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This one-of-a-kind short book walks you through creating fantastic entertainment apps for one of the newest Android platforms. Android TV Apps Development: Building Media and Games will demystify some of the newest APIs and present the tools necessary for building applications that run on Android TV.

Walking through example applications, you will learn the vocabulary necessary to solve real-world problems and how to present your content on the television through Android. In addition to practical code examples, you will learn about various design considerations that will make using your apps an enjoyable experience for users.

What you´ll learn:

How to design for Android TV

How to create a media app for Android TV

What are the game design/development considerations for Android TV

How to distribute Android TV apps

Audience:Developers with some experience with Android development who are interested in building applications for the Android TV platform.

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Introduction

Discuss what Android TV is
Discuss what needs to be considered before making the app (is it a game, or a media app? Does it make sense for the TV? DRM, supported formats, hardware restrictions. Why apps that are already created for tablets/phones need a design revamp)
Creating a Hello World application in Android Studio
Designing for TV

Overscan, grids, 10´ view, anti-patterns
Colors and fonts

Using voice and recommendations
Allowing users to be relatively passive
Creating a Media Application

Manifest and gradle setup
Introduce the Leanback library that will be used for the majority of the media app.
RecyclerView grid of items, side navigation, preferences, cards
Search
Detail Fragment, recommendations
Video activity - this will probably be a shorter subheader since it´s more about how the user wants to set it up, or if I need to add more content I can go into a little detail on the ExoPlayer, which is an open source video player from Google
Game Considerations

General design consideration, setting up the manifest to support games
How to work with the game controller - handling disconnects, new players, button and joystick interactions
How to communicate between secondary Android devices (phone, tablet) and the Android TV for a second screen experience. Going to look into the Nearby Messages API that was released yesterday to see if that´s more viable, otherwise I know the Nearby Connections API works well.
Maybe a section on additional utilities in Play Game Services Distributing Android TV Applications

Checklist of requirements to get approved for distribution on the Play Store, and details on what those requirements are.

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Paul Trebilcox-Ruiz is a software engineer at Sphero (they make awesome robots that you can control from your phone) in Boulder, Colorado and a Computer Science graduate from California State University, Fresno. His main interests are in the Android platform, Android TV and wearable computing. He also actively participates in hackathons in the Denver/Boulder area; writes an Android technical blog and presents to Meetups in the area.

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