We have released Android Things Developer Preview 7 (DP7). Android Things is a Google platform designed to help Android developers build Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The platform also supports powerful applications such as video and audio processing and onboard machine learning via TensorFlow. The latest preview builds on Android 8.1 and has been updated to support Google Play services in version 11.8.0. For all the details of DP7 features, see the release notes:

https://developer.android.google.cn/things/preview/releases.html

Here are some highlights:

Console enhancements and device updates

The Android Things console has also added some new features to enhance product management from prototype to mass production:

  • Product model. Create multiple software variants for the same hardware product and manage versions and updates of each variant individually.

  • Product sharing. Grant other user accounts the right to view and manage models, versions, and updates for a given product.

  • Analysis. View device activation metrics and update statistics for your product.

  • Update channels. Deploy software versions to groups of devices for development or Beta testing without interrupting production facilities in the field.

With the new API added to UpdateManager, devices can subscribe to different update channels. See the updated Device Updates API guide:

https://developer.android.google.cn/things/sdk/apis/update.html

Console documentation for details on how to configure update channel subscriptions:

https://developer.android.google.cn/things/console/update.html

Addressing developer feedback

We’ve received a lot of great feedback from developers so far and have spent a lot of time in this release addressing many of the key issues reported by users:

  • Improved camera resolution support. Applications can now capture image data at the full resolution native to the camera hardware.

  • Support MIDI. Use the MidiManager API to build virtual MIDI devices with external MIDI controllers in your application or interface.

  • Improve testability of Android Things apps. The Peripheral I/O API now exposes interfaces instead of abstract classes, making it easier for local unit tests to replace these objects with mocks and stubs.

  • Consistent API naming. This release renamed several existing Android Things API classes in an effort to provide a more consistent developer experience across the interface. See the updated API Reference for changes in package and class names.

The new bluetooth API

Android mobile devices provide users with controls to pair and connect with Bluetooth devices through the Settings app. IoT devices running Android Things need to perform these same operations programmatically. New BluetoothConnectionManager API allows applications to control matching and the connection process.

For more details, see the new Bluetooth API guide:

https://developer.android.google.cn/things/sdk/apis/bluetooth.html

Sample update

At last year’s Google I/O, we showed how to build apps using Kotlin on Android Things. For developers using Kotlin, we’ve started releasing Kotlin versions of Android Things examples.

Today, you can download Kotlin’s buttons and LED examples with the Java version, and we’ll be releasing more examples soon:

https://github.com/androidthings/sample-button

We also migrated the TensorFlow image classifier sample application to use the TensorFlow Lite library, which reduced the size of the pre-trained TensorFlow model by more than 90% and reduced the time required to classify images by approximately 50%.

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