top, bottom and both sides of the screen. For example, components like Cards can scale down as they are closer to the top of the screen.

TransformingLazyColumn allows content to collapse and change in size when approaching the edge of the screens

Material 3 Expressive also includes a ScrollIndicator that features a new visual and motion design to make it easier for users to visualize their progress through a list. The ScrollIndicator is displayed by default when you use a TransformingLazyColumn and ScreenScaffold.

ScrollIndicator

Lastly, you can now use segments with the new ProgressIndicator, which is now available as a full-screen component for apps and as a small-size component for both apps and tiles.

Example of a full-screen ProgressIndicator

To learn more about the new features and see the full list of updates, see the release notes of the latest beta release of the Wear Compose and Wear Protolayout libraries. Check out the migration guidance for apps and tiles on how to upgrade your existing apps, or try one of our codelabs if you want to start developing using Material 3 Expressive design.

Watch Faces

With Wear OS 6 we are launching updates for watch face developers:

New options for customizing the appearance of your watch face using version 4 of Watch Face Format, such as animated state transitions from ambient to interactive and photo watch faces.

A new API for building watch face marketplaces.

Learn more about what's new in Watch Face updates.

Look for more information about the general availability of Wear OS 6 later this year.

Library updates

ProtoLayout

Since our last major release, we've improved capabilities and the developer experience of the Tiles and ProtoLayout libraries to address feedback we received from developers. Some of these enhancements include:

New Kotlin-only protolayout-material3 library adds support for enhanced visuals: Lottie animations (in addition to the existing animation capabilities), more gradient types, and new arc line styles.
Developers can now write more idiomatic Kotlin, with APIs refined to better align with Jetpack Compose, including type-safe builders and an improved modifier syntax.

The example below shows how to display a layout with a text on a Tile using new enhancements:

// returns a LayoutElement for use in onTileRequest()
materialScope(context, requestParams.deviceConfiguration) {
    primaryLayout(
        mainSlot = {
            text(
                text = "Hello, World!".layoutString,
                typography = BODY_LARGE,
            )
        }
    )
}

For more information, see the migration instructions.

Credential Manager for Wear OS

The CredentialManager API is now available on Wear OS, starting with Google Pixel Watch devices running Wear OS 5.1. It introduces passkeys to Wear OS with a platform-standard authentication UI that is consistent with the experience on mobile.

The Credential Manager Jetpack library provides developers with a unified API that simplifies and centralizes their authentication implementation. Developers with an existing implementation on another form factor can use the same CredentialManager code, and most of the same supporting code to fulfill their Wear OS authentication workflow.

Credential Manager provides integration points for passkeys, passwords, and Sign in With Google, while also allowing you to keep your other authentication solutions as backups.

Users will benefit from a consistent, platform-standard authentication UI; the introduction of passkeys and other passwordless authentication methods, and the ability to authenticate without their phone nearby.

Check out the Authentication on Wear OS guidance to learn more.

Richer Wear Media Controls

New media controls for a Podcast

Devices that run Wear OS 5.1 or later support enhanced media controls. Users who listen to media content on phones and watches can now benefit from the following new media control features on their watch:

They can fast-forward and rewind while listening to podcasts.
They can access the playlist and controls such as shuffle, like, and repeat through a new menu.

Developers with an existing implementation of action buttons and playlist can benefit from this feature without additional effort. Check out how users will get more controls from your media app on a Google Pixel Watch device.

Start building for Wear OS 6 now

With these updates, there’s never been a better time to develop an app on Wear OS. These technical resources are a great place to learn more how to get started:

Earlier this year, we expanded our smartwatch offerings with Galaxy Watch for Kids, a unique, phone-free experience designed specifically for children. This launch gives families a new way to stay connected, allowing children to explore Wear OS independently with a dedicated smartwatch. Consult our developer guidance to create a Wear OS app for kids.

We’re looking forward to seeing the experiences that you build on Wear OS!

Explore this announcement and all Google I/O 2025 updates on io.google starting May 22.

¹ Actual battery performance varies.

What’s new in Watch Faces

Android Developers — Tue, 20 May 2025 19:02:47 +0000

Posted by Garan Jenkin – Developer Relations Engineer

Wear OS has a thriving watch face ecosystem featuring a variety of designs that also aims to minimize battery impact. Developers have embraced the simplicity of creating watch faces using Watch Face Format – in the last year, the number of published watch faces using Watch Face Format has grown by over 180%^*.

Today, we’re continuing our investment and announcing version 4 of the Watch Face Format, available as part of Wear OS 6. These updates allow developers to express even greater levels of creativity through the new features we’ve added. And we’re supporting marketplaces, which gives flexibility and control to developers and more choice for users.

In this blog post we'll cover key new features, check out the documentation for more details of changes introduced in recent versions.

Supporting marketplaces with Watch Face Push

We’re also announcing a completely new API, the Watch Face Push API, aimed at developers who want to create their own watch face marketplaces.

Watch Face Push, available on devices running Wear OS 6 and above, works exclusively with watch faces that use the Watch Face Format watch faces.

We’ve partnered with well-known watch face developers – including Facer, TIMEFLIK, WatchMaker, Pujie, and Recreative – in designing this new API. We’re excited that all of these developers will be bringing their unique watch face experiences to Wear OS 6 using Watch Face Push.

From left to right, Facer, Recreative and TIMEFLIK watch faces have been developing marketplace apps to work with watches running Wear OS 6.

Watch faces managed and deployed using Watch Face Push are all written using Watch Face Format. Developers publish these watch faces in the same way as publishing through Google Play, though there are some additional checks the developer must make which are described in the Watch Face Push guidance.

