Google Play Services 4.0

Cross-posted from the Android Developers Blog

Today we're launching a new release of Google Play services. Version 4.0 includes the Google Mobile Ads SDK, and offers improvements to geofencing, Google+, and Google Wallet Instant Buy APIs.

With over 97% of devices now running Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) or newer platform versions, we’re dropping support for Froyo from this release of the Google Play services SDK in order to make it possible to offer more powerful APIs in the future. That means you will not be able to utilize these new APIs on devices running Android 2.2 (Froyo).

We’re still in the process of rolling out to Android devices across the world, but you can already download the latest Google Play services SDK and start developing against the new APIs using the new Android 4.4 (KitKat) emulator.

Google Mobile Ads

If you’re using AdMob to monetize your apps, the new Google Mobile Ads SDK in Google Play services helps provide seamless improvements to your users. For example, bug fixes get pushed automatically to users without you having to do anything. Check out the post on the Google Ads Developer Blog for more details.

Maps and Location Based Services

The Maps and Geofencing APIs that launched in Google Play services 3.1 have been updated to improve overall battery efficiency and responsiveness.

You can save power by requesting larger latency values for notifications alerting your app to users entering or exiting geofences, or request that entry alerts are sent only after a user stays within a geofence for a specified period of time. Setting generous dwell times helps to eliminate unwanted notifications when a user passes near a geofence or their location is seen to move across a boundary.

The Maps API enhances map customization features, letting you specify marker opacity, fade-in effects, and visibility of 3D buildings. It’s also now possible to change ground overlay images.

Google+ and Google Wallet Instant Buy

Apps that are enabled with Google+ Sign-In will be updated with a simplified sign-in consent dialog. Google Wallet Instant Buy APIs are now available to everyone to try out within a sandbox, with a simplified API that streamlines the buy-flow and reduces integration time.

Google Wallet Instant Buy also includes new Wallet Objects, which means you can award loyalty points to a user's saved rewards program ID for each applicable Google Wallet Instant Buy purchase.

New user control over advertising identifier

To give users better controls and to provide you with a simple, standard system to continue to monetize your apps, this update contains a new, anonymous identifier for advertising purposes (to be used in place of Android ID). Google Settings now includes user controls that enable users to reset this identifier, or opt out of interest-based ads for Google Play apps.

More About Google Play Services

To learn more about Google Play services and the APIs available to you through it, visit the Google Services area of the Android Developers site.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Google Cloud SQL is now accessible from just about any application, anywhere

By Joe Faith, Product Manager

Cross-posted from the Google Cloud Platform Blog

Google Cloud SQL is a fully managed MySQL service hosted on Google Cloud Platform. Today, we are embracing open standards and expanding customers’ choice of tools, technologies and architectures by adding support for native MySQL connections.

MySQL Wire Protocol is the standard connection protocol for MySQL databases. It lets you access your replicated, managed, Cloud SQL database from just about any application, running anywhere. Here are some of the top features enabled by the MySQL Wire Protocol:

• Low latency connections from applications running on Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine
• Use all your favourite tools such as MySQL Workbench, Toad and the MySQL command-line tool to manage your Cloud SQL instances
• Use standard drivers, such as Connector/J, Connector/ODBC, and Connector/NET, making it exceptionally easy to access Cloud SQL from most applications
• Replication to external MySQL databases for low latency connections and easy migration

Native connectivity also gives you great flexibility and control over managing and deploying your cloud databases. For example, you can use DBMoto from HiTSW to replicate data between Cloud SQL and on-premise databases -- including Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2. And you can use DBShards from CodeFutures to manage sharding across Cloud SQL instances, and migrate on- and off-cloud with no downtime.

Genoo, a SaaS provider of online marketing tools, has already put wire protocol support to use. They were outgrowing their existing cloud services provider, but were worried about migrating a live application to another environment. So Kim Albee, Genoo’s founder and President, turned to DBShards who used native connectivity to migrate Genoo’s database without any service disruption. She said, "I've been amazed by what Cloud SQL's support for native connections can do. Before this feature, migrating between cloud providers would have been too costly."

You can read more about how they did it in this case study, or learn more about Cloud SQL.


Joe Faith is a Product Manager on the Google Cloud Team. In a previous life he was a researcher in machine learning, bioinformatics, and information visualization, and was founder of charity fundraising site Fundraising Skills.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

A new look for managing your APIs

By Akshay Kannan, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform

Back in 2010, we launched the Google APIs Console, enabling you to manage multiple Google APIs from a single, centralized console.

Today, we are introducing the Google Cloud Console, our next evolution of the APIs Console. The new Google Cloud Console makes managing the over 60 Google APIs housed within easier than ever. It brings an entirely new visual design and integrates tightly with our Cloud Platform services, enabling you to manage an end-to-end application deployment. For the past few weeks, we've given you the ability to opt in to the new experience, and starting soon we'll be making it the default (with the ability to go back to the old experience if you prefer).

You'll notice an entirely new visual design, a hierarchical navigation, and even a friendly new URL structure.

We’ve also simplified the process of getting API credentials. Now, you can register an app on the platform you are building on, then see all the possible credential types for your application, making it easier to quickly grab the credentials you need.

If you haven't already, give the new Cloud Console a shot. We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback in the comments section below.

Akshay Kannan is a Product Manager on the Google Cloud Console team. His focus is on providing an integrated, beautiful developer experience for all Google Developers.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

New AdSense data in the Analytics Core Reporting API

By Nick Mihailovksi, Product Manager, Google Analytics API Team

Cross-posted from the Google Analytics Blog

Google AdSense is a free, simple way for website publishers to earn money by displaying targeted Google ads on their websites. Today, we’ve added the ability to access AdSense data from the Google Analytics Core Reporting API. The AdSense and Analytics integration allows publishers to gain richer data and insights, leading to better optimized ad space and a higher return on investment.

