Google Play Services 7.5 was released few hours back at the Google I/O. It aims to make the Android ecosystem more flexible and stable. According to the release, it will deliver better optimizations on Android devices. It works with devices running on Android 2.3 or above.
There are several additions of features in this release. As you read on, you will get to know all the new additions. Especially new APIs which will make the apps more efficient and make things easy for a user.
Smart Lock for Passwords
This feature acts as the same popup option present in the modern browsers asking you to save your credentials for quick sign-in. Well, here this is built on the Google Chrome password manager. It will help the users to not click on “Forgot Password” frequently if they keep changing their device. All the sign-in credentials(in-app) will be synced with the Google Play Services smart lock feature on your unique account ID.
All the apps won’t support this. The app developers need to add the new “CredentialsApi” to their app to keep their users logged in even if they switch devices and to prevent them getting frustrated.
Instance ID
Instance ID (IID) allows you to retrieve a unique identifier for every app instance. It introduces a new way of authentication and authorization using an Instance ID token. With this feature on board the authorization actions or requests can now be easily tracked by a user.
Instance ID tokens are fully compatible with the users notifications with the Google Cloud Messaging service.
Google Cloud Messaging ( GCM )
It’s an efficient mechanism for an app to send information to their users/clients and can easily receive messages on the same path. It is indeed a flexible platform which lets an app send messages to its users in 3 ways:
1. To a single device.
2. To a group of devices.
3. To devices subscribed to specific topics.
And, after all its free and it establishes a battery-efficient connection between the device and server.
GCM Network Manager
Applications normally sync the required data over the network. But, the sync process was never battery-efficient until now. The GCM Network Manager APIs intelligently waits for the Network connectivity, retries, device charging and backoff.
As mentioned:
App Invites (Beta)
Being in the beta stage, it allows a user to invite his/her friends to install an app which the sender currently uses. However you can only send invites through SMS or E-mail.
Google Cast
You can now easily cast your Android mobile or laptop content to your TV/speakers.It comes with the new ability to use remote display on any Android, iOS, or Chrome app, better media support, better game support.
It also introduces a Remote Display API in it to make it easy for mobile game developers to give their app a better Google cast support with a richer second screen experience.
Google Fit
Google Fit is an open platform designed to make building fitness apps, whether that means retrieving sensor data like current location and speed, collecting and storing activity data, or automatically aggregating that data into a single view of the user’s fitness data.
Two new APIs come into the scene here- RecordingApi, HistoryApi to record your health data and save it for future references.
The data can be stored in the Google Fit helping the user to keep track of the activities.
SDK
Google Play Service 7.5 is officially available and the developers can get started with the updated SDK.