The Watch Face Push API covers only the watch part of this typical marketplace system diagram - as the app developer, you have control and responsibility for the phone app and cloud components, as well as for building the Wear OS app using Watch Face Push. You’re also in control of the phone-watch communications, for which we recommend using the Data Layer APIs.

Adding Watch Face Push to your project

To start using Watch Face Push on Wear OS 6, include the following dependency in your Wear OS app:

// Ensure latest version is used by checking the repository
implementation("androidx.wear.watchface:watchface-push:1.3.0-alpha07")

Declare the necessary permission in your AndroidManifest.xml:

<uses-permission android:name="com.google.wear.permission.PUSH_WATCH_FACES" />

Obtain a Watch Face Push client:

val manager = WatchFacePushManagerFactory.createWatchFacePushManager(context)

You’re now ready to start using the Watch Face Push API, for example to list the watch faces you have already installed, or add a new watch face:

// List existing watch faces, installed by this app
val listResponse = manager.listWatchFaces()

// Add a watch face
manager.addWatchFace(watchFaceFileDescriptor, validationToken)

Understanding Watch Face Push

While the basics of the Watch Face Push API are easy to understand and access through the WatchFacePushManager interface, it’s important to consider several other factors when working with the API in practice to build an effective marketplace app, including:

How to build watch faces for use with Watch Face Push - Watch faces deployed using Watch Face Push require an additional validation step to be performed by the developer. Learn more about how to build watch faces for use with Watch Face Push, and to integrate Watch Face Push into your application.

Watch Face Slots - Each Watch Face Push-based application is able to install a limited number of watch faces at any given time, represented by a Slot. Learn more about how to work with and manage slots.

Default watch faces - The API allows for a default watch face to be installed when the app is installed. Learn more about how to build and include this default watch face.

Setting active watch faces - Through an additional permission, the app can set the active watch face. Learn about how to integrate this feature, as well as how to handle the different permission scenarios.

To learn more about using Watch Face Push, see the guidance and reference documentation.

Updates to Watch Face Format

Photos

Available from Watch Face Format v4

The new Photos element allows the watch face to contain user-selectable photos. The element supports both individual photos and a gallery of photos. For a gallery of photos, developers can choose whether the photos advance automatically or when the user taps the watch face.

Configuring photos through the watch Companion app

The user is able to select the photos of their choice through the companion app, making this a great way to include true personalization in your watch face. To use this feature, first add the necessary configuration:

<UserConfigurations>
  <PhotosConfiguration id="myPhoto" configType="SINGLE"/>
</UserConfigurations>

Then use the Photos element within any PartImage, in the same way as you would for an Image element:

<PartImage ...>
  <Photos source="[CONFIGURATION.myPhoto]"
          defaultImageResource="placeholder_photo"/>
</PartImage>

For details on how to support multiple photos, and how to configure the different change behaviors, refer to the Photos section of the guidance and reference, as well as the GitHub samples.

Transitions

Available from Watch Face Format v4

Watch Face Format now supports transitions when exiting and entering ambient mode.

State transition animation: Example using an overshoot effect in revealing the seconds digits

This is achieved through the existing Variant tag. For example, the hours and minutes in the above watch face are animated as follows:

<DigitalClock ...>
  <Variant mode="AMBIENT" target="x" value="100" interpolation="OVERSHOOT" />

   <!-- Rest of "hh:mm" clock definition here -->
</DigitalClock>

By default, the animation takes the full extent of allowed time for the transition. The new interpolation attribute controls the animation effect - in this case the use of OVERSHOOT adds a playful experience.

The seconds are implemented in a separate DigitalClock element, which shows the use of the new duration attribute:

<DigitalClock ...>
  <Variant mode="AMBIENT" target="alpha" value="0" duration="0.5"/>
   <!-- Rest of "ss" clock definition here -->
</DigitalClock>

The duration attribute takes a value between 0.0 and 1.0, with 1.0 representing the full extent of the allowed time. In this example, by using a value of 0.5, the seconds animation is quicker - taking half the allowed time, in comparison to the hours and minutes, which take the entire transition period.

For more details on using transitions, see the guidance documentation, as well as the reference documentation for Variant.

Color Transforms

Available from Watch Face Format v4

We’ve extended the usefulness of the Transform element by allowing color to be transformed on the majority of elements where it is an attribute, and also allowing tintColor to be transformed on Group and Part^* elements such as PartDraw and PartText.

The main exceptions to this addition are the clock elements, DigitalClock and AnalogClock, and also ComplicationSlot, which do not currently support Transform.

In addition to extending the list of transformable attributes to include colors, we’ve also added a handful of useful functions for manipulating color:

To see these in action, let’s consider an example.

The Weather data source provides the current UV index through [WEATHER.UV_INDEX]. When representing the UV index, these values are typically also assigned a color:

We want to represent this information as an Arc, not only showing the value, but also using the appropriate color. We can achieve this as follows:

<Arc centerX="0" centerY="0" height="420" width="420"
  startAngle="165" endAngle="165" direction="COUNTER_CLOCKWISE">
  <Transform target="endAngle"
    value="165 - 40 * (clamp(11, 0.0, 11.0) / 11.0)" />
  <Stroke thickness="20" color="#ffffff" cap="ROUND">
    <Transform target="color"
      value="extractColorFromWeightedColors(#97d700 #FCE300 #ff8200 #f65058 #9461c9, 3 3 2 3 1, false, clamp([WEATHER.UV_INDEX] + 0.5, 0.0, 12.0) / 12.0)" />
  </Stroke>
</Arc>

Let’s break this down:

The first Transform restricts the UV index to the range 0.0 to 11.0 and adjusts the sweep of the Arc according to that value.

The second Transform uses the new extractColorFromWeightedColors function.

