Posted by William Denniss, Product Manager, Identity and Authentication
The Identity team is constantly striving to help Google users sign-in to third-party applications with their Google account in a secure and seamless way, and enable users to share select information from their account such as their calendar or contact information with other apps, when they wish to do so.
Under the hood these interactions happen via OAuth requests, and over the years Google has supported a number of ways for developers to implement OAuth flows with us. With improved security and usability in mind, we will soon be ending the support for one of these ways. In the coming months, we will no longer allow OAuth requests to Google in embedded browsers known as “web-views”, such as the WebView UI element on Android and UIWebView/WKWebView on iOS, and equivalents on Windows and OS X.
In contrast, the outdated method of using embedded browsers for OAuth means a user must sign-in to Google each time, instead of using the existing logged-in session from the device. The device browser also provides improved security as apps are able to inspect and modify content in a web-view, but not content shown in the browser.
To help you migrate, we offer libraries and samples that follow modern best practices which you can use:
You can also read protocol-level documentation for our standards-based support of OAuth for Native Apps, and an IETF best current practice draft on this topic.
Versions of Google Sign-In on iOS prior to version 3.0 don’t support the current industry best practices of the in-app browser tab, and therefore are also deprecated. If you use Google Sign-In, please update to the latest version to get all the recent security and usability improvements. For now, this policy does not remove our support of WebView on iOS 8, however we may start to display notices encouraging users to upgrade their device for better security.
The rollout schedule for the deprecation of web-views for OAuth requests to Google is as follows. Starting October 20, 2016, we will prevent new OAuth clients from using web-views on platforms with a viable alternative, and will phase in user-facing notices for existing OAuth clients. On April 20, 2017, we will start blocking OAuth requests using web-views for all OAuth clients on platforms where viable alternatives exist.
If you have any questions with the migration, please post to Stack Overflow tagged with “google-oauth”.
Posted by Roy Glasberg Global Lead, Launchpad Accelerator
We’re heading to the city of San Francisco this September to open a new space for developers and startups. With over 14,000 sq. ft. at 301 Howard Street, we’ll have more than enough elbow room to train, educate and collaborate with local and international developers and startups.
The space will hold a range of events: Google Developer Group community meetups, Codelabs, Design Sprints, and Tech Talks. It will also host the third class of Launchpad Accelerator, our equity-free accelerator for startups in emerging markets. During each class, over 20 Google teams provide comprehensive mentoring to late-stage app startups who seek to scale and become leaders in their local markets. The 3-month program starts with an all-expenses-paid two week bootcamp at Google HQ.
Developers are in an ever-changing landscape and seek technical training. We’ve also seen a huge surge in the number of developers starting their own companies. Lastly, this is an unique opportunity to bridge the gap between Silicon Valley and emerging markets. To date Launchpad Accelerator has nearly 50 alumni in India, Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico. Startups in these markets are tackling critical local problems, but they often lack access to the resources and network we have here. This dedicated space will enable us to regularly engage with developers and serve their evolving needs, whether that is to build a product, grow a company or make revenue.
We can’t wait to get started and work with developers to build successful businesses that have a positive impact locally and globally.
Sam Thorogood, Developer Programs Engineer
Today, we're announcing that the open source version of Google's Santa Tracker has been updated with the Android and web experiences that ran in December 2015. We extended, enhanced and upgraded our code, and you can see how we used our developer products - including Firebase and Polymer - to build a fun, educational and engaging experience.
To get started, you can check out the code on GitHub at google/santa-tracker-web and google/santa-tracker-android. Both repositories include instructions so you can build your own version.
Santa Tracker isn’t just about watching Santa’s progress as he delivers presents on December 24. Visitors can also have fun with the winter-inspired experiences, games and educational content by exploring Santa's Village while Santa prepares for his big journey throughout the holidays.
Below is a summary of what we’ve released as open source.
We hope that this update inspires you to make your own magical experiences based on all the interesting and exciting components that came together to make Santa Tracker!
