Udacity and Google always had a close relationship. Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity is also a Google fellow. While at Google he founded Google X, which is home to projects like the Google self-driving car and Google Glass. Its no surprise that Udacity made couple of big announcements at Google I/O this year.

New Courses with Google Experts

Udacity announced three new courses and one mini-course (which was announced a week ago) that will be taught by Google employees:

Developing Android Apps: Android Fundamentals
This course is approximately 8 weeks long and taught by Reto Meier. He is the author of Professional Android Application Development series.

UX Design for Mobile Developers: Learn to Design a 5-Star App
This course is optimized for the developer who is looking to efficiently learn the most important design techniques that will help them make better apps (with a focus on mobile/Android).

Developing Scalable Apps: Using Google App Engine
You will learn about challenges of building applications that can serve hundreds of thousands of users, and how you can prepare for them as a developer.

Web Performance Optimization: The Critical Rendering Path
This is a mini course. You will learn how to optimize any website for speed by diving into the details of how mobile and desktop browsers render pages.

Android app

Udacity for Android is now available on Google Play! Though it has only been on the play store for a few hours it already getting lot of positive reviews. One big feature that is missing is the ability to download videos on your Android device. According to Udacity, this feature is coming soon.