The first argument is our list of colors

The second argument is a list of weights - you can see from the chart above that green covers 3 values, whereas orange only covers 2, so we use wei

Updates to the Android XR SDK: Introducing Developer Preview 2

Android Developers — Tue, 20 May 2025 19:02:20 +0000

Posted by Matthew McCullough – VP of Product Management, Android Developer

Since launching the Android XR SDK Developer Preview alongside Samsung, Qualcomm, and Unity last year, we’ve been blown away by all of the excitement we’ve been hearing from the broader Android community. Whether it's through coding live-streams or local Google Developer Group talks, it's been an outstanding experience participating in the community to build the future of XR together, and we're just getting started.

Today we’re excited to share an update to the Android XR SDK: Developer Preview 2, packed with new features and improvements to help you develop helpful and delightful immersive experiences with familiar Android APIs, tools and open standards created for XR.

At Google I/O, we have two technical sessions related to Android XR. The first is Building differentiated apps for Android XR with 3D content, which covers many features present in Jetpack SceneCore and ARCore for Jetpack XR. The future is now, with Compose and AI on Android XR covers creating XR-differentiated UI and our vision on the intersection of XR with cutting-edge AI capabilities.

Building differentiated apps for Android XR with 3D content and The future is now, with Compose and AI on Android XR

What’s new in Developer Preview 2

Since the release of Developer Preview 1, we’ve been focused on making the APIs easier to use and adding new immersive Android XR features. Your feedback has helped us shape the development of the tools, SDKs, and the platform itself.

With the Jetpack XR SDK, you can now play back 180° and 360° videos, which can be stereoscopic by encoding with the MV-HEVC specification or by encoding view-frames adjacently. The MV-HEVC standard is optimized and designed for stereoscopic video, allowing your app to efficiently play back immersive videos at great quality. Apps built with Jetpack Compose for XR can use the SpatialExternalSurface composable to render media, including stereoscopic videos.

Using Jetpack Compose for XR, you can now also define layouts that adapt to different XR display configurations. For example, use a SubspaceModifier to specify the size of a Subspace as a percentage of the device’s recommended viewing size, so a panel effortlessly fills the space it's positioned in.

Material Design for XR now supports more component overrides for TopAppBar, AlertDialog, and ListDetailPaneScaffold, helping your large-screen enabled apps that use Material Design effortlessly adapt to the new world of XR.

An app adapts to XR using Material Design for XR with the new component overrides

In ARCore for Jetpack XR, you can now track hands after requesting the appropriate permissions. Hands are a collection of 26 posed hand joints that can be used to detect hand gestures and bring a whole new level of interaction to your Android XR apps:

Hands bring a natural input method to your Android XR experience.

For more guidance on developing apps for Android XR, check out our Android XR Fundamentals codelab, the updates to our Hello Android XR sample project, and a new version of JetStream with Android XR support.

The Android XR Emulator has also received updates to stability, support for AMD GPUs, and is now fully integrated within the Android Studio UI.

The Android XR Emulator is now integrated in Android Studio

Developers using Unity have already successfully created and ported existing games and apps to Android XR. Today, you can upgrade to the Pre-Release version 2 of the Unity OpenXR: Android XR package! This update adds many performance improvements such as support for Dynamic Refresh Rate, which optimizes your app’s performance and power consumption. Shaders made with Shader Graph now support SpaceWarp, making it easier to use SpaceWarp to reduce compute load on the device. Hand meshes are now exposed with occlusion, which enables realistic hand visualization.

Check out Unity’s improved Mixed Reality template for Android XR, which now includes support for occlusion and persistent anchors.

We recently launched Android XR Samples for Unity, which demonstrate capabilities on the Android XR platform such as hand tracking, plane tracking, face tracking, and passthrough.

Google’s open-source Unity samples demonstrate platform features and show how they’re implemented

The Firebase AI Logic for Unity is now in public preview! This makes it easy for you to integrate gen AI into your apps, enabling the creation of AI-powered experiences with Gemini and Android XR. The Firebase AI Logic fully supports Gemini's capabilities, including multimodal input and output, and bi-directional streaming for immersive conversational interfaces. Built with production readiness in mind, Firebase AI Logic is integrated with core Firebase services like App Check, Remote Config, and Cloud Storage for enhanced security, configurability, and data management. Learn more about this on the Firebase blog or go straight to the Gemini API using Vertex AI in Firebase SDK documentation to get started.

Continuing to build the future together

Our commitment to open standards continues with the glTF Interactivity specification, in collaboration with the Khronos Group. which will be supported in glTF models rendered by Jetpack XR later this year. Models using the glTF Interactivity specification are self-contained interactive assets that can have many pre-programmed behaviors, like rotating objects on a button press or changing the color of a material over time.

Android XR will be available first on Samsung’s Project Moohan, launching later this year. Soon after, our partners at XREAL will release the next Android XR device. Codenamed Project Aura, it’s a portable and tethered device that gives users access to their favorite Android apps, including those that have been built for XR. It will launch as a developer edition, specifically for you to begin creating and experimenting. The best news? With the familiar tools you use to build Android apps today, you can build for these devices too.

XREAL’s Project Aura

The Google Play Store is also getting ready for Android XR. It will list supported 2D Android apps on the Android XR Play Store when it launches later this year. If you are working on an Android XR differentiated app, you can get it ready for the big launch and be one of the first differentiated apps on the Android XR Play Store:

Install and test your existing app in the Android XR Emulator
Learn how to package and distribute apps for Android XR
New! Make your XR app stand out from others on Play Store with preview assets such as stereoscopic 180° or 360° videos, as well as screenshots, app description, and non-spatial video.

And we know many of you are excited for the future of Android XR on glasses. We are shaping the developer experience now and will share more details on how you can participate later this year.

To get started creating and developing for Android XR, check out developer.android.com/develop/xr where you will find all of the tools, libraries, and resources you need to work with the Android XR SDK. In particular, try out our samples and codelabs.

