Posted by Alex Rocha – Developer Relations Engineer Supervisor, Ryan Ausanka-Crues – Eng Supervisor, Multi-device improvement, Stella Loh – Product Supervisor, Multi-device improvement
At this time we’re launching our Developer Preview of the brand new Cross machine SDK for Android. First introduced in the course of the Google I/O ‘22 Multi-device improvement session, our Cross machine 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 machine discovery, authentication, and connection protocols, permitting you to give attention to 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 incorporates a set of wealthy APIs centered across the core performance of System discovery, Safe connections, and Multi-device Classes.
- System 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 licensed gadgets.
- Multi-device Classes: Allow transferring or extending an software’s person expertise throughout a number of gadgets.
In flip, this can help you construct compelling cross-device experiences by enabling and simplifying the next use circumstances:
- Discovering and authorizing communication with close by gadgets.
- Sharing an app’s present state with the identical app on one other machine.
- Beginning the app on a secondary machine with out having to maintain the app operating in background.
- Establishing safe connections for gadgets to speak with one another.
- Enabling activity handoff the place the person begins a activity on one machine, and might simply proceed on one other machine.
Beginning at this time with a Developer Preview for Android telephones and tablets, the Cross machine SDK might be accessible later for different Android surfaces and non-Android OSs.
Beneath The Hood
The Cross machine SDK supplies a software program abstraction layer that handles all facets of cross-device connectivity, leveraging wi-fi applied sciences corresponding 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 appropriate to Android 8. As well as, apps won’t should declare or request Runtime Permissions for any of the underlying connectivity protocols used (corresponding to BLUETOOTH_CONNECT, BLUETOOTH_SCAN, ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION, and so forth.), and the person can permit apps to hook up with solely the machine(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 machine SDK for Android. Ensure that to take a look at our Rock Paper Scissor pattern app (Kotlin and Java) on GitHub for an illustration on tips on how to work with the assorted APIs and our Google I/O ‘22 Multi-device improvement 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!
