Google Play Console adds new engagement metrics and benchmarks

Google has launched a new suite of metrics in the Google Play Console, giving developers new ways to evaluate the performance of their apps.

These new benchmarks will allow developers to measure their app’s engagement and monetization trends against up to 250 different peersets. With greater insight, developers will know which features to prioritize. It can be especially helpful for developers who are just starting out and don’t have the resources of larger competitors.

“Whether you want to prioritize new features to drive engagement, experiment with pricing, or drive up retention, we hear from all developers that they need great data and insights to help make the best investments,” Google said in a blog post.

There are 15 new normalized metrics with benchmarks “based on best practices in evaluating app and game performance.” For example, there’s a metric that will tell developers the ratio of users who open an app every day compared to once a month. A different metric will show the average revenue per daily active users.

These new metrics can be found in the “Compare to peers” tab on the Statistics page. Developers will also be able to see other normalized metrics, like store listing conversions, in the same place.

Google said the data powering the new metrics uses differential privacy and come from users who have agreed to share their app activity, which is recorded when an app is opened in the foreground. The new benchmarks also protect developer privacy.

“The largest mobile app developers often use growth consultants to help inform their long-term strategic product decisions,” Google said. “We’re dedicated to bringing this kind of help and expertise to all Play developers via the console.”

The new metrics are part of a larger multi-year project to bring more helpful insights and actionable recommendations to Google Play Console, and arrive after Google added a publishing overview page.

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Samsung is discontinuing the Get Location feature for the Galaxy Watch

Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 3, Galaxy Watch Active 2, and original Galaxy Watch are set to lose a useful feature. Samsung’s Find My Watch service will soon be undergoing changes that will nix a feature to track the location of your smartwatch. According to a notice that is being sent to Galaxy Watch users, due to changes in Samsung’s service policy, the Find My Watch feature will no longer offer the Get Location service as it will be effectively discontinued from March 15, 2021.

This means that users who own a Galaxy Watch smartwatch can only use the Find My Watch feature within the Galaxy Wearable app to locate their device so long as it’s in close proximity. The smartwatch’s approximate location will no longer be accessible on a map using this feature.

As noted by SamMobile, though, there’s some upside to this news. While the Get Location service is going to be axed in a few days, owners of a Galaxy Watch device will still have a way of locating them in case they are lost or stolen. Samsung announced SmartThings Find last year and seeded an update to enable support for it on the Galaxy Watch 3 earlier this month. The Galaxy Watch Active 2 also got support for SmartThings Find via an update last month.

SmartThings Find makes use of BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) and UWB (Ultra-wide Band) technologies, the latter of which is only supported on select Galaxy devices. So while the Get Location feature will be shut down, owners of the Galaxy Watch 3, Galaxy Watch Active 2, and Galaxy Watch will still have the ability to locate their smartwatch.

Featured image: The Samsung Galaxy Watch 3.

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AMD’s Radeon RX 6700 XT is now official to take on NVIDIA’s RTX 3070, 3060 Ti

AMD has announced a new addition to its Radeon 6000 desktop GPU series. At its “Where Gaming Begins: Ep 3” event, the company announced the Radeon RX 6700 XT. As per the specifications, the new graphics card should compete with NVIDIA’s affordable options under the RTX 30- series GPUs: the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti.

The new RX 6700 XT is said to be optimized for gaming at 1440p resolution. It features 12GB of GDDR6 memory and runs at a base clock speed of 2.321GHz going up to 2.581GHz. It comes with 40 compute units, 160 texture units, and 2560 stream processors. The GPU can draw 230W of power so a minimum 650W power supply is recommended. AMD says that gamers can expect to reach 212fps in Overwatch, 272fps in League of Legends, and 360fps in Rainbow Six Siege which means that it is more than capable when it comes to competitive eSports titles.

AMD’s numbers suggest that it can match and even go beyond the performance parameters of NVIDIA’s RTX 3070. The new GPU also supports AMD’s Smart Access Memory (also known as Resizable BAR), which recently rolled out to NVIDIA’s new range of RTX 30 graphics cards.

Expect the RX 6700 XT to hit markets starting March 18th at a suggested retail price of $479. This slots it between the RTX 3070 which retails at $500 and the RTX 3060 Ti which is priced at $400. As for the question of whether customers can expect enough stock, AMD told The Verge, “with the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT launch, we are on track to have significantly more GPUs available for sale at launch.” AMD also claims that it will begin refreshing stocks of the RX 6000 GPUs and Ryzen 5000 CPUs every week on its own website, where it is planning to sell these at their individual retail prices.