We welcome your feedback, suggestions, and ideas as you’re helping shape Android XR. Your passion, expertise, and bold ideas are vital as we continue to develop Android XR together. We look forward to seeing your XR-differentiated apps when Android XR devices launch later this year!

Explore this announcement and all Google I/O 2025 updates on io.google starting May 22.

5 Ways to Customize Your WordPress Post Embeds

Thoriq Firdaus — Fri, 16 May 2025 13:00:49 +0000

WordPress introduced post embeds in version 4.4, allowing you to easily share and display WordPress posts from one site to another. When you paste a link to a WordPress post, it automatically appears as a styled preview with the title, excerpt, and featured image.

While this feature makes sharing content simple, the default look might not always match your website’s style or layout, as we can see below.

Default WordPress post embeds look

Fortunately, WordPress provides several ways to customize these embeds to better fit your design. In this article, we’ll explore different ways to tweak and personalize WordPress post embeds, so they blend seamlessly with your site.

1. Customizing the Styles

You can easily change the embed’s appearance to better match your website’s theme by adding a custom CSS file with the enqueue_embed_scripts hook, which ensures it’s loaded when the embed is displayed. You can add it in your theme’s functions.php file, for example:

add_action( 'enqueue_embed_scripts', function () {
    wp_enqueue_style(
        'my-theme-embed',
        get_theme_file_uri( 'embed.css' ),
        ['wp-embed-template']
    );
} );

This function tells WordPress to load your custom embed.css file when rendering an embedded post. Now, you can define your own styles in css/embed.css to modify the look of the embed. For example, you can adjust the typography, colors, or layout with CSS like this:

.wp-embed {
    background-color: #f9f9f9;
    border: 1px solid #eee;
    border-radius: 8px;
}

.wp-embed-featured-image img {
    border-radius: 5px;
}

With these changes, your WordPress post embeds will have a unique style that aligns with your site’s design, as shown below:

2. Customizing the Image

By default, WordPress post embeds use a predefined image size for the featured image. However, you can customize this to better match your design by specifying a different image size.

For example, if you want the embed image to be a perfect square but don’t have a square image size set up yet, you can define one using the following code in your theme’s functions.php file. This code will create a new image size called embed-square, which crops images precisely to 300×300 pixels.

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', function () {
    add_image_size( 'embed-square', 300, 300, true );
} );

Then, use the embed_thumbnail_image_size hook

add_filter( 'embed_thumbnail_image_size', function () {
    return 'embed-square';
} );

If you’ve already uploaded images before adding this code, WordPress won’t automatically generate the new embed-square size for them. To fix this, you can use the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin. This ensures that all your older featured images are available in the new size and display correctly in post embeds.

Now, your WordPress post embeds will now use the embed-square image size, as shown below:

3. Customizing the Excerpt

The post embeds also display an excerpt of the post content. However, the default length may not always fit your design or readability preferences. Fortunately, you can control how much text is shown by adjusting the excerpt length by using the excerpt_length

For example, if you want to shorten the excerpt to 18 words specifically for embeds, you can use the following code in your theme’s functions.php file:

add_filter( 'excerpt_length', function ($length) {
    return is_embed() ? 18 : $length;
} );

This code checks if the content is being displayed in an embed and, if so, limits the excerpt to 18 words. Otherwise, it keeps the default excerpt length, as shown below.

Experiment with different word counts to find the right balance in your content.

4. Adding Custom Content

By default, WordPress post embeds display basic information like the title, excerpt, and featured image. However, you might want to include additional details, such as the post’s updated date, to provide more context.

To do so, you can use the embed_content. In our case, we can add the following code in the functions.php file to display the post’s updated date:

add_action( 'embed_content', function () {
    if ( ! is_single() ) {
        return;
    }

    $updated_time = get_the_modified_time( 'U' );
    $published_time = get_the_time( 'U' );

    if ( $updated_time > $published_time ) {
        $time = sprintf(
            '<time datetime="%s">%s</time>',
            esc_attr( get_the_modified_date( 'Y-m-d' ) ),
            esc_html( get_the_modified_date() )
        );

        printf(
            '<p class="wp-embed-updated-on">%s</p>',
            sprintf(
                esc_html__( 'Updated on %s', 'devblog' ),
                $time
            )
        );
    }
} );

Now, the post embeds will display the updated date after the content, as shown below:

Displaying the updated date is helpful for readers to know if the content has been recently refreshed. This is especially useful for articles with time-sensitive information, tutorials, or news posts that may change over time.

5. Overriding Embed Templates

By default, WordPress uses a single template file called embed.php to display embedded content for all post types, including blog posts, pages, and custom post types. If you want to change how embedded content looks across your site, you can create a custom embed.php file inside your theme folder.

Additionally, WordPress lets you customize embeds for specific post types. For example, if you have a custom post type called “product” and want its embed to show extra details like price and availability without affecting other embeds you can create an embed-product.php file in your theme folder and customize it as needed.

<?php get_header( 'embed' ); ?>
<?php $product = wc_get_product( get_the_ID() ) ?>
<div id="embed-product-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class("wp-embed") ?>>
    <div class="embed-product-image">
        <?php the_post_thumbnail( 'embed-square' ); ?>
    </div>
    <div class="embed-product-details">
        <header class="embed-product-header">
            <h3 class="embed-product-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h3>
        </header>
        <div class="embed-product-content">
            <?php the_excerpt(); ?>
            <p><strong>Price</strong>: <?php echo number_format($product->get_regular_price()); ?></p>
            <p><button>Buy Now</button></p>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>
<?php get_footer( 'embed' ); ?>

Now, whenever a product post is embedded, WordPress will use this template instead of the default one.

