News

Android Devs Can Show Off Work -- or Borrow Ideas -- at Experiments Site

• By David Ramel
• August 13, 2015

Google unveiled Android Experiments, a site where mobile developers can show off their innovative apps or glean ideas from open source code.

"We set out to find a way to celebrate the creative, experimental Android work of developers everywhere and inspire more developers to get creative with technology and code," said Roman Nurik and Richard The of Google Creative Lab in a blog post yesterday.

The site initially featured 20 "inspiring projects" and Google issued an invitation for all developers to submit their own creations. All the featured apps will reportedly be open sourced and available on the Google Play store, with source code available on GitHub.

"The 20 initial experiments show a broad range of creative work -- from camera experiments to innovative Android Wear apps to hardware hacks to cutting edge OpenGL demos," Google said. "All are built using platforms such as the Android SDK and NDK, Android Wear, the IOIO board, Cinder, Processing, OpenFrameworks and Unity. Each project creatively examines in small and big ways how we think of the devices we interact with every day."

Initial offerings include Landmarker, which "turns your orientation into an interface, revealing key destinations around you," and Tunnel Vision, to "distort time and space by recording your surroundings through a collection of transformative filters." The functionality of these and other apps are best described through a provided showcase video:

The site was inspired by Chrome Experiments, launched in 2009 with 19 showcased Web projects and now featuring 1,110 examples.

To beef up the Android site, Google is inviting developers to submit their own creations. "While we can’t post every submission, we’d love to see what you’ve created," Nurik and The said.

Google said it's looking for apps that showcase "innovative use of new or unique features of the Android platform; projects that explore how we interact with our devices, in small and big ways; unique and extraordinary visual aesthetics; and open source projects that can inspire other developers."