In the past, accessing AdSense data using the Analytics Core Reporting API has been a top feature request. We’ve now added 8 new AdSense metrics to the Analytics Core Reporting API, enabling publishers to streamline their analysis.

Answering Business Questions
You can now answer the following business questions using these API queries:

Which pages on your site contribute most to your AdSense revenue?

dimensions=ga:pagePath

&metrics=ga:adsenseCTR,ga:adsenseRevenue,ga:adsenseECPM &sort=-ga:adsenseRevenue

Test in query explorer

Which pages generate a high number of pageviews but aren't monetizing as well as other pages?

dimensions=ga:pagePath

&metrics=ga:pageviews,ga:adsenseCTR

&sort=-ga:pageviews

Test in query explorer

Which traffic sources contribute to your revenue?

dimensions=ga:sourceMedium

&metrics=ga:adsenseCTR,ga:adsenseRevenue,ga:adsenseECPM

&sort=-ga:adsenseRevenue

Test in query explorer

Reporting Automation

By accessing this data through the API, you can now automate reporting and spend more time doing analysis. You can also use the API to integrate data from multiple sites into a single dashboard, build corporate dashboards to share across the team, and use the API to integrate data into CRM tools that display AdSense Ads.

Getting Started

To learn more about the new AdSense data, take a look at our Google Analytics Dimensions and Metrics Explorer. You can also test the API with your data by building queries in the Google Analytics Query Explorer.

Busy? In that case, now’s a great time to try these Analytics API productivity tools:

• Magic Script: A Google Spreadsheets script to automate importing Analytics data into Spreadsheets, allowing for easy data manipulation. No coding required!
• Google Analytics superProxy: An App Engine application that reduces all the complexity of authorization.

We hope this new data will be useful, and we're looking forward to seeing what new reports developers build.

Nick Mihailovski oversees the Google Analytics APIs. In his spare time, he likes to travel around the world.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

GDL Weekly: web compression, startups feeling lucky, SQL vs. NoSQL

By Louis Gray, Program Manager, Google Developers Live

Cross-posted from +Google Developers

Take a few minutes and catch what's new on Google Developers Live.



You can go directly to the videos mentioned:

• Root Access: Viewer questions, patents, skunkworks, safe harbor http://goo.gl/y9xEqe
• Root Access Berlin: SQL vs. NoSQL http://goo.gl/wh14q0
• YouTube: Troubleshooting your OAuth token http://goo.gl/wh14q0
• GZIP is not enough! http://goo.gl/LevTIY
• Root Access: the Intersection of Skill and Luck http://goo.gl/b2bNdZ
• Platform as a Service: App.net http://goo.gl/pkqZhp
• Android http://goo.gl/iZfGi3

To make sure you don't miss a single event, subscribe to Google Developers on YouTube or just click the red YouTube button on the right nav, and check us out at http://developers.google.com/live.

+Louis Gray is a Program Manager on Google's Developer Relations Team, running Google Developers Live. He believes life is but a (live) stream.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Fridaygram: free web expression, million-year disk, media tools

By +Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog Editor

The web opens up communication possibilities that never existed before. But with more people doing more on the web come new challenges for keeping these new channels open and free from censorship. Hugo Landa, Cubanet Executive Director puts it this way: “Today, access to the Internet equals freedom of expression”. Last week Google Ideas hosted a summit on this subject entitled “Conflict in a Connected World”.



One concrete outcome of the summit is a set of tools to help people who are facing online censorship. These tools include the Digital Attack Map, which visualizes DDoS attacks, Project Shield, which actively helps protect against DDoS, and a new browser extension that enables a group to build a trusted connection to the Web. We hope these tools will help keep web speech free.

If you express yourself via digital storage, there’s a new technology to make sure that what you say can stay around for a long time. A team at the University of Twente in the Netherlands has built a disk designed to store data reliably for a million years or more. Researchers studied the processes that corrupt data over time, and then built a disk out of silicon nitride and tungsten designed to withstand the corruption. They developed accelerated aging tests that proved their ideas for now, but we’ll await the final results that will be available in about a million years.

Finally, it was a big week for new toolsets. We also launched Google Media Tools, a destination for journalists and news organizations. Google Media Tools includes sites and apps to help with collecting information, visualizing data, publishing, and our favorite, developing your own tools. Even if you’re not a pro journalist but are interested in how you can use Google stuff to learn what’s happening and tell others about it, you might want to check out this nicely organized site.


We make tools, you make tools, the web rules! Fridaygram is here to inform you, but it’s mostly for a fun weekly break from your coding chores. Thanks to friend of the blog Adam Feldman for this week’s million-year-disk info.

Improvements for CardDAV

By Hakson Teh, Tech Lead

In June, we announced that CardDAV -- an open standard for accessing contact information across the web – was available to everyone.

Today, we’re adding several new features that improve the user experience:

• High resolution contact photos, which enables syncing of full-screen photos used by some mobile devices including iPhones (previously we supported 96x96 thumbnails).
• Sync-Collections, which improves battery life for mobile users by reducing the amount of data exchanged.
• POST support, which reduces mobile data usage when creating new contacts.
• For Google Apps users, searching the domain’s Global Address List.

Most of these features are available today with Apple iOS 7 devices that sync with Google Contacts. You can find more information about these features in the Developer’s Guide.


+Hakson Teh is the Tech Lead for the Google CardDAV API. His current focus is to provide a great contacts sync experience with Google products for both developers and users.

Posted by +Scott Knaster, Editor