Bonus:

Disable Post Embed for Specific Post Types

While post embeds are a useful feature for sharing content, you might want to disable them for specific posts or post types. For example, you may have private content that you don’t want to be embedded on other sites.

To disable post embeds for a specific post, you can use the embed_oembed_html filter to return an empty string.

Here’s an example of how you can disable post embeds for page post type.

add_filter( 'embed_oembed_html', function ( $html, $url, $attr, $post_id ) {
    if ( get_post_type( $post_id ) === 'page' ) {
        return '';
    }

    return $html;
}, 10, 4 );

Wrapping up

WordPress post embeds make it easy to share content between websites. In this article, we explored several ways to customize how these embeds look, so they match your site’s design and include extra details for your readers. Now, you can try these techniques to create embeds that look better and make your content more engaging.

The post 5 Ways to Customize Your WordPress Post Embeds appeared first on Hongkiat.

Secure Secret Management with 1Password CLI

Thoriq Firdaus — Thu, 15 May 2025 13:00:37 +0000

As developers, we often deal with sensitive data like API keys, SSH credentials, database passwords, and other secrets. Keeping them secure while ensuring easy access across different projects can be a challenge.

This is where 1Password‘s’ CLI comes in.

1Password CLI is a command-line tool that allows you to securely access and manage your 1Password vault without leaving the terminal. Instead of manually copying and pasting secrets, which can be tedious and risky, you can fetch credentials programmatically, automate authentication workflows, and integrate secrets management into your development processes.

In this article, we’ll explore how to install, configure, and use 1Password CLI to streamline your workflow while keeping your credentials secure.

Getting Started

If you’re on macOS or Linux, the easiest way to install 1Password CLI is using Homebrew:

brew install 1password-cli

If you’re on Windows, I recommend referring to the official 1Password CLI documentation for installation instructions.

For Windows and Linux, follow the official 1Password CLI installation guide to get the appropriate setup for your system.

Once installed, go to Settings… > Developer in the 1Password app, and check Integrate with 1Password CLI.

Then, sign in through the Terminal with the following command and select the 1Password account you want to sign in to:

op signin

Now, you’re ready to securely access and manage secrets without exposing them in plain text.

Command-Line Secret Management

When running commands that require authentication, manually copying and pasting credentials can be both tedious and insecure. With 1Password CLI, you can retrieve secrets dynamically using the op read command and the Secret References.

To get the Secret Reference, you can click on the dropdown arrow of the value within the item you’d like to refer to in 1Password.

Then pass it in the command that requires the secrets. For example, to authenticate with doctl using the DigitalOcean API token, you can run:

doctl auth init --access-token $(op read op://Internet/d439ada/token)

Environment Variables Integration

Another way you can use 1Password CLI is by setting the secrets as environment variables. This is useful when working with multiple secrets or when you need to pass them to a script or a program.

If you’re using Chromatic to test your UI components, you can set the CHROMATIC_PROJECT_TOKEN as an environment variable using the op read command:

#!/bin/bash
export NPM_TOKEN=$(op read op://Internet/d439ada/npm_token)
export CHROMATIC_PROJECT_TOKEN=$(op read op://Internet/d439ada/chromatic_token)

// Install the dependencies, including the private ones that require NPM_TOKEN.
npm install

// Chormatic will automatically use the CHROMATIC_PROJECT_TOKEN.
// @see https://www.chromatic.com/docs/cli/#continuous-integration
npx chromatic

Then, you can run the script using the op run command, as follows:

op run -- bash chormatic.sh

Shell Plugin Extensions

To make it even more seamless, you can use the Shell Plugins to integrate 1Password with popular third-party apps such as Github CLI, Docker, DigitalOcean CLI, AWS, HuggingFace, OpenAI, and many more.

In this example, we are going to try to integrate it with the Github CLI. To do so, we can run:

op plugin init gh

You’ll be prompted to import your GitHub credentials into 1Password or select an existing 1Password item where your credentials are saved. In this case, since we’ve already saved the GitHub credentials in 1Password, we can select the existing item.

Then, it will ask you the scope where the selected credentials can be used. In this case, we’d select it to use it globally so that we can use it across different repositories.

If this is your first time installing a shell plugin, you’ll need to add the source command to your RC file or shell profile to persist the plugin beyond the current terminal session. For example:

echo "source /Users/jondoe/.config/op/plugins.sh" >> ~/.zshrc && source ~/.zshrc

That’s it for the setup! Now, you can use the gh command to interact with GitHub without exposing your credentials in plain text. To test it out you can run the gh auth status.

Conclusion

1Password CLI is a powerful tool that allows you to securely access and manage your secrets from the Terminal. With a little bit of setup, you can streamline your workflow and integrate secrets management into your development processes with other apps without exposing your credentials in plain text. If you haven’t tried it yet, I recommend giving it a try to make your development workflow more secure and efficient.

The post Secure Secret Management with 1Password CLI appeared first on Hongkiat.

10+ Best Burner Email Providers

Gina Mark — Thu, 15 May 2025 10:00:39 +0000

A burner email, also known as a disposable email, is a temporary address that is used in place of your primary email. Think of it as a protective shield for your real email, keeping it safe from unwanted spam and potential data breaches.

Why Would You Need a Burner Email?

Let’s be honest – we’ve all been there. You want to download that cool PDF guide or try out a new app, but they’re asking for your email address. Sure, you could use your main email, but do you really want to deal with the inevitable flood of marketing emails that follows?

This is where burner emails come to the rescue. They’re perfect for:

Testing out new services without committing your real email address
Signing up for one-time downloads or temporary access to content
Protecting your privacy when you’re not sure about a website’s trustworthiness
Avoiding spam in your primary inbox

How Do Burner Emails Work?

