Newsletter - August 2021

Android / Google Play

• See  the latest upcoming changes to ratings and reviews on Google Play.
• Learn about an upcoming policy change for app metadata and new Google Play store preview asset guidelines. 
• Discover   how to attain high performing Android apps, use memory, power efficiency, and more with App Excellence checklists and resources.
• Meet  the team at Duolingo who solved performance challenges by refactoring their entire Android app to a MVVM architectural pattern.
• Watch  how to help your players spend less time waiting and more time playing with Play as you download. 

Firebase / Google Cloud

• Announcing  three new features in App Check beta.
• Check out  the three part Firebase quality guide to build high performing apps.  
• Use  Firebase Crashlytics to unlock the next level of app stability to keep your users engaged. 
• Learn  how to boost engagement by getting to the root of high-impact performance issues with Firebase Performance Monitoring.
• See   This Week in Cloud , 23 regions for logging, private service connect, and more. 

ML / AI

• Discover  what's new with TensorFlow release 2.6.0.
• Analyze  your ML datasets with the interactive Know Your Data (beta) tool to help mitigate potential bias and fairness concerns.
• Learn  how the field of MLOps is growing, and what you need to know about machine learning engineering for production.
• Achieve  greater parameter efficiency and training speed with new EfficientNet V2 models for image classification and feature extraction, available on TF Hub.
• Build  a mobile app to identify speech and other sounds, and learn how to customize a pre-trained audio classification model.

Google Maps Platform

• Explore  the redesigned homepage for Google Maps Platform documentation aimed at making it easier to find what you need.
• Add  the official TypeScript typings for Google Maps Platform JavaScript API projects.
• Customize  your maps with the latest Cloud-based maps styling features, including Landmarks, building footprints, and detailed street maps.
• Icons   in Places API received a refresh. New fields provide access to SVG files and background colors for flexible control of icon appearance.
• Try the open source places-rx library. This library exposes RxJava bindings so you can use Observable streams with the Places SDK for Android.

Open Source and Misc

• Review  upcoming changes to Google's OAuth 2.0 authorization endpoint in embedded webviews and update your apps if they will be affected.
• Implement the new Google Identity Services APIs, a suite of sign in and sign up products under a single SDK. 
• Start your migration, the legacy Sign In solution will be deprecated in March 2023.
• Due  October 1, submit self-nominated products for the Annual Material Design Awards.
• Deliver asynchronous notifications in Google Chat using webhooks.

Developer Community / BIPOC Partner Highlights

• Register for Google Cloud Accelerator Canada Demo Day 2021 on September 16 and see how 12 selected startups used cloud technology to solve a wide range of challenges. 
• Meet the North American Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders cohort. Get to know the women-led startups who are leveraging machine learning and AI in the 10-week virtual accelerator.
• Tune  in on demand #ICYM the Google for Startups Accelerator: Climate Change Demo Day. #AcceleratedWithGoogle
• Read about Kose Notes and his developer experience as a community organizer in South Sudan.
• See who the top 10 finalists are from the Google Developer Student Clubs Solution Challenge and how teams solved for the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals.