Corona Labs releases a new public build

10 July 2018

Corona Labs releases a new public build

Corona Labs is pleased to announce the availability of our latest public release of Corona: 2018.3326. This build contains significant bug fixes and new features that we hope you will appreciate.

Google Play

One of the biggest changes in this public build is addressing changes required by Google. Since the last public build, Google has changed their Vitals detection methods and have gotten considerably more aggressive with their detection. To support these changes, we’ve updated all of our support plugins for Android to bring them up to modern standards.

We have also increased our Android API level to 27 (Android 8.1) in preparation for Google’s August, 2018 requirement to have API level 26 support.

Google is also pushing new app signing procedures. As such, Corona can now employ the modern encryption methods used by the latest Java keytool built keystores as well as older keystores.

HTML5

You will notice that a majority of the updates in this build are involving HTML5. That’s right – HTML5 builds are now in Open Beta! HTML5 is becoming a considerably more stable product. We now include the base code needed to build Facebook Instant Games as well as support for the VK social media site’s version as well.

HTML5 builds are already having an impact on other platforms. Developers have prototyped HTML5 versions of game ideas and pitched them to publishers to build mobile versions of the games. Being able to quickly give someone a look into your prototype is a great way to market your content.

GDPR

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation went into effect on May 25, 2018. This public release of Corona does not collect data considered personal in nature. Also, Corona Labs doesn’t collect any personal data in Corona-managed advertising plugins. The third-party SDKs used in the plugins have their own GDPR requirements..

Apple

On the Apple side, we have updated to support iOS 11.4 and Xcode 9.4 and implemented additional features to support iOS 11 edge gestures that impact the iPhone X.

One breaking change that comes with iOS 11 is that getting the default language of the device is now dependent on additions to the iOS plist. iOS 11 only returns supported values that your app supports. You must include an entry in your build.settings file to list the supported languages by the app. For example:

You can look at the sample app: SampleCode/GettingStarted/HelloWorldLocalized for an example of this requirement or see our localization guide.

Open-source libraries

In addition to these changes, Corona Labs is open-sourcing the following libraries:

• timer.*
• easing.*
• transition.*
• composer.*

You can download the Lua source for these libraries from the Corona Labs GitHub account. In addition, the widget.* library was updated to be in sync with our internal library.

Facebook

Facebook has recently changed their permission requirements for apps. You now have to submit your app to Facebook for review and get approved to use the user_friends permission. We have removed the default addition of the user_friends permission from the login process. Starting with this release (2018.3326) plugin facebook_v4a only asks for public_profile by default. This may be a breaking change if your app depends on the user_friends permission. If this is a case, add the permission when requesting login, like facebook.login( { 'user_friends' } ).

Check it out!

You can see a full list of changes in our release notes for 2017.3326. If you have questions or comments on this release, join us in our community forums.