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Brave goes after Google with privacy-first search engine

Brave has built a reputation as a privacy-first browser, and the company is now taking on Google’s web dominance with a new search engine project called Brave Search.

Brave on Wednesday announced plans to launch a new search engine that will keep user information private and away from the prying eyes of big tech. The new search engine will use technology developed by Tailcat, which Brave just acquired.

“The Tailcat search engine is built on top of a completely independent index, capable of delivering the quality people expect, but without compromising their privacy,” Brave said in a blog post. “Tailcat does not collect IP addresses or use personally identifiable information to improve search results.”

Brave said its browser has grown in popularity over the last year, from 11 million monthly active users to over 25 million — and it expects to see even more growth in 2021. Expanding to search, an area long dominated by Google, was a necessary step in Brave’s evolution, the company said.

Brave Search promises not to track or profile users, and will always serve the user first. It will rely on anonymized contributions from the community to improve and refine the experience, and won’t use “secret methods or algorithms to bias results.” Brave said it plans to provide options for ad-free paid search and ad-supported search.

“The only way to counter Big Tech with its bad habit of collecting personal data is to develop a robust, independent, and privacy-preserving search engine that delivers the quality users have come to expect,” said Dr. Josep M. Pujol, head of the Tailcat project.

The news comes after Brave was at the center of a controversy that saw the browser adding affiliate links to cryptocurrency URLs, which the company has addressed  If you’re interested in trying Brave Search, you can join the waitlist.

Brave Private Browser: Fast, secure web browser (Free, Google Play) →

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Google vows not to use new tracking tech after replacing cookies

After announcing plans to phase out third-party cookies — those crumbs of code that track you online — Google said it won’t build alternative identifiers to track users across the web. Any tools that are developed by other advertising tech companies won’t be used in Google’s products, so users can enjoy a quieter, more private browsing experience.

The move comes more than a year after Google said it was developing a set of open standards called Privacy Sandbox, which is meant to enhance user privacy on the web. When Privacy Sandbox was announced, Google said its creation was in response to users becoming dissatisfied with advertisers collecting data to show them ads.

“If digital advertising doesn’t evolve to address the growing concerns people have about their privacy and how their personal identity is being used, we risk the future of the free and open web,” Google said in a blog post.

Ever since Google announced plans to block third-party cookies, advertisers have been devising alternative means of tracking users. One possible solution is PII graphs based on people’s email addresses. Google won’t use that solution, and instead focus on developing its own tools that will protect user anonymity but still deliver results for advertisers and publishers.

Privacy has become a huge concern for users on the web, with targeted ads often following people across websites, apps, and social media. According to Pew Research Center, 72% of people feel that almost all of what they do online is being tracked by ads, and 81% say that the potential risks from data collection outweigh the benefits. Google said the future of the web will rely on advances in aggregation, anonymization, on-device processing, and other privacy-preserving technologies.

We’ve seen a similar fight to protect privacy from Apple. The company has clamped down on tracking in its Safari browser and is also preparing an App Tracking Transparency feature in iOS 14, which has provoked the ire of Facebook. The social network is attempting to wage war on Apple, including an antitrust lawsuit over iOS 14’s privacy features.

“Keeping the internet open and accessible for everyone requires all of us to do more to protect privacy — and that means an end to not only third-party cookies, but also any technology used for tracking individual people as they browse the web,” Google said.

Google said it has been testing a method that takes third-party cookies out of the advertising equation and instead hides individuals within large crowds of people with common interests. As the company’s Privacy Sandbox tools evolve, Google said it will continue to solicit feedback from end users and the industry.

“People shouldn’t have to accept being tracked across the web in order to get the benefits of relevant advertising,” Google said. “And advertisers don’t need to track individual consumers across the web to get the performance benefits of digital advertising.”

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Dart 2.12 has been released, with null-safety and C interoperability

With the release of Flutter 2.0, Google is also bringing Dart 2.12 to stable. In case you didn’t know, Dart is the language that Flutter uses. It’s a TypeScript-based language but comes with some language feature additions, including the ones I’m about to go over.

Null Safety

Null safety is a pretty great language feature. It forces you to consider whether a variable will ever be null, and explicitly deal with potential null situations, while also letting you guarantee that specific variables will never be null.