Think of a burner email like a disposable phone number – it works just like your regular email but is designed to be temporary. When you use a burner email service, you get a unique email address that forwards messages to your real inbox (if you want it to), or you can check messages directly on the provider’s website.

Choosing the Right Burner Email Service

Before we dive into our list of providers, here’s what you should consider when picking a burner email service:

Duration: Do you need it for 10 minutes or 10 months?
Features: Some services offer email forwarding, while others provide a temporary inbox
Ease of use: Look for services that don’t require complex setup
Price: While many are free, some premium services offer extra features worth considering

Now that you understand the basics, let’s explore some of the best burner email providers available today. We’ve tested and compiled a list of services that cater to different needs and preferences.

Best Burner Email Providers

SimpleLogin: A service that provides burner emails with a full subscription running at 0 per year.

Burner Mail: As the name suggests, this service specializes in providing burner emails. It’s slightly cheaper than SimpleLogin.

ProtonMail: This service offers more than just disposable emails, especially if you upgrade to a premium account.

10 Minute Mail: A quick, simple, and effective service ideal for use with sites that require verification.

Temp-Mail: A secure disposable email service. Offers a premium option for folks wanting more features.

EmailOnDeck: This service is known for its simplicity and effectiveness in providing temporary emails.

Guerrilla Mail: A popular choice for temporary email addresses.

Maildrop: Another service that provides free disposable email addresses.

Hushmail: This service is more business-oriented, with pricing starting at .99 per user per month for small businesses and nonprofits.

YOPmail: YOPmail provides temporary, anonymous, free, secure, disposable email address.

Mailinator: Mailinator lets you use any email address @mailinator.com and pick up the mail at its site.

TrashMail: This service forwards all mail to your real email address and allows you to make unlimited disposable addresses.

While these services can help protect your privacy, they should not be used for sensitive communications since the emails can be read by the service provider.

Frequently Asked Questions About Burner Emails

Is Burner email free?

Yes, many burner email services offer free basic features. Services like 10 Minute Mail, Temp-Mail, and Guerrilla Mail are completely free. However, premium services like SimpleLogin and Burner Mail offer additional features like custom domains, unlimited aliases, and better privacy protection for a subscription fee.

Can burner emails be traced?

While burner emails provide a layer of anonymity, they aren’t completely untraceable. The level of privacy depends on the service provider and their logging policies. Premium services often offer better privacy features and fewer logs. For maximum privacy, consider using a VPN alongside your burner email.

How long does a burner email last?

The duration varies by service. Some temporary emails last for just 10 minutes (like 10 Minute Mail), others for 24 hours, and some premium services let you keep the address as long as you want. Many services also allow you to extend the duration or delete the address manually when you’re done.

Can I receive attachments with burner emails?

Most burner email services support receiving attachments, but there are usually size limitations. Free services typically have stricter limits (often 10MB or less), while paid services may offer larger attachment capabilities. Always check the service’s limitations before using it for receiving important files.

Are burner emails legal?

Yes, using burner emails is legal for legitimate purposes like protecting your privacy or reducing spam. However, using them for fraud, harassment, or other malicious activities is illegal. Always follow the service provider’s terms of use and local laws.

Can I send emails from a burner address?

This depends on the service. Some basic free services only allow receiving emails, while others provide full sending capabilities. Premium services typically offer more reliable sending features and may even let you reply from different aliases.

What happens to emails after the burner address expires?

When a burner email expires, any emails sent to that address will typically bounce back to the sender. Most services automatically delete all associated data and messages for privacy reasons. Some premium services may offer message archiving options before expiration.

The post 10+ Best Burner Email Providers appeared first on Hongkiat.

20 Best Business WordPress Themes

Nancy Young — Wed, 14 May 2025 07:00:46 +0000

Selecting the right WordPress themes is crucial for any business aiming to establish a robust online presence. This article showcases 20 exceptional WordPress themes, catering to a diverse range of business needs. Whether you’re a startup, a small business, or a large corporation, you’ll find themes here that are tailored to your unique requirements.

Our curated list includes both free and premium WordPress themes, ensuring that you can find a perfect match regardless of your budget. Each theme is designed with functionality and aesthetics in mind, making it easier for you to create a website that not only looks professional but also resonates with your brand identity.

Let’s explore these themes and find the one that aligns best with your business vision.

Free Business WordPress Themes

BoostUp Business

Boostup Business transforms the way businesses and consultants build their online presence. It’s a Full Site Editing (FSE) WordPress theme that excels in creating both dynamic business websites and captivating blogs.

With its modern, elegant design, it offers a plethora of customization features. The theme adapts beautifully across various devices, ensuring a seamless experience on any screen size.

Plus, it’s built with SEO and mobile-friendly aspects, giving your site an edge in online performance.

Bosa Business Services

Bosa Business Services, branching from the versatile Bosa, caters to a broad spectrum of websites, ranging from e-commerce to fashion and more. This multipurpose theme melds aesthetics with speed and lightness, ensuring a responsive experience.

It’s highly customizable, compatible with Gutenberg and Elementor page builders, making it simple to materialize your vision. Prioritizing SEO, speed, and user-friendliness, it offers diverse header and footer designs, ready-to-use starter sites, and works seamlessly with key plugins like WooCommerce and Yoast.

Its adaptability and user-friendliness make it an excellent choice for any business-oriented site. You can explore its capabilities in the Bosa Business Services Demo.

Business Chat

Business Chat is a free WordPress theme perfect for a variety of sites, including businesses, online shops, personal blogs, and journalistic outlets. Its minimalist design is both clean and modern, making it a great fit for corporate, fashion, food, travel, and lifestyle sites.

With SEO optimization, it helps your content rank better in search engines. Features like sidebars and widgets are ideal for displaying Adsense, affiliate links, or author information.

