Newsletter - April 2020

NEW: COVID-19 support

• Google Play is prioritizing apps that reference COVID-19, or are commissioned or authorized by official government officials and public health organizations. Read more on best practices and how to maintain business continuity in this changing landscape. 
• Register for the Data science for public health: Working with public COVID-19 data sets webinar on May 5th. Develop new skills to draw insights and visualize select public health data sets that were released by Google in April to support COVID-19 research.
• If you're building or maintaining a health organization website that qualifies as a national health ministry or US state-level agency, you can request to join the COVID-19 Google Search technical support group. Read the  blog post  to learn more.

Android / Google Play

• Start developing with the CameraX beta. Access the Jetpack support library to integrate camera features in your app with Preview, ImageAnalysis, and ImageCapture. Review documentation here and join the online community for support .  
• Learn how to protect your game, business, and users on Google Play. This guide shows you how to increase security, develop an anti-abuse strategy, and reduce risks. 
• Get featured. Share your #IMakeApps story or  self-nominate for a chance to be featured in  the campaign .

Firebase / Google Cloud

• Learn how Firebase can help with backend services Cloud Firestore, Cloud Storage, and Firebase Authentication.
• Tune into Cloud Study Jam through Qwiklabs at no charge. Googlers will provide hands-on labs and answer questions about security, managing GCP costs, and more. Find your timezone and register online . 
• Watch the Test-driven infrastructure : Configuration as code on Google Cloud webinar. Learn how to leverage InSpec to test your GCP environment. InSpec is an open-source infrastructure testing language (policy as code), and an execution engine that is used to audit remote systems and APIs.
• Check out the newly open-sourced gRPC Kotlin for the JVM. It supports using gRPC with your Kotlin projects, from mobile apps to cloud microservices. Learn more .
• Two new Qwiklabs have just been added to help build Go Apps on the Google Cloud Platform; free to use for a limited time. Jump in now .
• Tune in for weekly updates from This Week in Cloud for the latest Google Cloud news.
• Test your skills on the BigQuery Weekly Data Challenge. Every week, Felipe Hoffa issues a new data challenge. Solve the puzzle for a chance to win $500 in Cloud credits. 
• Explore Google Cloud’s latest and upcoming Certifications, including which learning paths are most helpful and some discounts on relevant training in this on-demand webinar .

Web

• Support for JSON-RPC and global HTTP batch endpoints is being deprecated. Support has been extended until Aug 12, 2020. Read more .
• Announcing support for Flutter on CodePen, a social development environment for front-end developers and designers. Learn new techniques, share design explorations, and showcase your creativity. 

Developer Community

• With support from Google.org, watch how the Google AI Impact Challenge Accelerator, Hadi, and the team at The American University of Beirut applied machine learning to preserve crops calculating weather, groundwater resources, and remotely-sensed agricultural data. 
• Join and tune into Google Developer Ecosystem MENA’s new online initiative. For 16 weeks, learn different technologies for free from talks, workshops, and panel discussions in Arabic, English, and French. Join the weekly challenge and subscribe and watch past recordings.
• See why  Google Developer Expert Akshay Chordiya uses Kotlin Flow, an implementation of Reactive Stream specification made on top of coroutines and channels for Kotlin.
• Launchpad Istanbul's 2017 cohort startup TeamSQL (now DataRow ) has been acquired by AWS, Amazon’s first acquisition in Turkey. This is the second global exit news from the same cohort: Around the same time in 2018, Local Guddy was acquired by Triple. Read more .

Misc

• Integrate your apps and websites with the new Business Console for Google Pay . Manage new and existing integrations, see how they perform over time, and more. Get started here .  
• Review policies and guidance for use of OAuth 2.0 with Google APIs, which are now consolidated into a single page to make it easier for you to build apps that meet minimum security and privacy requirements.
• See updates and improvements to Local Home SDK, a suite of local technologies to enhance smart home integration with Google Assistant by adding local fulfillment.