Android tablets are growing in popularity, and Google recognizes this and is setting out to make great tablet apps more visible in the Play Store. Starting today, there will be a new "designed for tablets" section in each of the top charts tabs in the Play Store when accessed from an Android tablet. Great news for Android tablet users and developers of great tablet apps alike. 

Follow our live coverage of the Google I/O keynote for the rest of the day's news!

Brand new Android IDE to make it easier to build and preview apps

Google has launched a brand new IDE (integrated development environment) for building Android apps at today's Google I/O keynote presentation. Android Studio is based on the community edition of IntelliJ, and includes a number of unique tools designed to make the development and previewing process more easy.

Among these are the ability to preview strings in code as if they were hard-coded, see colors based on color codes and even preview layouts on different device sizes -- everything from a 3.7-inch phone to a 10-inch tablet. It's even possible to preview different languages and see if everything will fit right with overflowing.

The developers in the room seemed really excited about the new previewing capabilities of Android Studio, and we're sure this will be hugely useful to both seasoned devs and newcomers.

Keep watching our live coverage of the I/O keynote for more news from the show.

New developer tool to take away the difficulties with language barriers

During the Google Play developer console presentation in the Google I/O 2013 keynote, a fantastic new tool has been unveiled for the first time. Language barriers are tough to overcome, but Google is introducing a new app translation tool right within the developer console. 

The demo given by Ellie Powers on stage showed the new feature, by choosing a language -- Russian -- desired for translation. Then developers can select a translation service, pay, send their app away, and in around a week it comes back all translated and ready to go. Fantastic news for developers to help them get their apps out to a wider audience. 

Developers interested in trying out the pilot program are invited to apply now.

Follow our live coverage of the Google I/O keynote for the rest of the day's news!

Developers get ready for the latest in Google Play Gaming features

Google has just rolled out a huge number of features related to gaming at Google I/O 2013, and even on day 1 over a dozen developers are partnering to have the new services ready at launch. Popular names like Miniclip, Glu, Spryfox, Ironhide Game Studio, HandyGames, Hemisphere and several more are all on board to provide multiplayer game services, the new game data syncing feature, and more. These are the developers that make many of the top games we know and love, which will be great to get multiplayer gaming the exposure it needs right from the start.

We'll continue to bring you more from the Google I/O 2013 keynote as it becomes available.

The worst kept secret from Google just became officially official. Google Play Game Services has just been formally announced by Hugo Barra in San Francisco. We'll be taking a more detailed look at this later on, but the service centers around a few key elements:

• Cloud Save - progression and game states saved to the cloud and synchronized across devices. 
• Achievements
• Leaderboards
• Google+ Circles to make connections

Perhaps more impressive still, though, is that Google is making the Google Play Game Services cross-platform. There is an API for the web and for iOS. So, Google will be taking on Game Center on Apple's own turf. Interesting stuff! 

Follow our live coverage of the Google I/O keynote for the rest of the day's news!

We're at Google I/O, where they just announced improvements to their Google+ Sign-In API, which is cross platform sign-in. What does that mean? If you find a cool website that you like (they demoed it with Fancy), you can sign in with Google+. If you do, you will automatically be asked if you would like to install the app on your Android device. If you say yes, the app will download and log you in automatically on your current device and other Android devices on your account. Very cool improvement to a good API. 

Follow our live coverage of the Google I/O keynote for the rest of the day's news!

Upstream messaging, sycnhronized notifications and persistent connections

Google's Hugo Barra has just taken the wraps off new features for Google Cloud Messaging, at the Google I/O keynote in San Francisco. In addition to rolling GCM into Google Play services, Barra unveiled three major new features for the push messaging service.

• Persistent connections between developers' own servers and Google's, allowing a large number of messages to be sent out at once.
• Upstream messaging, so devices can push messages back to GCM.
• Synchronized notifications, so users can dismiss notifications on one device, and have them dismiss on all other devices.

The last two in particular were met with much applause from the assembled developers and press.

The new GCM features will be "rolling out progressively," Barra said. Keep watching our Google I/O liveblog for live coverage of the day's events.

Save battery life and improve location data for every app

We're live here at the Google I/O 2013 keynote, where Google has started off with talking about APIs for Android. As one of its first announcements, Google is rolling out three new APIs  for developers to access the location of a device. First up is "Geofencing", which lets apps define virtual fences around areas to then do actions when the user enters or leaves the area. Every app will be able to set up to 100 different geofences.

Next, we now have "Activity Recognition", which tracks movement without the use of GPS. Using different sensors like the accelerometer, apps can track the location and movement of a device. Finally, we have a new service called "Fused Location Provider", which sounds fancy but the end result is that it improves GPS efficiency for apps. GPS will drain no more than 1-percent per hour when locking to a user's location.

We'll keep on bringing you more from Google I/O 2013 as we see it!

Hugo Barra just took to the stage in San Francisco at Google I/O 2013, and the first thing he talked about was some extremely impressive statistics for Google Play. 

Google Play has now seen an astonishing total of 48 billion app installs, with 2.5 billion installs in just the last month alone.  Better yet for developers, revenue per user is up 2.5 percent in the last year, so things are looking good for developers distributing their apps through Google Play. 

Follow our live coverage of the Google I/O Keynote for the rest of the days news, as it happens!

At the Google I/O keynote in San Francisco, Android and Chrome head Sundar Pichai has just revealed that Android has passed the milestone of 900 million activations, up from 400 million in 2012 and 100 million in 2011.

Pichai called the milestone "an extraordinary ecosystem achievement," but joked "there are 7 billion people in the world, so we have a long way to go, and we think we're just getting started." 

Follow our live coverage of the Google I/O keynote for the rest of the day's news!