Posted by Sean Kirmani, Software Engineering Intern, Tango
Augmented reality scenes, where a virtual object is placed in a real environment, can surprise and delight people whether they’re playing with dominoes or trying to catch monsters. But without support for environmental lighting, these virtual objects can stick out rather than blend in with their environments. Ambient lighting should bleed onto an object, real objects should be seen in reflective surfaces, and shade should darken a virtual object.
Tango-enabled devices can see the world like we do, and they’re designed to bring mobile augmented reality closer to real reality. To help bring virtual objects to life, we’ve updated the Tango Unity SDK to enable developers to add environmental lighting to their Tango apps. Here’s how to get started:
Before we begin, you’ll need to download the Tango Unity SDK. Then you can follow the steps below to make your reality a little brighter.
Step 1: Create a new Unity project and import the Tango SDK package into the project.
Step 2: Create a new scene. If you need help with this, check out the solar system tutorial from a previous post. Then you’ll add Tango Manager and Tango AR Camera prefabs to your scene and remove the default Main Camera game object. Also remove the artificial directional light. We won’t need that anymore. After doing this, you should see the scene hierarchy like this:
Step 3: In the Tango Manager game object, you’ll want to check Enable Video Overlay and set the method to Texture and Raw Bytes.
Step 4: Under Tango AR Camera, look for the Tango Environmental Lighting component. Make that the the Enable Environmental Lighting checkbox is checked.
Step 5: Add your game object that you’d like to be environmental lit to the scene. In our example, we’ll be using a pool ball. So let’s add a new Sphere.
Step 6: Let’s create a new material for our sphere. Go to Create > Material. We’ll be using our environmental lighting shader on this object. Under Shader, select Tango > Environmental Lighting > Standard.
Step 7: Let’s add a texture to our pool ball and tweak our smoothness parameter. The higher the smoothness, the more reflective our object becomes. Rougher objects have more of a diffuse lighting that is softer and spreads over the surface of the object. You can download the pool_ball_texture and import it into your project.
Step 8: Add your new material to your sphere, so you have a nicer looking pool ball.
Step 9: Compile and run the application again. You should able see environment lit pool ball now!
You can also follow our previous post and be able to place your pool ball on surfaces. You don’t have to worry about your sphere rolling off your surface. Here are some comparison pictures of the pool ball with a static artificial light (left) and with environment lighting (right).
We hope you enjoyed this tutorial combining the joy of environmental lighting with the magic of AR. Stay tuned to this blog for more AR updates and tutorials!
You’ve just created a more realistically light pool ball that live in AR. That’s a great start, but there’s a lot more you can do to make a high performance smartphone AR application. Check out our Unity example code on Github (especially the Augmented Reality example) to learn more about building a good smartphone AR application.
Posted by Robbie Tilton, UX Designer, Google VR
At Daydream Labs, we have experimented with social interactions in VR. Just like in real reality, people naturally want to share and connect with others in VR. As developers and designers, we are excited to build social experiences that are fun and easy to use—but it’s just as important to make it safe and comfortable for all involved. Over the last year, we’ve learned a few ways to nudge people towards positive social experiences.
What can happen without clear social norms
People are curious and will test the limits of your VR experience. For example, when some people join a multiplayer app or game, they might wonder if they can reach their hand through another player’s head or stand inside another avatar’s body. Even with good intentions, this can make other people feel unsafe or uncomfortable.
For example, in a shopping experiment we built for the HTC Vive, two people could enter a virtual storefront and try on different hats, sunglasses, and accessories. There was no limit to how or where they could place a virtual accessory, so some people stuck hats on friends anywhere they would stick—like in front of their eyes. This had the unfortunate effect of blocking their vision. If they couldn’t remove the hat in front of their eyes with their controllers, they had no other recourse than to take off their headset and end their VR experience.
Protecting user safety
Everyone should feel safe and comfortable in VR. If we can anticipate the actions of others, then we may be able to discourage negative social behavior before it starts. For example, by designing personal space around each user, you can prevent other people from invading that personal space.
We built an experiment around playing poker where we tried new ways to discourage trolling. If someone left their seat at the poker table, their environment desaturated to black and white and their avatar would disappear from the other player’s view. A glowing blue personal space bubble would guide the person back to their seat. We found it’s enough to prevent a player from approaching their opponents to steal chips or invade personal space.
