Most Android apps focus on security and privacy to make sure everyone has a helpful experience discovering and installing the apps and games they love the most. With this article, you will learn about the latest changes that Android developers are facing, as well as explain the reason for each change and how these settings make it easier for Android devices to be more protected and secure for the long term.
To make apps more useful and protected, Android developers will have to work on new requirements if they want their apps to be accessible on Google Play in the future. These include support for the latest version of Android and the addition of support for native 64-bit code in applications in the future. Also, Google will start to include some security metadata to improve the APK validity check.
How to protect your applications?
There are several reasons to require an application to be compatible with the latest version of the API, which benefits the application with security and privacy that Google has gradually added to the Android platform. This does not mean that Android should stop supporting older versions of Android, which is still recommended. Google also illustrated that new apps published to Google Play as of August 2018 must be at least API level 26 (Android 8.0) using the manifest attribute of the target SDK version.
The condition to contain 64-bit CPU only has an effect on applications that include native libraries in them. Google says that more than 40% of the Android devices used today have 64-bit support and that their performance improves considerably when running 64-bit code. For this, Google Play also supports 32-bit apps and devices, so 64-bit support is an addition to 32-bit support using a single APK or multiple APKs. This is one of the good points for developers that they can use in the future.
In addition to the above, developers have a period of almost 2 years to transition to 64-bit, as this condition will begin in August 2019. For now, you can start adding a small amount of security metadata at the pinnacle of each APK to confirm that it was authoritatively distributed by Google Play. The metadata that developers will add to APKs is like a Google Play authenticity badge for your Android app. Surely 2017 has been an incredible year for developers who have experienced growth and achievement on Google Play.
Wrap
With all these features and the most recent upcoming updates, we look forward to seeing the Android and Play ecosystem continue to flourish in 2018 and beyond. At the end, to conclude this section, we can say that Google will automatically start adding certification to its applications at the beginning of 2018. This modification has no effect on the behavior of the applications, but it will surely be used in the future to allow new distribution opportunities. . with the aim of helping users keep their applications up to date.