Posted by Alex Rocha – Developer Relations Engineer Supervisor, Ryan Ausanka-Crues – Eng Supervisor, Multi-device growth, Stella Loh – Product Supervisor, Multi-device growth
At the moment we’re launching our Developer Preview of the brand new Cross system SDK for Android. First introduced in the course of the Google I/O ‘22 Multi-device growth session, our Cross system SDK permits builders to construct wealthy multi-device experiences with a easy and intuitive set of APIs. This SDK abstracts away the intricacies concerned with working with system discovery, authentication, and connection protocols, permitting you to deal with what issues most—constructing pleasant person experiences and connecting these experiences throughout a wide range of kind elements and platforms.
What’s in Developer Preview
This preliminary launch comprises a set of wealthy APIs centered across the core performance of Gadget discovery, Safe connections, and Multi-device Classes.
- Gadget discovery: Simply discover close by gadgets, authorize peer-to-peer communication, and begin the goal software on receiving gadgets.
- Safe connections: Allow encrypted, low-latency bi-directional information sharing between approved gadgets.
- Multi-device Classes: Allow transferring or extending an software’s person expertise throughout a number of gadgets.
In flip, this may assist you to construct compelling cross-device experiences by enabling and simplifying the next use instances:
- Discovering and authorizing communication with close by gadgets.
- Sharing an app’s present state with the identical app on one other system.
- Beginning the app on a secondary system with out having to maintain the app operating in background.
- Establishing safe connections for gadgets to speak with one another.
- Enabling process handoff the place the person begins a process on one system, and might simply proceed on one other system.
Beginning as we speak with a Developer Preview for Android telephones and tablets, the Cross system SDK might be obtainable later for different Android surfaces and non-Android OSs.
Underneath The Hood
The Cross system SDK supplies a software program abstraction layer that handles all points of cross-device connectivity, leveraging wi-fi applied sciences equivalent to Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Extremely-wide band; our SDK does all of the heavy-lifting beneath the hood, providing you a modular,connectivity-agnostic API that helps bi-directional communication between gadgets and is backward suitable to Android 8. As well as, apps is not going to need to declare or request Runtime Permissions for any of the underlying connectivity protocols used (equivalent to BLUETOOTH_CONNECT, BLUETOOTH_SCAN, ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION, and so on.), and the person can permit apps to hook up with solely the system(s) they chose.
Getting began with Developer Preview
Head over to our developer information to get began and check out the Developer Preview of the Cross system SDK for Android. Make sure that to take a look at our Rock Paper Scissor pattern app (Kotlin and Java) on GitHub for an indication on tips on how to work with the varied APIs and our Google I/O ‘22 Multi-device growth session for a basic overview of the SDK.
Suggestions
We’d love to listen to from you throughout this preliminary Developer Preview launch to assist us form the SDK and affect future roadmapping, so please share your suggestions and tell us your expertise with the SDK!