Reward positive behavior
If you want people to interact in positive ways—like high-fiving 🙌 —try giving them an incentive. In one experiment, we detected when two different avatars “touched” each other’s hands at high speed. This triggered a loud slapping sound and a fireworks animation. It sounds simple, but people loved it. Meanwhile, if you tried to do something more aggressive, like punching an avatar’s body, nothing would happen. You can guess which behavior people naturally preferred.
Posted by Justin Quimby, Senior Product Manager Tango
At Tech World last month, our team showed off some of the latest Tango-enabled games. One crowd favorite was Domino World by Schell Games which will will be available on the first Tango-enabled device, Lenovo’s Phab 2 Pro, coming this fall. Schell Games has adapted a few classic games, including Jenga, into smartphone augmented reality, and their developers share their experience and considerations they kept in mind as they gave dominoes a new twist.
Google: How did your team first hear about Tango technology?
Schell Games: The Tango team invited us to their Game Developer Workshop where we learned about Tango and the types of apps we could develop for this platform.
Google: You took a classic game, and added AR elements. How did you come to dominoes?
Schell Games: At the Game Developer Workshop, we prototyped three games: a racing game, Jenga and a pet game. Of the three games, people connected the most with Jenga.
People loved sharing a device to play the game together—and they loved that they didn’t have to pick up all the Jenga pieces when the game was over! And from a developer perspective, Jenga was great as it highlighted Tango’s ability to recognize surfaces.
Based on how much people liked Jenga, we decided that Domino World would be our second game. Domino World gives players all the fun of dominoes, but without the setup effort or mess. We were inspired by YouTube videos where people of all ages were doing really creative things with dominoes. Our goal was to bring that experience to the phone as an immersive and fun augmented-reality experience.
Google: Which Tango features did you use in Jenga and Domino World?
Schell Games: We used motion tracking, which lets people walk around their dominoes or Jenga tower. We also used surface detection with the depth camera, so that the device recognizes when objects are placed on a surface.
Google: How does your development approach differ for AR apps versus standard mobile apps?
Schell Games: With Domino World, for example, our approach to augmented reality thrives on reinforcing the feeling that the player’s display is a “window on the world.” Toys and dominoes are (virtually) placed on the actual surfaces around the player, and the game’s controls aid players in manipulating objects in the space in front of them. As a result, the player is naturally encouraged move around as they view, adjust and otherwise shape their ever-growing creations.
In contrast, traditional touchscreen controls largely work with metaphors of interacting with the screen’s image itself -- drawing on it, pinch-zooming it, etc. As a result, a more traditional touchscreen-controlled Domino World could have influenced players to remain more static and work with the existing view, as opposed to moving around to different vantage points.
Google: We noticed that you use a landscape orientation for Domino World. How did you decide to take that approach.
Schell Games: The decision to use landscape orientation for Domino World is the result of multiple smaller reasons all put together:
Google: What surprised you the most while building with Tango?
Schell Games: We were quite surprised at how easy it was to build with the Tango SDK and add Tango functionality to our apps. We used the Unity Engine which made the whole process quite seamless. It took us just over two weeks to build Jenga and 10 weeks to build Domino World from beginning to end.
Google: How do you think Tango will change the way people play games?
Schell Games: Tango makes it easy to play AR games. You don’t need to print and cut out AR trackers or markers to place throughout your room to help orient the phone. Instead, your phone always knows where it is in relation to the AR objects and you can easily start playing—whether you’re in a living room or on a bus. It’s incredible to have this experience with just your mobile device.
Posted by Philip Walton, Developer Programs Engineer
Autotrack is a JavaScript library built for use with analytics.js that provides developers with a wide range of plugins to track the most common user interactions relevant to today's modern web.
The first version of autotrack for analytics.js was released on Github earlier this year, and since then the response and adoption from developers has been amazing. The project has been starred over a thousand times, and sites using autotrack are sending millions of hits to Google Analytics every single day.
Today I'm happy to announce that we've released autotrack version 1.0, which includes several new plugins, improvements to the existing plugins, and tons of new ways to customize autotrack to meet your needs.
