Here’s Everything Developers Want to know About Android 4.4

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After two months of waiting, Google finally unveiled the features its bringing to its mobile OS with Android 4.4. There’s quite a lot of great things for users and you’ll read more about that here. There’s even better news though – Google is making developers’ lives much easier with the most recent incarnation of Android.

On the official Android Developers blog, Google laid out all of the new development features coming to Android 4.4, or KitKat. These new features may help developers deliver more immersive apps while adding new functionality.

Without further ado, listed here are the key new development tools in Android 4.4:

  • New how one can create beautiful apps — a brand new full-screen immersive mode lets your app or game use every pixel at the screen to showcase content and capture touch events. a brand new transitions framework makes it easier to animate the states on your UI. Web pages can profit from a totally new implementation of WebView built on Chromium.
  • More useful than ever — A printing framework permits you to add the ease of printing in your apps. A storage access framework makes it easier for users find documents, photos, and other data across their local and cloud-based storage services. That you can integrate your app or storage service with the framework to present users instant access to their data.
  • Low-power sensors — New hardware-integrated sensors will let you add great new features in your apps without draining the battery. Included are a step detector and step counter that allow you to efficiently track of the collection of walking steps, even if the screen is off.
  • New media capabilities — a brand new screen recorder allows you to capture high-quality video of your app directly out of your Android device. It’s a good new thanks to create walkthroughs, tutorials, marketing videos, and more. Apps can use adaptive playback to present a much better streaming video experience.
  • RenderScript within the NDK — a brand new C++ API inside the Android Native Development Kit (NDK) enables you to use RenderScript out of your native code, with access to script intrinsics, custom kernels, and more.
  • Improved accessibility support — New system-wide captioning settings let your apps present closed captions inside the style that’s preferred by the user.

    • If that you need to learn more about Android 4.4, look into this new video from the DevBytes show at the Android Developers channel:

    Developers involved in updating their apps for Android 4.4 can download the SDK and related tools today from the Android SDK manager. You too can grab the most recent support package here, and the most recent Android NDK here.

    [Image: Android Developers/YouTube]