With a growing user base of smartphones, the requirement for dynamic and high-quality mobile apps is also expanding.
Now users look up to powerful apps that they can access at any point in time, from any location.
About 1.4 billion people are Android users worldwide. The Android OS has more than 50% of OS market share and operates on more than 4,000 types of devices. The best practices for Android app development not only ease app development but also helps a rapidly growing mobile ecosystem.
App development is a new frontier, and many clients are looking for an Android developer to turn their vision into a tangible product. Do well, and you’ll be rewarded handsomely.
Android developers earn about $77,000 a year. However, learning is an important part of app development, and you’ll do well to enroll in an
Android training course to learn the best practices of Android.
To deliver a great user experience, every developer needs to know do’s and don’ts for the Android world.
Memory issues
Usually, mobile devices have higher memory limitations than most desktops. Developers should learn to code with higher memory limitations in mobile programming. Any ignorance regarding memory on an Android device can certainly lead to the risk of an app crash because of “out of memory” errors.
You can work on this by using services sparingly on the device and free up memory resources when your app is unrevealed. Developers can override the onTrimMemory event to release memory resources, but it is not a magic wand that permits you to avoid other performance optimization across your code.
Examine the Standby Mode
Whether your app can handle the standby mode or not is important to test on your app. Your app should update the current view in order to fetch recent data from the database. When examining the standby mode, you should also check the battery usage by the app. An ideal practice would be to test with a completely charged battery and then analyze the state of the battery after every 10 min to understand how much battery your app consumes. Then, test your app when the battery level is at 10-15% as in this case, the device should be in safe battery mode while disabling all the hardware features.
Application id in the build file
Do you know the difference between applicationID and packageName?
According to Android tools doc:
The end package used during development .apk’s manifest, and the package your app is notable in the Google Play store and on the device, is the “application id.”
Your source code that encompasses the package to refer to R class, and to solve any service registrations, continues to be referred the “package.”
The package should always be set in your AndroidManifest.xml file and the application id is entirely separated from it. Due to compatibility issues, by default, the application id becomes equal to the package. An explicit setting of application id in your build configuration is completely advantageous.
An unpleasant bug was reported about application id to bug tracker about one year ago, but this issue is still the same. The issue is that application id is not populated to the associated libraries if application id is not fixed in build.gradle. This problem can lead to your app failing to install on the device from Play Store, and all report tools won’t inform you about the problem.
Safe payment options
Risk-aware transactions are important to implement to protect mobile apps from attacks. Moreover, you can integrate code that calculates data access parameters, for example, user location and IP velocity to ensure the payment security and database transactions maintained by your apps. You can also develop your apps for data encryption at rest using tools like FIPS 140-2. You add an extra layer of transaction security by integrating app-level VPN support into your software.
Efficient release configuration
Proguard option for the release build is an effective solution for a build file evolved by Android Studio. It is important to know that Proguard works on the Java side and is independent of the resources side. Accordingly, if an image my_image in res/drawable is not used, it strips its reference in the R class while keeping the related image in place. But Gradle script can do that by setting shrinkResourcesto to true. Developers need to test their release APK carefully after implementing these tools.
Go deeper by splitting your app to several APKs, but ensure that you have skills to test all these builds using various screen sizes/target ABIs.
DON’Ts
Design to attract
User experience is important, but Kumulos says designing is a need. Usually, catchy apps bring in sales. Your app must provide a great user experience to ensure regular app usage, but smarter screens, clean sound effects, and a unique design are tactics to hook your users to your app in the first place.
Don’t overdo it: Don’t let your app make irritating noises every thirty seconds as it can topple sales charts anytime. But a visually and aurally engaging app is important to stand your app out from the designing economy.
Don’t support every version of android
Every developer tries to get his app in front of maximum users. However, don’t assume that supporting many versions of Android is always the right approach.
The best user experience is key to attract users, but supporting many versions of Android can damage the user experience.
The problem is that as you regularly travel back through Android’s release history, it becomes harder to make your app work perfectly with the earlier releases.
A point may even come where you do not align with earlier releases of Android. If your app needs access to Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), for example, then your app would not run on anything earlier than Android 4.3—the version where BLE support was integrated to the Android platform.
So customizing, upgrading and testing your app for each version of Android consume time, you need to decide whether this investment will generate the potential rewards or not.
Android apps are a great way to reach out to a humongous audience. The key is to play it right. Overdo it and you’ll get penalized; ignore it and you’ll miss out.
