Friday, March 29, 2024

Google Play services 8.3 brings simplified sign-in with Google accounts, app sharing, and Android Wear improvements

Share

google_play_logo_2015Google has updated their Google Play services framework, bringing things to version 8.3. The update brings a handful of new APIs for developers to implement, including some things to streamline the sign-in process using a Google account and some better ways to save power and performance on smartphones and wearables.

Currently, it takes several steps to sign into an app or service using your Google credentials. With the new Play Services, that’s cut down to a single step to allow apps to access your basic profile info. There’s also a new API to pull data like your name and profile picture to set up accounts in apps based on your Google info.

There’s a brand new app sharing API, too, that will allow users to quickly share apps with friends and family. It integrates with Google’s deep linking activity to speed things up for all users involved.

The rest of what’s included is mostly under the hood stuff, touching on everything from wearables to Google Play Games. The newest version for Play Games offers a signal as to when a player is about to “churn,” or stop playing a game. This lets the developer dish out some promotional offers to keep the player hooked, so if you start to see some irresistible offers for games you haven’t played recently, you’ll know what’s going on.

There are also improvements to wearables, including an API to set the urgency for data to be synced. By default most data is marked as non-urgent now, and specific info will need to be marked as urgent to have it immediately synced from a phone to a device, which should theoretically help smartwatches and wearables squeeze out a little extra battery life.

source: Android Developers

Come comment on this article: Google Play services 8.3 brings simplified sign-in with Google accounts, app sharing, and Android Wear improvements

Visit TalkAndroid for Android news, Android guides, and much more!

Read more

More News