My name is Alexy and with Google Play Business Development for Application in
Central and Eastern Europe.
And I'm Ricardo engineering lay down and Andorid vitalals.
And we are going to talk with you about application quality in Android.
Application quality in Android ecosystem has always been a top priority
for us, and we have been moving away from just installations and user rights in
Play application rankings and start focusing on more complex and exact
metrics like engagement and uboxed performance.
Today we are going to talk about this all in detail,
first of all a way it's important to have a quality app,
then how can you troubleshoot your technical issues and master
Android vitals, and how we can build an excellent
product on this great technical foundation.
First of all why quality matters? Why it's important?
Quality directly impact the success of your business on Google Play.
We have run an analysis on our top apps and games in
Google Play rankings a quality score and we have seen some spectacular results.
For example one application moved from average to good quality.
We can see up to seven times uplift in retention and
six times uplift in spending those applications.
Our partners support of those findings. For example the London
Europe speaking fashioned platform, they focused on a reliability in performance,
and emanating bugs and making their application faster and this has not only
increased the organic traffic that getting as they provided the positive
impact on as their revenue growing the LTV lifetime value per user.
How much stability matters?
The answer is it matters a lot. Again our findings found out
that if the application crashes a lot, and a lot means more than 5% crashes,
they have a 30% more uninstallation in the first day, than more stable apps.
You have seen this previously but again, I want to remind you that
application performance and quality is the main driver of a user life or
anything, with 50% of negative reviews mention stability and crush and 60% of
positively used mentioning speed, design, and reliability you know what to focus
on to make your app excellent. Again our partners support those findings
and busuu, a language learning app, they saw significant growth in the average
ranking when they increase the performance of the applications
and everybody knows how difficult it is to grow the application
from already high ranking 44.1.
Lastly in addition to those objective fractions and your business
growth there are some rewards you can get from
Google Play from having equality applications.
Those benefits are the boost for organic traffic, featuring and some
occasional awards you can get from us. For example if the application crashes
a lot it gets a lot of negative reviews and bad user ratings it can decrease
your application permutability in Google Play, and when we are speaking
application for featuring we have already paid a lot of attention to its
overall quality and platform support. Now we are starting to look at your
Android vitals to see if the app actually performs and works stable, and at the end
of the day you can get a lot of specific Google Awards with some time runs some
kind of best application of the year or material design award which can do
wonders for your PR and promote your application.
One of such awards is Android excellence
which we have announced on Google IO and which we have updated two times already.
It's a quarterly collection of best content based apps and games of the
Android ecosystem has to offer, and this is
some top and great applications you can all
look for inspiration and some great ideas on how to build Android applications.
now to the technical excellence. Thank you, so you heard from
Kobe in the keynote about Android vitals. I want to spend ten minutes walking you
through how I can help you.
What is Android vitals? Android vitals is a program that
Google created to help you create apps and games of exemplary quality.
We launched it at Google IO with Android vitals dashboards
in the play console. In there you can see aggregated
performance information about your app. Data is collected automatically,
no action required from you, from millions of devices worldwide, from any
user that has agreed to share data with Google.
For example when they have bought
unbox the new device. Thanks to these everyone in
your companies from engineers all the way to the CEO can
understand app quality and set KPIs around it.
How does android vitals work? Is a combination of three things:
metrics,tools, and rewards. Metrics I mean bad
behaviors, these are application practices and patterns and events that
are detrimental to the user experience like crashes and battery drains, all the
things that you want to avoid. Tools imply council
to help you understand and improve your app quality,
from before release with the pre-launch report at
release time, with risk dashboard, and after release when your app is live with
the Android vitals dashboard. And finally rewards as Alexei mentioned
rewards in search and discovery for apps that show exemplary behavior.
What I mean by bad behaviors?
If you got your Android vitals today so far you will see that we
explained performance across three key domains:
stability, battery, and rendering.
For stability we tell you whenever your application is crashing or freezing
application not responding. For battery we already inform you when
your application is closing unnecessary battery drains, for example by keeping
the CPU on excessively or for too long amount of time
or waking the device up too often.
