I'm Dan Galpin.
Welcome to a very special Game Show episode,
helping to kick off the hashtag #11WeeksofAndroid week,
focused on games, media, and 5G.
The games part of the week, we'll look at our ongoing efforts
to help improve your developer experience,
expanding your reach to more devices and new audiences,
and supporting your go-to-market with Google Play.
We've made improvements to our tooling to help you build great games.
Earlier this year, we announced the revamped system trace profiler
as part of Android Studio 4.0.
In Android Studio 4.1, we've added native memory support
to the memory profiler,
and further enhanced the system trace profiler UI.
In the Thread section of the system trace profiler,
you can now drag your mouse to perform
a box selection of a rectangular area, which you can zoom into.
You can also select across multiple threads
to inspect all of them at once
to do things such as analyzing multiple worker threads.
The Summary tab in the Analysis panel displays aggregate statistics
for all occurrences of a specific event,
trace events statistics for a selected occurrence,
and data about thread state distribution,
as well as the longest running occurrences of the selected trace event.
In the Display section, new timelines for SurfaceFlinger and VSync
help you investigate rendering issues in your game.
Check the post linked in the description
to learn more about what's new in the system trace profiler.
Android Studio 4.1 can now view native memory allocations
within its memory profiler.
Looking at high level allocations like this
helps visualize memory leaks.
This table view allows you to see call stacks for each allocation,
leveraging the debug symbols from your project.
If your source is available, you can right click on a function
and jump to source.
The post linked in the description contains a detailed guide
to using this new profiler.
And we've added support to run the Android Studio Profiler
standalone in a separate window from the primary Android Studio window.
We continue to invest in our extension from Microsoft's Visual Studio
to help developers building C and C++ games on multiple platforms.
We've added support from Microsoft's Visual Studio 2019
and launching the standalone Android Studio profilers.
If you're developing with a custom game engine,
you can sign up for the developer preview
to integrate with your workflow for Visual Studio.
The Android GPU Inspector is also in developer preview,
allowing you to better understand what's causing
graphical performance bottlenecks.
Stay tuned for our upcoming open beta.
We're also working to help your game reach more devices and users.
The Android Game SDK is now also part of Jetpack
and available on the Google Maven Repository,
helping to simplify the integration of our gaming libraries,
such as the frame pacing API or the Android Performance Tuner.
Now, the Android frame pacing API
helps your OpenGL and Vulkan games achieve smooth rendering,
while making it easier to support high refresh rate displays.
The Android Performance Tuner measures your frame rate performance
in reference to quality levels you provide,
and helps you optimize between them
to achieve stable frame rates at scale across the whole Android device ecosystem.
Both APIs are designed to work together,
with the frame pacing API helping to provide quality metrics
for the Performance Tuner.
Play Asset Delivery improves the game user experience
in your game while reducing delivery costs and game size,
thanks to its flexible delivery modes backed by auto-updates and delta patching.
It simplifies deployment by allowing you to deploy
a single app bundle that can dynamically deliver the right assets
to the right devices at the right time.
Since the App Bundle format will be required
for all new apps starting August 2021,
we're deprecating legacy APK expansion files,
making Play Asset Delivery the standard option
for publishing games over 150 megabytes.
Finally, we have Google Play tools
to help fight monetization and distribution abuse.
Some partners have seen up to a 40% decrease in potential hacks
and up to a 30% decrease in fraudulent purchase attempts
using our integrity and commerce APIs.
And we've an early access program for automatic integrity protection.
We're also helping support your go-to-market efforts on Google Play.
We've made a dramatic overhaul to the Google Play Console,
making it clearer and easier to use.
Check out the open beta to see the improved look and feel,
navigation, a more responsive design, and better team management.
The new pre-registration menu within the Google Play Console
makes it easier than ever to leverage pre-registration
to boost early installs.
And Play now supports day one auto-installs.
Early experiments have shown up to a 20% increase in day one installs
when using this new feature.
The new in-app review API allows developers to prompt users
to write reviews within the app experience,
making it much easier for users to share valuable insights about your game.
The new Play Games Services friends API is now in open beta
to help players easily find and play with friends
across Android games.
Millions of players have a new platform-level friends list
that you can access to bootstrap and enhance your in-game friend networks,
and have your game surfaced in new clusters in the Play Games app.
Finally, we've updated our guidance to help optimize your Store listing pay
to take advantage of the updates we've made to the Games home
within Google Play.
As always, thank you for your support in continuing to build incredible games.
Check out the links in the description to learn more.
And we hope you enjoy all that our games, media, and 5G week
has to offer.