Note: autotrack is not an official Google Analytics product and does not qualify for Google Analytics 360 support. It is maintained by members of the Google Analytics developer platform team and is primarily intended for a developer audience.
Based on the feedback and numerous feature requests we received from developers over the past few months, we've added the following new autotrack plugins:
The impression tracker plugin allows you to track when an element is visible within the browser viewport. This lets you much more reliably determine whether a particular advertisement or call-to-action button was seen by the user.
Impression tracking has been historically tricky to implement on the web, particularly in a way that doesn't degrade the performance of your site. This plugin leverages new browser APIs that are specifically designed to track these kinds of interactions in a highly performant way.
If your analytics implementation sends pageviews to Google Analytics without modifying the URL, then you've probably experienced the problem of seeing multiple different page paths in your reports that all point to the same place. Here's an example:
/contact
/contact/
/contact?hl=en
/contact/index.html
The clean URL tracker plugin avoids this problem by letting you set your preferred URL format (e.g. strip trailing slashes, remove index.html filenames, remove query parameters, etc.), and the plugin automatically updates all page URLs based on your preference before sending them to Google Analytics.
Note: setting up View Filters in your Google Analytics view settings is another way to modify the URLs sent to Google Analytics.
It's becoming increasingly common for users to visit sites on the web and then leave them open in an inactive browser tab for hours or even days. And when users return to your site, they often won't reload the page, especially if your site fetches new content in the background.
If your site implements just the default javascript tracking snippet, these types of interactions will never be captured.
The page visibility tracker plugin takes a more modern approach to what should constitute a pageview. In addition to tracking when a page gets loaded, it also tracks when the visibility state of the page changes (i.e. when the tab goes into or comes out of the background). These additional interaction events give you more insight into how users behave on your site.
In addition to the new plugins added to autotrack, the existing plugins have undergone some significant improvements, most notably in the ability to customize them to your needs.
All plugins that send data to Google Analytics now give you 100% control over precisely what fields get sent, allowing you to set, modify, or remove anything you want. This gives advanced users the ability to set their own custom dimensions on hits or change the interaction setting to better reflect how they choose to measure bounce rate.
Users upgrading from previous versions of autotrack should refer to the upgrade guide for a complete list of changes (note: some of the changes are incompatible with previous versions).
Perhaps the most common question we received after the initial release of autotrack is who should use it. This was especially true of Google Tag Manager users who wanted to take advantage of some of the more advanced autotrack features.
Autotrack is a developer project intended to demonstrate and streamline some advanced tracking techniques with Google Analytics, and it's primarily intended for a developer audience. Autotrack will be a good fit for small to medium sized developer teams who already have analytics.js on their website or who prefer to manage their tracking implementation in code.
Large teams and organizations, those with more complex collaboration and testing needs, and those with tagging needs beyond just Google Analytics should instead consider using Google Tag Manager. While Google Tag Manager does not currently support custom analytics.js plugins like those that are part of autotrack, many of the same tracking techniques are easy to achieve with Tag Manager’s built-in triggers, and others may be achieved by pushing data layer events based on custom code on your site or in Custom HTML tags in Google Tag Manager. Read Google Analytics Events in the Google Tag Manager help center to learn more about automatic event tracking based on clicks and form submissions.
If you're not already using autotrack but would like to, check out the installation and usage section of the documentation. If you already use autotrack and want to upgrade to the latest version, be sure to read the upgrade guide first.
To get a sense of what the data captured by autotrack looks like, the Google Analytics Demos & Tools site includes several reports displaying its own autotrack usage data. If you want to go deeper, the autotrack library is open source and can be a great learning resource. Have a read through the plugin source code to get a better understanding of how some of the advanced analytics.js features work.
Lastly, if you have feedback or suggestions, please let us know. You can report bugs or submit any issues on Github.
Roy Glasberg, Global Lead, Launchpad and Launchpad Accelerator
Last month, the second cohort of Launchpad Accelerator, Google’s high-touch global program for late-stage startups, came and conquered their app challenges with the help of mentors at Google HQ.
