Announcing Android 2.0 support in the SDK

Announcing Android 2.0 support in the SDK!

By Xavier Ducrohet, Android SDK Tech Lead

27 October 2009

I am excited to announce that the Android SDK now supports Android 2.0 (also known as Eclair).

Android 2.0 brings new developer APIs for sync, Bluetooth, and a few other areas. Using the new sync, account manager and contacts APIs, you can write applications to enable users to sync their devices to various contact sources. You can also give users a faster way to communicate with others by embedding Quick Contact within your application. With the new Bluetooth API, you can now easily add peer-to-peer connectivity or gaming to your applications. To get a more complete list of the new capabilities you can add to your applications, please go to the Android 2.0 highlights [ http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.0-highlights.html ] page.

Current developers can use the SDK Manager [ http://developer.android.com/sdk/adding-components.html ] to add Android 2.0 support to their SDK as well as update their SDK Tools to revision 3. New developers can download the Android SDK from the download site [ http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html ]. After the download, Android platforms must be added using the SDK Manager

The SDK Manager allows you to add new Android platforms to your SDK.

Android SDK Tools, revision 3 [ http://developer.android.com/sdk/tools-notes.html ] is required to develop for Android 2.0. It includes support for code coverage through the Ant build system, as well as Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) support for the SDK and related tools. For those of you who develop using Eclipse, we are releasing ADT version 0.9.4 [ http://developer.android.com/sdk/adt-notes.html ] through the usual Eclipse update mechanism [ http://developer.android.com/sdk/eclipse-adt.html ].

Over the next few months, we expect to see more and more Android devices being released. These devices will be running Android 1.5, 1.6, or 2.0. We are also planning a minor version update of Android 2.0 towards the end of the year, and that will be the last update for 2009. Below are some of the things you can do to be better prepared:

Download the Android 2.0 platform and make sure your existing apps continue to work on new devices running Android 2.0.
Make sure that your apps work when using the WVGA (800x480) & FWVGA (854x480) emulator skins. We expect devices with these types of screen, running Android 2.0 to be launched soon.

Checkout the video below for more information about Android 2.0.

[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opZ69P-0Jbc ]

9:00 AM