Originally posted on Chromium Blog

Posted by Darin Fisher, VP Engineering, Chrome

The last sessions of the Chrome Dev Summit 2015 are coming to a close, so it’s the perfect time to reflect on the event. We started our annual summit back in 2012, where we first introduced Chrome on Android. Today, there are more than 800 million monthly active users on Chrome for Android.

The greatest power of the Web is in its reach—not just across devices and operating systems, but in reaching users. Top mobile web properties are seeing 2.5 times the number of monthly unique visitors compared to the top mobile apps, and mobile web reach is growing at more than twice the rate of mobile app reach. This reach offers a unique opportunity to engage with more users.  

We believe this is a pivotal moment for the web platform, as early adopters of a set of key enabling technologies and tools are seeing success. During the keynote, we covered the evolution of the mobile platform and the shift towards “progressive web apps,” which are fast, robust, app-like experiences built using modern web capabilities. The web has come a long way, and building immersive apps with web technology on mobile no longer requires giving up properties of the web you’ve come to love. Flipkart’s new mobile web experience is a great example of a progressive web app that uses the new capabilities to provide a next-generation user experience.



In practice, progressive web apps have three main aspects that separate them from traditional websites: reliability, performance, and engagement.

Reliability

Every web app should load quickly, regardless of whether a user is connected to fast Wi-Fi, a 2G cell network, or no connection at all. We envision service workers as the ideal way for developers to build web apps that are resilient despite changing and unreliable networks. Weve released two libraries to help take the work out of writing your own service worker: sw-precache and sw-toolbox for your App Shell and dynamic content, respectively. Once your implementation is up and running, you can easily test it on different network connections using Chrome DevTools and WebPageTest. Service workers are already seeing great adoption by developers: there are currently 2.2 billion page loads a day using service workers, not counting its use in the New Tab page in Chrome.

Performance

The RAIL performance model helps you figure out what a user expects from each interaction with your site or app, breaking down performance into four key goals: 

• Responses (tap to response) should be less than 100ms 
• Animations (scrolling, gestures, and transitions) should run at 60 frames per second
• Idle time should be used to opportunistically schedule non-essential work in 50ms chunks
• Loading should be finished in under 1 second

In practice, weve found improving even just one area of RAIL performance can make a dramatic difference on the user experience. For example, a one second difference in loading time can have as much as an 11% impact on overall page views and a 16% impact on customer satisfaction.

Engagement

Traditionally, users have had a hard time re-engaging with sites on the web. Push notifications enable you to build experiences that users can engage with "outside of the tab"--they don’t need to have the browser open, or even be actively using your web app, in order to engage with your experience. Best of all, these notifications appear just like other app notifications. Currently we’re seeing over 350 million push notifications sent every day in Chrome, and it’s growing quickly. Beyond the Rack has found that users arriving to their site by push notifications browse 72% longer than average users and spend 26% more.

Tools for Success

Finally, Google is committed to making web developers successful. As our generalized library for building components on the web, Polymer is also deeply focused on helping developers achieve RAIL. Since its 1.0 release at Google I/O earlier this year, it has grown to be used on over 1 million web pages, including more than 300 projects within Google. Polymer 1.0 was 3 to 4 times faster than the previous 0.5 version, and the latest 1.2 release is even 20% faster than that. To get started with this modern way of thinking about web development, take a quick tour of Polymer, watch the Polymer Summit talks, check out the Polymer codelabs, or try the Polymer Starter Kit.

We already have great resources like Web Fundamentals that we continue to expand and improve.  We’re also committed to documenting each new feature we ship on the Mozilla Developer Network. In the past year alone, we’ve made 2,800 individual edits to MDN and created 212 new pages. To further our commitment to educating web developers, we’ve partnered with Udacity to offer a senior web nanodegree, an education credential focused on modern web technologies and techniques like service workers, Promises, HTTP/2 and more.

For all the details on Chrome Dev Summit 2015, you can watch full session videos, which we will continue to upload as they’re ready. Thanks for coming, thanks for watching, and most of all, thank you for developing for the web!

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Posted by Taylor Savage, Product Manager, Polymer

Yesterday in Amsterdam we kicked off the first ever Polymer Summit, joined live by 800 developers. We focused on three key themes: Develop, Design and Deploy, giving concrete advice on how you can build your web app from start to finish. You can watch a replay of the keynote here.

