Shobana Radhakrishnan, Senior Director of Engineering-Google TV
Paul Lammertsma, Developer Relations Engineer
Today, more entertainment content is available than ever before. In fact, according to our research, one-third of US households watch more than 25 hours of television each week. As the role of TV continues to evolve, our goal is to build a customized TV experience that gives users easy access to their favorite entertainment.
I’m excited about the future of Android TV OS. Currently, there are over 110 million monthly active devices, including millions of Google TVs. Android TV and Google TV are available to over 300 partners worldwide. This includes 7 of the 10 largest smart TV OEMs and over 170 pay TV operators. And thanks to the hard work of the developer community, more than 10,000 apps are available on TV, with more apps being added every day.
Since last year’s I / O, we’ve been working to build a better and more engaging experience with Android TV OS. In addition to platform updates[ライブ]New features, such as enhanced integration with tabs, will help users better access their content. Also, if you haven’t started using the WatchNext API, learn how to add it to your app to make your content more readable and accessible.
Today, Android 13 introduces new features and tools that focus on overall performance and quality, improve accessibility, and enable multitasking.
- Performance and quality: To help build the next generation of TVs, we’re introducing new APIs to make app development more efficient and give users the best experience on their devices. With AudioManager, your app can predict audio routes and understand exactly what playback modes are available. When the app is properly integrated with Messia Session, Android TV can react to HDMI state changes to save power and notify you that content needs to be paused.
- Accessibility: Added support for various keyboard layouts in the InputDevice API to improve the way users interact with the TV. Game developers can also browse keys in physical locations to support different layouts of physical keyboards such as the QWERTZ and AZERTY keyboards. The new system-wide accessibility settings also allow users to enable voice guidance between apps.
- Multitasking: Television is now used for more than just watching media content. In fact, we often see users making phone calls and monitoring cameras in smart homes. To support multitasking, the updated picture-in-picture API is supported on Android 13 using the core Android API. Picture-in-picture on TV has an enhanced mode to show more video from group calls, a docking mode to avoid overlaying content on other apps, and an overlay that doesn’t hide important content in full-screen apps. Supports keep-clear API.
Android 13 Beta for TV is now available to test your app and provide feedback on the latest release. Thank you for your continued use of Android TV OS. I can’t wait to see the amazing innovations you continue to make for the big screen.