This theme is not only lightweight and customizable but also works smoothly with page builders like Elementor and Divi Builder. Its compatibility with WooCommerce adds e-commerce functionality, making it suitable for startups, agencies, and portfolios.

The theme is mobile-friendly, translation-ready, and supports schema markup. A key feature is its live chat integration with JoinChat for real-time customer engagement.

Business Conference

Business Conference Theme is a go-to free WordPress theme for events and conferences. Designed specifically for business meetups, technology conferences, and product launches, it’s compatible with WP Event Manager plugin and integrates well with popular page builders.

It’s responsive, supports multiple browsers, and is translation-ready and SEO-optimized. With dedicated customer support, it’s an ideal choice for any event-focused website.

Business FSE

Business FSE is a dynamic Full Site Editing WordPress theme, ideal for a range of business sectors including startups, law firms, and agencies. Leveraging the power of WordPress’s block editor, it enables the creation of eye-catching designs without the need for coding.

This theme offers an array of pre-designed templates and patterns, addressing various business requirements and goals. Known for its rapid loading times, Business FSE enhances both user experience and SEO performance.

It is search engine optimized, featuring clean code and compatibility with major SEO plugins. The interface is user-friendly, facilitating the implementation of SEO best practices. Consistency in responsive browsing across all devices ensures your website looks impeccable on any screen.

Explore more about Business FSE through its demo, and access documentation or support as needed.

Business Growth X

The theme is SEO-optimized, boosting your content’s search engine visibility. It supports popular page builders such as Elementor and Divi Builder, offering design flexibility. With WooCommerce compatibility, it enables e-commerce features and includes schema markup for improved online visibility.

Mobile-friendly and translation-ready, Business Growth X is great for bloggers, startups, and anyone aiming for a professional online look. Explore Business Growth X for a customizable web experience.

Business Guidance Coach

Business Guidance Coach is a WordPress theme crafted specifically for business coaches, consultants, and mentors. It provides a polished and complete platform to showcase expertise and offer advice to emerging entrepreneurs and leaders.

The theme’s design is sleek and user-friendly, reflecting the professionalism of business coaches and facilitating easy interaction. It’s responsive across various devices, extending its reach to a broader audience.

Customizable to align with personal branding, it enhances each user’s unique identity. Supporting multimedia integration, it enriches interactions between coaches and their audience, making it an ideal choice for professionals in business coaching.

Cube Business

Cube Business is a WordPress theme based on Elementor, fitting for agencies, businesses, and financial sites. It boasts a modern, responsive layout with excellent typography, prioritizing readability and user experience.

Its compatibility with Elementor Page Builder makes it user-friendly, even for beginners, by removing the need for CSS or HTML skills. Cube Business is ideal for those who want an easy, yet powerful theme for a professional online presence.

FSE Business Blocks

FSE Business Blocks delivers a simple yet elegant solution for WordPress website creation. It features a clean design and a comprehensive set of features, including hero sections, portfolio showcases, prominent call-to-action buttons, and client testimonials.

Suitable for business sites, personal brands, or creative projects, FSE Business Blocks is designed for quick and effective website launches. It combines functionality with aesthetic appeal, making it a prime choice for establishing a prominent online presence.

Goldy Business

Goldy Business is a WordPress theme that blends a modern aesthetic with user-friendly functionality. It’s adaptable for a variety of websites, featuring an appealing design and numerous features like a featured slider, sections for about, portfolio, team, services, sponsors, and testimonials.

The theme also includes a sticky header, social information, a sidebar, and excerpt options. These features are responsive and easily customizable, allowing Goldy Business to meet your specific requirements, providing an effortless experience for both site owners and visitors.

Premium Business WordPress Themes

AhaShop

AhaShop is tailored for small to medium-sized online fashion stores, making it a prime choice for businesses dealing in clothing for all ages, along with shoes, watches, jewelry, handbags, and accessories.

This WordPress theme streamlines the creation of online fashion stores with tools like WPBakery Page Builder, Flexible Slider, compatibility with the latest versions of WooCommerce and WordPress, Bootstrap CSS framework, a shop grid layout, a mega menu, and a mobile-friendly design.

AhaShop is dedicated to facilitating a quick and easy setup for online fashion businesses, offering a swift solution for launching fashion products online.

Preview theme

Cena Store

TB Cena Store is a flexible WooCommerce WordPress Theme, offering a variety of powerful customization options. It’s particularly effective for electronics online stores but versatile enough for various purposes.

The theme excels in SEO, boosting your site’s visibility on search engines. It’s fully responsive, ensuring a seamless shopping experience across all devices. Cena Store provides more than 10 different homepage designs, giving you ample choices to find the ideal match for your needs.

The One-click import feature simplifies the process of importing content, widgets, sliders, menus, and customization settings.

Preview theme

Fildisi

Fildisi is a WordPress theme that serves a wide range of users, from corporations to freelancers, agencies, photographers, designers, and bloggers.

Designed to spark creativity, it allows for unique layouts that break from traditional design norms. Fildisi adapts to your creative demands, offering the freedom to craft distinct and striking layouts for any purpose.

It’s a top choice for those who prioritize design flexibility and aim to make a strong visual statement with their website.

Preview theme

Hermes

Hermes is a WooCommerce theme that excels in versatility, fitting a wide range of e-commerce websites.

It offers various layouts for home and product pages, providing extensive customization possibilities. Beyond e-commerce, Hermes serves business, creative, news, and corporate sites effectively.

Its features include a responsive layout, mega menu, page builder, Slider Revolution, product quick view, and one-click installation. Designed for ease of use, Hermes allows you to create websites without coding skills, making it perfect for those looking for a professional and flexible WordPress theme.

Preview theme

Krowd

Krowd is a WordPress theme designed for crowdfunding, charity, nonprofit, NGO, and donation websites, as well as other business and non-profit ventures.