It has been amazing to see how much the community has grown and how far the project has come: what started as an experiment in a new way of developing on the web platform has steadily grown into the range of tools, product lines, and community contributions we saw presented throughout the Summit. Since Polymer 1.0 launched in May we’ve seen more than 150,000 public facing pages created with Polymer.

In case you missed any of the sessions, we’ve consolidated all of the recordings below:

Develop

• Thinking in Polymer
• End to End with Polymer
• Using ES6 with Polymer
• Testing Polymer Web Components
• Platinum Elements
• There’s an element for that - but what if there isn’t
• A11y with Polymer
• Upgrading to 1.0 with polyup
• Polymers Gesture System

Design

• Adaptive UI with Material Design and Paper Elements
• Polymers Styling System
• Polymers Animation System

Deploy

• Polymer Power Tools
• Polymer Performance Patterns
• Doing a Perf Audit of your Polymer App

Be sure to visit our YouTube channel for the session recordings. For the latest news and upcoming Polymer events, subscribe to the Polymer blog and follow us on Twitter @Polymer.

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Posted by Alan Wrafter, Head of Partner Marketing, Google for Work and Education



At its core, work is about people coming together to fuse ideas, perspectives and passions into broader, rounder visions. It’s about connecting in that sweet spot between inspiration and launch. To achieve this, we have many partners – our teammates – that work together with us every day. To honor our partners and our shared focus to provide more for our customers on every level, we hosted TeamWork 2015. 800 Premier Partners and 200 Googlers joined live with hundreds more tuning in via livestream, for three days of thought leadership, networking, knowledge sharing and, well, teamwork.

Investing in our teammates
At TeamWork this year, we took the time to share our vision for 2015 and beyond, shaped by the real-time input of our partners.

In December we launched the Google for Work and Education Partner Program, designed to help our partners better innovate across the Google for Work and Education suite of products and platforms. At the summit, we shared full details about this new program and heard directly from partners about what they need to grow in the future.

We also shared the news about Android for Work – a new and better way to work on the powerful mobile devices that we carry with us wherever we go, and a vast opportunity for our partners to develop and deliver innovative IT solutions to their customers.

Celebrating our teammates
Our partners work every day to make sure customers get the most out of the technology and services they use. They’re thought leaders who solve real problems and drive the market forward. We closed out TeamWork by awarding our 2014 Partners of the Year.

We look forward to the work that we’ll continue to do with our partners this year to provide greater tools, services and access for our customers.

Check out what partners are saying about this year’s summit by searching #TeamWork2015 via G+ and Twitter. Go team!

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Posted by Ryan Troll, Technical Lead, Identity and Authentication

As mentioned in our earlier post reminding users to migrate to newer Google Data APIs, we would like to once again share that the ClientLogin shutdown date is fast approaching, and applications which rely on it will stop working when it shuts down. We encourage you to minimize user disruption by switching to OAuth 2.0.

Our top priority is to safeguard users’ data, and at Google we use risk based analysis to block the vast majority of account hijacking attempts. Our risk analysis systems take into account many signals in addition to passwords to ensure that user data is protected. Password-only authentication has several well known shortcomings and we are actively working to move away from it. Moving to OAuth 2.0 ensures that advances we make in secure authentication are passed on to users signing in to Google services from your applications.

In our efforts to eliminate password-only authentication, we took the first step by announcing a deprecation date of April 20, 2015 for ClientLogin three years ago. At the same time, we recommended OAuth 2.0 as the standard authentication mechanism for our APIs. Applications using OAuth 2.0 never ask users for passwords, and users have tighter control over which data client applications can access. You can use OAuth 2.0 to build clients and websites that securely access account data and work with our advanced security features like 2-step verification.

We’ve taken steps to provide alternatives to password authentication in other protocols as well. CalDAV API V2 only supports OAuth 2.0, and we’ve added OAuth 2.0 support to IMAP, SMTP, and XMPP. While a deprecation timeline for password authentication in these protocols hasn’t been announced yet, developers are strongly encouraged to move to OAuth 2.0.

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Posted by Paul Kinlan, Chrome Developer Relations

Welcome to the Chrome Dev Summit livestream 2015! Today, Darin Fisher, VP of Chrome, has some exciting announcements and will speak about how the Chrome team is thinking about the future of the web. Tune in to the livestream below. We look forward to engaging in the conversation with you at #ChromeDevSummit.

