Android 4.0 Platform and Updated SDK Tools

Today we are announcing Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich — a new version of the platform that brings a refined, unified user experience for phones, tablets, and more.
Android 4.0 builds on the things people love most about Android — efficient multitasking, rich notifications, customizable home screens, resizable widgets, and deep interactivity — and adds powerful new ways of communicating and sharing. It includes many great features for users, including social and sharing integration, network data usage control, innovative connectivity and camera options, and an updated set of standard apps.
For developers, Android 4.0 introduces many new capabilities and APIs. Here are some highlights:

Unified UI toolkit: A single set of UI components, styles, and capabilities for phones, tablets, and other devices.
Rich communication and sharing: New social and calendar APIs, Android Beam for NFC-based instant sharing, Wi-Fi Direct support, Bluetooth Health Device Profile support.
Deep interactivity and customization: Improved notifications, lockscreen with camera and music controls, and improved app management in the launcher.
New graphics, camera, and media capabilities: Image and video effects, precise camera metering and face detection, new media codecs and containers.
Interface and input: Hardware-accelerated 2D drawing, new grid-based layout, improved soft keyboard, spell-checker API, stylus input support, and better mouse support.
Improved accessibility: New accessibility APIs and text-to-speech APIs for writing new engines.
Enhancements for enterprise: Keychain and VPN APIs for managing credentials and connections, a new administrator policy for disabling the camera.

For a complete overview of what’s new for users and developers, please read the Android 4.0 Platform Highlights.
Alongside the new Android platform, we are releasing new versions of the SDK Tools (r14) and ADT Plugin (14.0) for Eclipse. Among the highlights are:

• Improved build performance in Ant and Eclipse


• Improved layout and XML editors

To get started developing on Android 4.0, visit the Android Developers site for information about the Android 4.0 platform, the SDK Tools, and the ADT Plugin.
If you have already developed and published apps, we encourage you to download the Android 4.0 platform now, to begin testing your app before devices arrive in stores.


Check out the video below for a closer look at Android 4.0 in action.

Updated SDK Tools and ADT revision 17

Today we are releasing an update to the SDK Tools and the Eclipse plugin. Revision 17 brings a lot of new features and bug fixes in various areas such as Lint, the build system as well as the emulator.

Lint is a static checker which analyzes Android projects for a variety of issues around correctness, security, performance, usability and accessibility, checking your XML resources, bitmaps, ProGuard configuration files, source files and even compiled bytecode. It can be run from within Eclipse or from the command line.
New for r17:

• Added check for Android API calls that require a version of Android higher than the minimum supported version. You can use the new @TargetApi annotation to specify local overrides for conditionally loaded code. For more information, read here.
• Added over 40 new Lint rules for a total of over 80, including checks for performance, XML layouts, manifest and file handling. For a full list read here.
• Added ability to suppress Lint warnings in Java code with the new @SuppressLint annotation, and in XML files with the new tools: namespace prefix and ignore attribute. For more information, read here.
• Improved HTML and XML reporting and Eclipse integration. For more information, read here.

We’ve also made improvements to the build systems for Eclipse and Ant:

• Added strict dependency support for 3rd party Jar files. You can read more information here.
• Added support for custom views with custom attributes in libraries. Layouts using custom attributes must use the namespace URI http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto instead of the URI that includes the app package name. This URI is replaced with the app specific one at build time.
• Added a feature that allows you to run some code only in debug mode. Builds now generate a class called BuildConfig containing a DEBUG constant that is automatically set according to your build type. You can check the (BuildConfig.DEBUG) constant in your code to run debug-only functions such as outputting debug logs.

The emulator is seeing some big improvements as well:

• Thanks to contributions to AOSP from Intel, the emulator now supports running x86 system images in virtualization mode on Windows and Mac OS X. This allows the emulator running at near native speed. The drivers are available through the SDK Manager. Read more here.
• After adding webcam support and sensor emulation, we are adding experimental support for Multi-Touch input through a tethered Android device. (Read more here)

Finally, we are also releasing an updated Support Library with the following improvements:

• ShareCompat provides easy helper classes for both sending and receiving content for social sharing apps.
• NavUtils and TaskStackBuilder provide cross-version support for implementing the Android Design guidelines for navigating within your app including the action bar's "Up" button.
• NotificationCompat.Builder provides a compatibility implementation of Android 3.0's Notification.Builder helper class for creating standardized system notifications.
• A new Library Project adds support for GridLayout back to API level 7 and higher.

You can get more information about these changes in the SDK Tools Release Notes and ADT Release Notes.