Jump to the tl;dr below for just the updates and links.

This week on The Developer Show, I chatted with Leon Nicholls about how you can use the Unity Game Engine and the new Google Cast Remote Display APIs to take your games into the living room, we hear from Chris Wren at the Android Dev Summit about how to use notifications to build trust with your users, Rob Craft gives us some insight into the Cloud Vision API and how easy it is to take advantage of it’s complex machine learning in your app, and we find out what is in Reto’s Android Studio box on our new segment #AskDevShow.

tl;dr

Just the updates and the links.

Games

• Use the Unity game engine to build games for the TV with the new Google Cast Remote Display plugin for Unity. The Google Cast Remote Display APIs use the powerful GPUs, CPUs and sensors of your Android or iOS mobile device to render a local display on your mobile device and a remote display on your TV. Leon will join us later on the show to give us more details.

Cloud

• Learn how to build, update, and use containers on the Google Cloud Platform with this tutorial by Julia Ferraioli. It’s a four-part series of blog posts that gives you a great hands-on introduction using something familiar to many of us: running a Minecraft server.
• Build powerful applications that can see, and more importantly, understand the content of images. This functionality is now available in the Google Cloud Vision API. Rob Craft is on the show today to tell us more.

Android

• Tap4Fun increased their game’s rating above 4.0 by using the review system to address user problems, as well as beta testing to improve the quality of their games from within the Google Play Developer Console. Find out how in this video with Tap4Fun’s CEO Founder Stan Xu and Creative Director Charlie Moseley
• Learn more about the improvements to Sign-In with Google with this latest post in a series by Laurence Moroney. He talks about Changes to basic sign-in flow, Silent Sign-In, and Customizing the Sign-In Button.

Analytics

• Understand what users Google Search is driving to your app as well as how those users behave once they’re in your app using Deep Link Referrer Analytics.

Chrome

• A new version of Chrome! Just like clockwork! The latest beta includes Present to Cast, custom notification buttons, and network estimation.

Maps

• The Google Maps SDK for iOS has been updated to include bitcode support, new events, and some features previously only available in the Android SDK.

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Jump to the tl;dr below for just the updates and links.

This week on The Developer Show I talked with Joanna Smith about the conversation that happened in the hallways at the Android Dev Summit, Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson about Instant Run and the new “55 times faster” Android Studio 2.0, and Jason Sanmiya about the open source VR & mobile game, Zooshi. Oh, and Reto brought us another “Who’s Doing What Now,” this time on Android Doze Mode.

tl;dr

Just the updates and the links.

Games

• Zooshi is a new open source, cross-platform game written in C++ that demonstrates how to build games using a suite of newly released and updated open source game technologies from Google. Check out the six recently updated open source tools you can use in your game. Jason Sanmiya is the TL for Zooshi and joined us on the show to tell us more.

Happy Birthday, Go!

• You’ve just turned six and you have over 780 contributors, with 30 thousand commits in 22 repositories. Thank you to everyone in the open source community who’ve made Go what it is today.

Cloud

• Create virtual machines with exactly the amount of power and memory that you need using Custom Machine Types on the Google Cloud Platform. No more rounding up to a power of two and wasting money on unused resources.
• A bunch of network performance and flexibility improvements have recently come to the Google Cloud Platform including the general availability of HTTPS Load Balancing, segmenting your IP space with subnetworks, dynamic routing on Cloud Router for seamless connectivity with no traffic disruption, and the ability to use Akamai as a CDN Interconnect provider.

Star Wars!

• Okay, so this isn’t exactly developer related, but if you love Star Wars check out google.com/starwars to add a little light side or dark side to your Google experience.

Android

• 30% of all smartphone sales worldwide happen in the last three months of the year and ad impressions spike by nearly 30% as well between October and January. This makes January an excellent time to promote your app. Check out this infographic for more.
• Find out how Fablic improved sign ups by 30% and increased retention by 20% using Material Design and Android Studio.
• App builds and deployment are both faster with Android Studio 2.0. The new version features Instant Run, a feature that will dramatically improve your development workflow. More on this later in the show as I get the inside scoop from product manager Stephanie Cuthbertson.
• Speaking of Android, the Android Dev Summit has wrapped. We had a great time meeting developers and talking about all things Android and we’ve got a few more clips to play from the event as well as Joanna Smith on the show today to share more about what went down at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.