Post by Alex Rocha, Developer Relations Engineer Manager. Ryan AusankaCrues – Eng Manager for Multi-device Development, Stella Loh, Product Manager,Multi-device Development.
Today we’re launching our Developer Preview of the new Cross device SDK for Android. First announced during the Google I/O ‘22 Multi-device development session, our Cross device SDK allows developers to build rich multi-device experiences with a simple and intuitive set of APIs. This SDK abstracts away the intricacies involved with working with device discovery, authentication, and connection protocols, allowing you to focus on what matters most—building delightful user experiences and connecting these experiences across a variety of form factors and platforms.
What’s in Developer Preview
This first release features rich APIs that focus on core functionality. Device discovery, Secure connectionsAnd Multi-device Sessions.
- Device discovery: You can easily locate nearby devices, allow peer-to-peer communications, and launch the target application from receiving devices.
- Secure connections Enable encrypted, low-latency bi-directional data sharing between authorized devices.
- Multi-device Sessions: Enable transferring or extending an application’s user experience across multiple devices.
You can then create cross-device experiences that are compelling by simplifying and enabling the following:
- Authorizing and discovering communication between nearby devices.
- Sharing an app’s current state with the same app on another device.
- Start the app on another device and stop it running in the background.
- Secure connections are established to allow devices to communicate.
- Task handoff allows the user to start and finish a task from one device.
Get a developer preview for your site today Android Phones and Tablets: The Cross device SDK for Android will be made available to other devices later Android Non-porous surfacesAndroid OSs.
Unter der Hood
The Cross device SDK provides a software abstraction layer that handles all aspects of cross-device connectivity, leveraging wireless technologies such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Ultra-wide band; our SDK does all the heavy-lifting under the hood, offering you a modular,connectivity-agnostic API that supports bi-directional communication between devices and is backward compatible to Android 8. In addition, apps will not have to declare or request Runtime Permissions for any of the underlying connectivity protocols used (such as BLUETOOTH_CONNECT, BLUETOOTH_SCAN, ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION, etc.The user has the option to allow apps to connect only to the devices they have selected.
Developer Preview: How to get started
For more information, please visit the developer guide. You can also download the Cross SDK Developer Preview. Android. For a demo, make sure you check out the Rock Paper Scissor app (Kotlin & Java) on GitHub how to work with the various APIs and our Google I/O ‘22 Multi-device development session for a general overview of the SDK.
Let us know your feedback
We’d love to hear from you during this initial Developer Preview launch to help us shape the SDK and influence future roadmapping, so please share your feedback and let us know your experience with the SDK!