What did they learn that they’d like to share with developers across the world? Check out the video below for solutions from 3 different startups, and an in-depth review of MagicPin’s mobile web challenge and solution.
Startup:
MagicPin from India is a social network app that curates a local user base around locations, allowing merchants to connect with these specific audiences.
Mobile web challenge:
In India, downloading an app requires a high commitment. On average a user would keep 5 or 6 apps on their phone. According to Anshoo Sharma, Co-Founder and CEO, MagicPin, “If you want to be the next app that they download, there is a high barrier.”
Jordan Adler, Google Developer Advocate: “Devices in markets like India have limited space--on average 128 MB of memory--and when you add in system features only 40 bytes of user space is left. And if a typical APK is a few megabytes, you can only have a few apps before you have to stop downloading.”
Solution:
Jordan Adler: “One of the great things about Progressive Web Apps is you don’t have to request the commitment (to download an app) upfront. You can start to build a relationship with the user through the web interface, and over time the web app can become more like a native app, it can be housed on a device, cache content and work offline.”
Anshoo Sharma: “In the last 1.5 weeks we have been here we have already launched a micro version of our platform on Progressive Web Apps. And the experience is great! Without using the (mobile) app people can get as good an experience.”
About Launchpad Accelerator
Launchpad Accelerator is a six-month accelerator that enables late-stage app startups from emerging markets to successfully scale. Here's a two-minute video about the Accelerator.
Originally posted on Geo Developers blog
Originally posted on Android Developers blog
Posted by Sam Dutton, Ankur Kotwal, Developer Advocates; Liz Yepsen, Program Manager
‘TOP-UP WARNING.’ ‘NO CONNECTION.’ ‘INSUFFICIENT BANDWIDTH TO PLAY THIS RESOURCE.’
These are common warnings for many smartphone users around the world.
To build products that work for billions of users, developers must address key challenges: limited or intermittent connectivity, device compatibility, varying screen sizes, high data costs, short-lived batteries. We first presented developers.google.com/billions and related Android and Web resources at Google I/O last month, and today you can watch the video presentations about Android or the Web.
These best practices can help developers reach billions by delivering exceptional performance across a range of connections, data plans, and devices. g.co/dev/billions will help you:
Seamlessly transition between slow, intermediate, and offline environments
Your users move from place to place, from speedy wireless to patchy or expensive data. Manage these transitions by storing data, queueing requests, optimizing image handling, and performing core functions entirely offline.
Provide the right content for the right context
Keep context in mind - how and where do your users consume your content? Selecting text and media that works well across different viewport sizes, keeping text short (for scrolling on the go), providing a simple UI that doesn’t distract from content, and removing redundant content can all increase perception of your app’s quality while giving real performance gains like reduced data transfer. Once these practices are in place, localization options can grow audience reach and increase engagement.
Optimize for mobile hardware
Ensure your app or Web content is served and runs well for your widest possible addressable market, covering all actively used OS versions, while still following best practices, by testing on virtual or actual devices in target markets. Native Android apps should set minimum and target SDKs. Also, remember low cost phones have smaller amounts of RAM; apps should therefore adjust usage accordingly and minimize background running. For in-depth information on minimizing APK size, check out this series of Medium posts. On the Web, optimize JavaScript CPU usage, avoid raster image rendering, and minimize resource requests. Find out more here.
Reduce battery consumption
Low cost phones usually have shorter battery life. Users are sensitive to battery consumption levels and excessive consumption can lead to a high uninstall rate or avoidance of your site. Benchmark your battery usage against sessions on other pages or apps, or using tools such as Battery Historian, and avoid long-running processes which drain batteries.
Conserve data usage
Whatever you’re building, conserve data usage in three simple steps: understand loading requirements, reduce the amount of data required for interaction, and streamline navigation so users get what they want quickly. Conserving data on behalf of your users (and with native apps, offering configurable network usage) helps retain data-sensitive users -- especially those on prepaid plans or contracts with limited data -- as even “unlimited” plans can become expensive when roaming or if unexpected fees are applied.
Have another insight, or a success launching in low-connectivity conditions or on low-cost devices? Let us know on our G+ post.