And for rendering we highlight whenever the applications is slow, lower
than 60 frames per second or stuttering with frozen frames.
We've seen massive momentum since we launched
the Google IO over 65% of Play top apps are engaging with Android
vitals regularly, over 60,000 app developers worldwide, and by working
closely with over 50 partners, some of you in the audience as well, we observe
that they were able on average to reduce their crush rate from 3.5% down to 1.7
which is massive and this means that since Google IO over 1.5 billion
installations were delivered to users leading
them to apps that are better and less crushing.
Thanks to these many for many partners Android vitals is now an
active part of their planning and they observe a direct impact on customer
satisfaction by focusing on app quality, like the Weather Channel here.
So inspired by all of this I want to announce three new things today, expand
the device coverage, five additional new metrics to help you understand and act
on up quality, and a completely new user experience in the Play console.
First, expanded device coverage. Until now, Android vitals only reported
performance pertaining to Nexus and Pixel devices.
In the last three months we work with
several OMS to surface performance metrics for many new devices across the
spectrum from high-end flagship devices,
to mid-range bestsellers, to low-end devices.
And this means that we are able to cover over 50 times more amount of
sessions tracked by the program. So if until now you were not able to get
sufficient representative information in Android vitals, I encourage you to go and
check it today because it's going to be much better.
We increased the set of metrics that we report,
starting with additional metrics around stability and battery.
For stability, obviously, repeating crashes
are induced user frustration because the apps
appears irremediably broken and this leads to higher knees loss.
So now you can see additional new metrics around multi ANR's percentage of
sessions during which users experience more than one freeze
during a session, and the same for crushes.
On battery we focused on excessive background activity.
Excessive background activity consumes a necessary
battery when the user is away from the phone, and your app will not receive
much usage if the phone is dead when the user comes
back to it, and so we have three new metrics there.
One is excessive Wi-Fi scans in the background whenever the
apps perform too many Wi-Fi scans when not in active use, same is for excessive
network usage you wouldn't be able to see whenever your application is
consuming an excessive amount of data and network usage while the app is not
in active use and stuck by ground wakelocks the percentage of sessions
when the app was keeping the CPU on for more than one hour while it was in the
background not in active use. To help you with all of this
we also significantly revamp the play console
user experience to help you understand improve your app
quality more in easier ways. There is a new overview
page that gives that helps you understand
your overall app quality at a glance across all performance metrics.
It is life now you can check it out as soon as you're out of this session.
There is a new straight at the top of the page and highlight section
that points out any bad behaviors that are triggering for your app right now.
So you can immediately focus on the most important actions.
You can now track the performance of your app over time
and see whenever you improve or you regress on your application quality
and observe the impact of the actions that you took to improve.
To facilitate recusing for any bad behaviors that might trigger you
can now slice the data by any combination of version code, devices, OS version,
time to really dive into what are the main problems that may be affecting your app.
And to help you understand the opportunities even further,
you have now benchmarks that help you establish reference points.
How your behavior fares against the top 10,000 apps,
and we highlight what is the performance of the bottom quartile so you can see
what the opportunity for improvement is for your app to capture compared to peers
And finally, we want to help you take action and be guided into recovery
whenever there is a problem. So for example in the case of application
freezes, which have some time hard to debug
because multiple causes contribute to them.
We now highlight what caused led to them across many different reasons.
>From deadlocks, to excessive disk IO, to excessive network IO,
excessive database usage, suspended threads
due to garbage collection, and much more.
Straight from the play console all UI. So thanks to
these partners are using vitals more and more to continue investing in app
quality, and is great to see feedback like these from big-fish games around
specific features like the effectiveness of benchmarks.
I want to cover one more thing around pre-launch report.
Pre-launch report is Play solution for automated
app testing before production releases.
It automatically crawls apks on 10 physical devices looking for crashes
and security vulnerabilities. And what we observe is that in 90% of the
time whenever pre-launch report discovers a
crash the app was then not pushed the production.
So very effective in preventing bad experiences reaching your users.
