Android vitals: Increase engagement and installs through improved app performance

Posted by Fergus Hurley, Product Manager, Google Play

Poor app performance is something that many users have experienced. Think about
that last time you experienced an app crashing, failing to respond, or rendering
slowly. Consider your reaction when checking the battery usage on your own
device, and seeing an app using excessive battery. When an app performs badly,
users notice. In fact, in an internal analysis of app reviews on Google Play, we
noticed that half of the 1-star reviews mentioned app stability.

Conversely, people consistently reward the best performing apps with better
ratings and reviews. This leads to better rankings on Google Play, which helps
increase installs. Not only that, but users stay more engaged, and are willing
to spend more time and money.

At Google I/O 2017, we href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/whats-new-in-google-play-at-io-2017.html">announced
the new Android vitals dashboard in the Google Play Console. Android vitals is
designed to help you understand and analyze bad app behaviors, so you can
improve your app's performance and reap the benefits of better performance.

Android vitals in the Google Play Console

Android vitals helps identify opportunities to improve your app's performance.
The dashboards are useful for engineers and business owners alike, offering
quick reference performance metrics to monitor your app so you can analyze the
data and dedicate the right resources to make improvements.

You'll see the following data collected from Android devices whose users have
opted in to automatically share usage and diagnostics data:

• Stability: ANR rate & crash rate
  
• Render time: slow rendering (16ms) and frozen UI frames
  (700ms)
  
• Battery usage: stuck wake locks and excessive
  wakeups

See how Busuu increased their rating from 4.1☆ to 4.5☆ by focusing on
app performance

Busuu is one of the world's largest language learning apps. Hear from Antoine
Sakho, Head of Product about how Busuu increased user ratings.

Learn more about engineering for high performance with tools from
Android and Google Play

Read our href="http://developer.android.com/distribute/best-practices/develop/android-vitals.html">best
practice article on Android vitals to understand the data shown in the
dashboards, and how you can improve your app's performance and stability. Watch
the I/O session to learn about more tools from Android and Google Play that you
can use to identify and fix bad behaviors:

Learn more about other Play Console features, and stay up to date with news and
tips to succeed on Google Play, with the Playbook app. href="http://g.co/playbookbeta">Join the beta and install it today.

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