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Google I/O 2015 review for Android Developers
July 10, 2025
Google I/O 2015 has come and gone, and as expected, left us with a ton of exciting new features, announcements and products, from the entirety of the Googleplex, including Android, Chrome, Search and ATAP. There is a lot of information from this years conference, and we have sifted through this information avalanche, and filtered out the most important stuff for Android Developers.
We will dive deeper into many of these technologies in the coming weeks. At the barest minimum, Android developers should watch theI/O 2015 Keynote,What’s new in AndroidandWhat’s new in Android Developer Toolsvideos. They all contain vital information regarding currently available and upcoming features.
Without further ado, some of the most important announcements in I/O 2015 for Android developers include:
Android Studio 1.3
Android Design Support Library
App Permissions
Full App backup
Currently, app developers can backup user data through Google Cloud services. However, the app developer has to write the code that persists and retrieves the user data. This means that when a user installs your app on a new device, he must start-up your app, and login, before your app fetches the saved data. With full backup however, the backup and restore of user data is done automatically. If the user installs your app on another device, app data is synchronized automatically, and should be available to the user immediately he opens the app. Nifty. Of course, the app developer can specify what files and folders should be backed up, using include (or exclude) tags in the AndroidManifest.xml, but that is all. To take advantage of this, the app must also be built with the “targetSdkVersion” set to 23(Android M). More information is available on theAndroid Developersite.
Multiple Device testing with Cloud Test Lab
App Invites
New API that helps users share apps/invite other users to use an app. This is great news for developers, since it helps users share your app via word of mouth with specific other users (their friends, family or colleagues that they expect will like the app). The invites are sent either over SMS or email, with a direct install button. There is a website with detailedinstructions and sample code.
DataBindings
This is one of those tools that’s really difficult to explain. You have to see it in action to actually appreciate its brilliance and potential usefulness.At its most basic, this is a method that helps bind data in an application to specific views in a layout file. For example, if you have a class called User, that has constants firstName and lastName. You could have two TextViews in your layout, called firstNameView and lastNameView, that display the corresponding User values. With data binding, you can describe this relationship in the layout xml file.
This is a support library, and would be available to all Android versions from 2.1 upwards. It is still very much experimental, and there is aguide available
Google Cloud Messaging 3.0
Honourable Mentions
Some other exciting stories from I/O include
Many of the I/O sessions and talks are available on theGoogle Developers youtube channel. Be sure to check them out for more information. Also, get started developing for Android M, with thedeveloper preview
We will be running more in-depth articles in the coming weeks, discussing these new features in detail, including howtos and tutorials. Do you feel we left out any vital Android developer announcements? Share with the community using the comments section below.
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