Three big news for this today, first, no more need to opt-in into the
service, this was the case until now. Every apk that is going to be now from
today submitted to alpha or the beta track will automatically be tested by a
pre-launch report, so for many of you, you will now start
seeing the result without any opt-in to do.
We completely rewrote and improved the automated crawler that
navigates your app to understand better the content of your app and reach deeper
into that with increased coverage, and be more effective at detecting crashes that
would have otherwise reached users in production.
And the last one, we launched an entire new section centered on
performance metrics that are collected during the troll.
So as the robot explores your app you will now
then be able to replay what the crawler did,
and next to the video of what the crawler you will see performance metric around
CPU, memory, Network, and rendering so you can understand if specific actions in
your app are particularly troublesome. All of these I hope will help you
leading you to unhealthy app but then how do you make it memorable?
And how do you make it excellent? And for this I will leap back to Alexy.
So Android vitals hopefully they helped you to build a great application
from the technical perspective, it works stable it works fast,
it works smooth and there is no issues. How now I do go up from that?
And how do we build a master an excellent product?
What's the next step? The next step is building
useful products from our useful features the users have from using
beautiful design and using all Android platform can offer you.
Let's talk about this in a little bit more detail.
First of all material design the concept got a
lot of praise from independent developers and independent designers.
There is a lot of material about how can you implement an adult material
design in your applications, both from Google and from our partners.
Remember that just reusing some pre-made companies we have plenty of them,
does not make application material, you should
sync material and use any application from the ground up or keeping the main
concept in mind. And having you up in material design definitely helps you
engagement, because users on Android are used to the common approaches and
common elements of material design. Next step is a platform support.
Quality app is an up-to-date application, we encourage you to use the latest SDK and
support the latest version of Android operating system, and as soon as
there is a new developer preview of the next version or as soon as there's a
better version next Android build try and test your application again against
it to be ready for its release. Of course there are a lot of different
platforms we actually built on Android and supporting them you improve the
application quality, and there are some cross-platform tools for example like
sign-in with Google and smart dock which help your
users to create accounts all log in seamlessly.
Speaking about the relevant platforms there are plenty of
devices running Android out there, wearables, tables, Smart TVs, VR
devices, and connected cars. Not everything is relevant for each
of your applications user case but when is relevant it's definitely helped boost your
application quality and benefit from supporting those platforms.
Monetization with Google Play billing is another great example of how your
application can increase the quality, if the users love you app so much so ready
to pay for your content and for your services
it's definitely a sign of a quality application.
As a premium content in-app purchases or subscriptions after
it goes through a certain threshold we will consider
your application as a more quality app.
Of course there is also Android Play which is launched in many
regions across Germany, not Germany of course, but for example in Poland,
and Russia Android pay is up and running and our
partner report is that they can get up to 20%
more paying users for their services with Android Play.
So supported and enjoy additional revenue
and additional users. Moving on from the application itself to
the play listing this is the most important thing for your [unintelligible]
any traffic and conversions to install. There a lot of play listing tools which
of course most of you already knew and use which include promo videos A/B
testing, and beta an alpha channel which help
you deliver quality application to your users.
You can also use the play console to respond to users
reviews in the native tongue, helping resolve the issues and boost the
application rating, keeping it about four, when your rating is about four points it
generally the main threshold we need to put you app in some kind of promos
featuring as activities. And of course all of those experiments
with the playlist in help with your conversion and our partners definitely
support those findings, so if you experiment with your screenshot with
your description and other parts of your listing it can boost
your conversion for example well up here they increase
the conversion by 17% by testing short descriptions which
append a distinction orders. For the best results of such testing you
definitely should have a clear hypothesis and
some big design variations, because only those activities
help get variable great results. So to sum everything up.
So to sum everything up. First of all the application quality
directly affects your business success and customer satisfaction.
And then as I mentioned with Android vitals you can
understand and troubleshoot your technical issues to
lead to an excellent app, from expanded device coverage, new
metrics, new console experience, an entirely revamped performance action in
pre-launch report and a better crawler. And platform and optional product
excellence help you get more traffic and become more visible on Google Play
getting more users and helping your business grow.