Android One: Bringing Your Apps to the Next Five Billion

With the launch of Android One,
more people across the world will have access to high-quality and
affordable smartphones, packed with plenty of processing power and
running the latest version of Android. These devices are available now
in India and soon in Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Asia, so now
is a good time to make sure your apps are ready for these new markets.
This post highlights a few areas to consider.





These days, we often talk about smooth, 60fps transitions and keeping
apps jank-free, and rightly so — performance is a critical metric for
app quality. But in the user experience hierarchy of needs, an app
should first and foremost do its job reliably and consistently.



If your app has search functionality, will user requests time out
entirely? Do you think it is more important that a result is returned in
a timely manner, or that the result is returned at all? If you're
trying to build a robust app to reach the next five billion, it might be
less about returning a result immediately, and more about returning a
result at all. To address this challenge, why not include an option to
users to “notify me with the results” when a search query is running on a
slow network? Your app can then take as long as it needs to
successfully retrieve the data in the background and show a notification
when complete. The difference in user experience between an app that
times out on a slower network and one that caters to user-specific needs
will be very impactful for driving mobile app adoption.





There are also ways to test app performance without flying around the globe. The Android Emulator has network speed and network delay emulation
settings, which can become an integral part of your testing strategy.
If you’re testing on physical hardware, try turning off WiFi and
switching the network to 2G only; how well does your app perform? Do
search pages load? Does data refresh? These issues can often be fixed
with relatively minor changes to your app logic or by leveraging a SyncAdapter. Check out our blog post on sync in the Google I/O app for more ideas.

Another key area for you to be aware of is app memory utilization. As
part of the KitKat launch, we added new tools to the SDK for analyzing memory use and new APIs like isLowRamDevice(). We also just added a Memory Monitor to Android Studio 0.8.10 (currently in Canary). Much of this is documented in our Best Practices for Performance guide.



Moving forward, the Android L release has a strong focus on battery usage and analysis. Project Volta introduces new tools, such as Battery Historian and new APIs like JobScheduler, that can really help optimize battery use of your app.



By ensuring your app works well on slower networks, uses minimal
memory, minimizes battery usage and doesn’t have a larger-than-necessary
APK, you will help the next five billion discover, use and love your
app.