Android’s IoT team announced the release of Android Things Developer Preview 8 today, marking the final preview release of the platform before its upcoming stable release.
“Developer Preview 8 represents the final API surface exposed in the Android Things support library for the upcoming stable release,” Dave Smith, developer advocate for IoT at Android wrote in the announcement. “There will be no more breaking API changes before the stable v1.0 release of the SDK.”
With the long-term support release imminent, the Android Things team have begun focusing on updates useful for shipping production devices. This led to the first set of new features in Developer Preview 8, which brings the ability to unpublish current over-the-air builds when issues are discovered, visual storage layout configuration, font and locale management and product sharing support for Google Groups in the Android Things developer console.
Also included in this new release is an app library that lets you manage APKs more easily without packaging them in zip files, track individual versions, review permissions and share your apps with other console users.
Handling of app permissions have also been updated in preparation for the stable release.
“On mobile devices, apps request permissions at runtime and the end user grants them,” Smith wrote. “In earlier previews, Android Things granted these same permissions automatically to apps on device boot. Beginning in DP8, these permissions are granted using a new interface in the developer console, giving developers more control of the permissions used by the apps on their device.
Finally, the Android Things platform’s launch behavior has been modified to ensure that if an IoT device’s primary application terminates unexpectedly, it will be reliably relaunched.