In Dart 2.12, there’s now full support for null-safety, with a syntax similar to Swift and Kotlin. There’s even smart-casting, where if Dart knows for sure that a normally-nullable variable can’t be null, it will implicitly cast it to a non-nullable form.

Since null-safety is a (very) breaking change, this feature is opt-in. If you update to Dart 2.12, your compilation won’t break, and you won’t have to spend hours adding nullability hints to everything. You can even use null-safe dependencies if your project isn’t yet null-safe.

Once you do decide to migrate, you can use the built-in migration tool (dart migrate) and/or the migration guide to get everything set up.

Also, while null-safety is included in Dart 2.12, if you create a new Flutter or Dart project, null-safety won’t be enabled out of the box. You’ll need to run the migration tool or use the guide to enable it.

Foreign Function Interface

Even though Dart (and Flutter’s) focus is on full cross-platform compatibility, there are still some things that just need to be done natively. To make native operations easier, Dart has a foreign function interface, or FFI. The FFI lets you interact with C code from Dart without having to resort to weird string-based API calls or other clunky interoperability methods.

And with Dart 2.12, the FFI is now stable, meaning it’s ready to be used in production projects and is mostly feature-complete.

With that in mind, there are some changes in the FFI, including a couple of breaking ones.

Most of the focus with this release was on how structs can be used with Dart and C. For one, you can now pass structs in your C code by reference and value, where previously only references were supported. Another important feature is support for nested structs, which wasn’t present before this release.

Now for the breaking changes. If you were using the FFI, you may need to update your code to work with 2.12. With this version of FFI, you can no longer create empty structs. If you need one for some reason, you can use the new “Opaque” type. There are also some changes to how some of the FFI built-in functions work, which you can read about here.

Finally, there’s a new package for the FFI that lets you generate FFI wrappers from existing C header files, called ffigen. If you have a lot of C code you need to use, with a lot of API methods, this will be pretty helpful. Even if the amount of C code you have is small, this is a nice convenience feature.

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And that’s pretty much it for Dart 2.12. With the addition of null-safety, and a stable C interoperability library, Dart is turning into a very feature-rich language. Let us know what you think about Dart 2.12 in the comments!

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Flutter 2.0 introduces production-quality support for building web apps

Flutter 2.0 has been released to stable, and with it, there is stable web support. This means that Flutter is now safe to use in production-quality web projects.

With that said, let’s see what Flutter for Web entails.

Renderers

There are two ways Flutter for Web can display your app in a browser. It can either render it using HTML, CSS, and Canvas, or using CanvasKit. Each has its own advantages. The HTML renderer, since it uses more basic elements, is faster to download and load. The CanvasKit renderer is a bit heavier, but it provides better performance when there’s a lot on-screen.

By default, a Flutter web app will automatically choose which renderer to use, based on the client device. Mobile devices will be sent the HTML renderer, while desktop devices will get CanvasKit. In the case that you want to use a specific renderer, Google has provided options to always use one or the other.

An architectural overview of Flutter. Source: Google

Web-Specific Features

Even though Flutter is cross-platform, there are still some things that are specific to each supported platform. This is because some things only exist on one platform, or work in some way that needs a special API. And the web is no different.

Flutter 2.0 adds support for things like custom URL strategies, web-app deep linking, and proper PWA support. When you create a Flutter for Web project, a web manifest and service worker templates will be generated for you.

Gestures & Keyboard

To truly be cross-platform, a framework needs to take into account its target. If it’s running on a desktop platform, it should respond to keyboard shortcuts. On mobile, it should respond to tap and swipe gestures.

Well, Flutter for Web does both of these things. Through the web, it targets both desktop and mobile devices. With the stable release of Flutter for Web, there is support for native gestures, depending on the client platform and input source.

Plugins

Like any good language, Flutter supports libraries, or plugins in this case. As a safety measure, plugins need to specify their platform compatibility. Since Flutter for Web is a relatively recent addition to the framework, a lot of plugins, including Google’s own, didn’t support it.

With the release of Flutter 2.0, a whole bunch of Google’s Flutter plugins, including the Firebase suite, are marked as web-compatible.

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While this may not seem like a lot, these are some pretty big features. Flutter 2.0 gained an entire platform, and a lot of work was put in to make Flutter for Web integrate into the rest of the framework.

What do you think of Flutter for Web? Is it a good option for web development? Let us know!

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