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Posted by Paul Kinlan, Chrome Developer Relations

The Chrome Dev Summit is almost here! We’ll kick off live from Mountain View, California at 9:00AM PT this coming Tuesday, November 17th. To get the most out of the event, make sure to check out the speaker list and talk schedule on our site.

Can’t join us in person? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! You can tune into the summit live on developer.chrome.com/devsummit. We will stream the keynote and all sessions over the course of the event. If you want us to send you a reminder to tune into the livestream, sign up here. We’ll also be publishing all of the talks as videos on the Chrome Developers YouTube Channel.

We’re looking forward to seeing you in person or remotely on Tuesday. Don’t forget to join the social conversations at #ChromeDevSummit!

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Posted by Taylor Savage, Product Manager, Polymer

The Polymer Summit is almost here! We’ll officially kick off live from Amsterdam at 9:00AM GMT+2 this coming Tuesday, September 15th. To get the most out of the event, make sure to check out the speaker list and talk schedule on our site.

Can’t join us in person? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! You can tune into the summit live on www.polymer-project.org/summit. We will stream the keynote and all sessions over the course of the event. If you want us to send you a reminder to tune into the livestream, sign up here. We’ll also be publishing all of the talks as videos on the Chrome Developers YouTube Channel.

We’re looking forward to seeing you in person or remotely on Tuesday. Don’t forget to join the social conversations at #PolymerSummit!

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Posted by Paul Kinlan, Chrome Developer Relations

Welcome to day two of the Chrome Dev Summit livestream 2015! Today, we’ll have a full day of sessions covering every aspect of performance on the web. Flipkart will also be joining us on stage later today to talk about their experience building a Progressive web app. Tune in to the livestream below. We look forward to engaging in the conversation with you at #ChromeDevSummit.

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Posted by Amir Shevat, Google Developers Launchpad Program Manager

With new events, improved courses and an expanded mentorship network - Startup Launch is now Google Developers Launchpad. We’re changing our program name to emphasize how you can use our resources as a launch pad to scale and monetize your app business. Read on to learn about our upcoming events and how you can apply to participate.

Events: Launchpad Week goes global

Launchpad Week, Launchpad’s weeklong in-person bootcamp for early-stage apps, continues to expand, with new 2015 programs planned in Munich, Mexico City, Helsinki, Bogota, and Sydney, to name a few. We’ll also regularly host these events in Tel Aviv, London, Berlin, and Paris.

We kicked off Launchpad Week in Bengaluru, India and Bordeaux, France last month. 32 startups and 80 experts from these communities gathered at Idiom Design Center and Le Node for a week of product, UX, and technology sprints designed to help transform ideas into validated, scalable businesses.

Featured startups from Bengaluru included iReff, an app that helps pre-paid mobile users find the best recharge plan for their specific needs. In Bordeaux, Google Developer Expert David Gageot volunteered as a tech mentor, helping startups “ship early, ship often” through testing and continuous integration.

Events: Google Developers Summits

For later-stage startups, we’re providing some of the best tech experts to help optimize apps for Material Design, Android TV, and Google Cast at two-day Google Developer Summits. At an event in Buenos Aires, Argentina, last week, we had participants such as game developer Etermax, the team behind Trivia Crack. Similar events happened in Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Bengaluru this month, and we’re looking forward to inviting more startups to this program in London, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, and New York in 2015.

Products: Your app, powered by Google

In 2014, we helped over 5,000 developers in 170 countries get their ideas off the ground by providing the infrastructure back-end that allows developers to build incredible products. For example, our program delivered software architecture reviews and Google Cloud Platform credits to help entrepreneurs in the program build businesses that scale with them. Check out how Fansino is using Google Cloud Platform to let artists interact with their fans.

We’ve also expanded our product offer for early-stage startups to include AdWords promotional offers for new accounts. Whatever your monetization plan, we’re making it easy to get started with tools like the new In-app Billing API and instruction from the AdMob team.

Courses: Upskilling you and your app

Starting this month, we’ll offer a virtual curriculum of how Google products can help your startup. We’re kicking things off with new Launchpad Online videos covering Google Analytics - are you observing how your users use your app? How do different promotional channels perform?

The series continues in April 2015 with AdMob products, and will expand with instruction in implementing material design and conducting user research later in the year.

If you can’t wait, we’ve also built courses together with Udacity to take your technical skills to the next level on topics, including Android, Java, Web Fundamentals, and UX.

Apply to get involved

Apply to Google Developers Launchpad program to take advantage of these offers - g.co/launchpad. Here’s to a great launch!

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