Android Series #1: App quality, Vitals

Android Series #1: App quality, Vitals

I’m starting Android Series on my blog (yay!). Today I’d like to focus on a news that was announced by Google 2 weeks ago and I feel that this post from official Andoid Developers Blog didn’t get much attention. I talked with many Android developers on many events and I know how approach for maintaining code can vary. In most cases on conferences we are focusing on technology, technical stuff and we forgot about quality. Don’t get me wrong, I know that Google is trying to change this situation. I’ve been to Google I/O 2018 and I was talking with Googlers about it but I saw also that many developers are more exited about technical news from Android’s world and they didn’t get much attention to this topic. It is worth to mention that new technical stuff we got from Google like Android Jetpack, Architecture Components – they are also here to help us to improve the quality – better architecture – more solid app, less crashes, better performance (so this is connected). What’s “the quality” in Android’s world?
Posted by Paul Bankhead, Director, Product Management, Google Play … Over the last year, we’ve been enhancing our search and discovery algorithms’ consideration of app quality and user engagement. This means that apps and games that have high retention rates, low crash rates, low uninstalls, and many other factors, are recommended more often. Recently, we increased the importance of engagement and app quality in our recommendation systems and users reacted favorably to the changes. With more high quality titles being surfaced in the Play Store’s recommendations, people are playing the games they download more often.
Paul Bankhead briefly listed factors that affect the quality of Android applications. We heard in the past that stability and performance is a factor when you are thinking about ASO (App Store Optimization). Now it is more clear what does it mean and we know that Google is already using this factor to filter search results at Play Store (search results, recommendations…). You want more downloads for your app? Make your app stable and don’t forget about performance.

Android Vitals to the rescue!

You’ll find Android Vitals in Google Play Console.
Android vitals is an initiative by Google to improve the stability and performance of Android devices. When an opted-in user runs your app, their Android device logs various metrics, including data about app stability, app startup time, battery usage, render time, and permission denials. The Google Play Console aggregates this data and displays it in the Android vitals dashboard.
Do you care about high retention or low uninstall rate as a developer? Probably you are focusing on crashes, ANRs mainly. It’s not enough right now. You could miss some important factors you’ll find in Android Vitals. It’s easier to understand this when you are working on your app for many years. You’ll see then also that in many cases fixing/improving Android Vitals can be a long term process. You could say that’s it’s not your problem as a developer – retention, number of downloads – it’s marketing or maybe product owner should care about this. Maybe, but right now you should be aware that with Android vitals as a factor in Play Store you are also responsible for this. All sides of a project should have this knowledge. Product manager was ignoring your suggestions about this? Tasks related with performance were moved to low priority queue? Right now maybe you should change your way of dealing with it. Especially when the app is your business. If you are a developer don’t focus only on problems mentioned for example in Crashlytics console. Be aware about Androd vitals. I hope that Google in future will move some information from vistals to Crashlytics console. I started writing more detailed article about Vitals but in my opinion Wojtek Kaliciński’s treatment of the subject is exhaustive. Wojtek posted two great articles about Android Vitals and you should read it:
  1. How to fix app quality issues with Android vitals
  2. How to fix app quality issues with Android vitals (Part 2)
I strongly suggest you also to to see the session about it from Google I/O ’18 See you next time!