Tailored to meet all aspects of crowdfunding, Krowd includes essential features for successful fundraising campaigns. Fully responsive and optimized for conversion rates, it offers high-resolution graphics and easy customization.

Key features include Elementor Page Builder, Slider Revolution, WooCommerce, MailChimp, and the Events Calendar. With its advanced control panel and use of technologies like Bootstrap 4, SASS, HTML5, CSS3, and Font Awesome, Krowd is ideal for creating impactful crowdfunding or charity websites.

Preview theme

NowaDays

NowaDays is a multi-purpose WordPress theme suitable for creative agencies, portfolios, blogs, and showcases, whether as a multi-page or a one-page layout.

It features the Unyson drag-and-drop Page Builder and a comprehensive Theme Options panel, making site building accessible without programming skills. The theme offers a range of Page Builder elements to make your site unique.

NowaDays is designed to effectively showcase products or services, making it a great choice for those seeking a user-friendly, standout WordPress theme for their creative or business projects.

Preview theme

Okab

Okab is a multipurpose WordPress theme noted for its excellent performance. Responsive, user-friendly, and fast-loading, it’s adaptable for a variety of websites including business, finance, consulting, personal blogs, shops, photography, and events.

The theme boasts over 275 stylish elements and numerous features, all customizable with an advanced visual builder that doesn’t require coding skills. Okab’s modern design and adaptability make it a top choice for creating a professional and diverse online presence.

Preview theme

Pheromone

Pheromone is a modern, minimalist WordPress theme, perfect for crafting a simple, fast-loading business or personal site.

Tailored for developers, designers, bloggers, and creatives, it offers an easy-to-use and efficient platform. With a focus on simplicity and speed, combined with aesthetic appeal, Pheromone is ideal for those looking for a clean and effective online presence.

Preview theme

Tool Name	Features	Pricing	Platform
Typorama	Create stunning text-based designs with no design skills needed.	Free; Pro starts at $1.99.	iOS
Text Art	Design posters, flyers, and social media posts quickly and easily.	Free; Premium starts at $2.99.	iOS
TENADA	Create logos, collages, and video posts with 3D effects and templates.	Free; Pro starts at $4.99/month.	iOS, Android
Word Swag	Turn text and photos into stunning designs with pre-made layouts.	Free; Pro starts at $4.99.	iOS
Leto	Create eye-catching Instagram stories, posts, and reels with fonts and effects.	Free; Premium starts at $4.99.	iOS, Android
Art Word	Transform photos into creative designs with text, stamps, and effects.	Free with in-app purchases.	iOS, Android
Font Candy	Add text and artwork to photos for social media and merch designs.	Free; Premium features via in-app purchases.	iOS
Fontspiration	Create custom text designs and animations for social media.	Free.	iOS

video content

Start building for the next generation of Samsung Galaxy devices

Unfold your app’s adaptive potential on Samsung’s newest Galaxy devices

Build for a more personal and expressive era with Wear OS 6

Get started building across screens, from foldables to wearables

Transition to using 16 KB page sizes for Android apps and games using Android Studio

Get ready to upgrade your app's performance as Android embraces 16 KB memory page sizes

Android’s transition to 16 KB Page size

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Detect compatibility issues

Build with 16 KB alignment

Fix code for page-size agnosticism

Test in a 16 KB environment

Don't wait – prepare your apps today

Evolving Android’s early-access programs: Introducing the Canary channel

Limitations of the previous developer preview model

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Getting started and providing feedback

Level up your game: Google Play's Indie Games Fund in Latin America returns for its 4th year

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Get ready for the next generation of gameplay powered by Play Games Services

Drive discovery and engagement by rewarding gameplay progress

Increase retention with tailored promotions

Start implementing PGS features today

Migration guide

Looking ahead, more opportunities powered by PGS

Top 3 updates for Android developer productivity at Google I/O ‘25

#1 Agentic AI is available for Gemini in Android Studio

#2 Build better apps faster with the latest stable release of Jetpack Compose

#3 The new Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) shared module template helps you share business logic

Top announcements to know from Google Play at I/O ‘25

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#3: New grace period and account hold duration: Decreasing involuntary churn

Fresh Resources for Web Designers and Developers (June 2025)

Click Here for More Resources

How Mecha BREAK is driving PC-only growth on Google Play Games

Building momentum with pre-registration

Accelerating growth with the Native PC program

Delivering a secure and high quality PC experience

Bring your game to Google Play Games on PC

Agentic AI takes Gemini in Android Studio to the next level

Agent Mode

Top 3 things to know for AI on Android at Google I/O ‘25

#1 Leverage the efficiency of Gemini Nano for on-device AI experiences

#2 Seamlessly integrate on-device ML/AI with your own custom models

#3 Power your Android apps with Gemini Flash, Pro and Imagen using Firebase AI Logic

Get inspired and start building with AI on Android today

New in-car app experiences

Gemini for Cars

New developer programs and tools

The road ahead

Announcing Kotlin Multiplatform Shared Module Template

A single code base for business logic

KMP enthusiasm

Large scale KMP adoptions

KMP was designed for Android development

Come check it out at KotlinConf

Get started with KMP Shared Module Template

On-device GenAI APIs as part of ML Kit help you easily build with Gemini Nano

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How GenAI APIs are built

Evaluating quality of GenAI APIs

Sample usage

Use cases

GenAI API in production

Supported devices

Learn more

Peacock built adaptively on Android to deliver great experiences across screens

Adapting to more flexible form factors

Building a future-proof experience with Jetpack Compose

Preparing for immersive entertainment experiences

Build adaptive apps

What's New in Jetpack Compose

New Features

Material Expressive

Adaptive layouts library

Performance

Stability