The Developer Show 005 — Android Dev Summit, VR & Mobile Gaming with Zooshi, Doze Mode

Jump to the tl;dr below for just the updates and links.

This week on The Developer Show I talked with Joanna Smith about the conversation that happened in the hallways at the Android Dev Summit, Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson about Instant Run and the new “55 times faster” Android Studio 2.0, and Jason Sanmiya about the open source VR & mobile game, Zooshi. Oh, and Reto brought us another “Who’s Doing What Now,” this time on Android Doze Mode.

tl;dr

Just the updates and the links.

Games

• Zooshi is a new open source, cross-platform game written in C++ that demonstrates how to build games using a suite of newly released and updated open source game technologies from Google. Check out the six recently updated open source tools you can use in your game. Jason Sanmiya is the TL for Zooshi and joined us on the show to tell us more.

Happy Birthday, Go!

• You’ve just turned six and you have over 780 contributors, with 30 thousand commits in 22 repositories. Thank you to everyone in the open source community who’ve made Go what it is today.

Cloud

• Create virtual machines with exactly the amount of power and memory that you need using Custom Machine Types on the Google Cloud Platform. No more rounding up to a power of two and wasting money on unused resources.
• A bunch of network performance and flexibility improvements have recently come to the Google Cloud Platform including the general availability of HTTPS Load Balancing, segmenting your IP space with subnetworks, dynamic routing on Cloud Router for seamless connectivity with no traffic disruption, and the ability to use Akamai as a CDN Interconnect provider.

Star Wars!

• Okay, so this isn’t exactly developer related, but if you love Star Wars check out google.com/starwars to add a little light side or dark side to your Google experience.

Android

• 30% of all smartphone sales worldwide happen in the last three months of the year and ad impressions spike by nearly 30% as well between October and January. This makes January an excellent time to promote your app. Check out this infographic for more.
• Find out how Fablic improved sign ups by 30% and increased retention by 20% using Material Design and Android Studio.
• App builds and deployment are both faster with Android Studio 2.0. The new version features Instant Run, a feature that will dramatically improve your development workflow. More on this later in the show as I get the inside scoop from product manager Stephanie Cuthbertson.
• Speaking of Android, the Android Dev Summit has wrapped. We had a great time meeting developers and talking about all things Android and we’ve got a few more clips to play from the event as well as Joanna Smith on the show today to share more about what went down at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.