Category: google android

How to increase your Android app ratings

Android app ratings and reviews: we love them, and we fear them. At times, it can feel that users only bother with them to complain. Sure, we like to hear about the issues in our apps so we can improve them, but a little love would be nice too!

There is a simple trick to increase your Android app ratings, but it needs to be deployed with care.

Is your app ready for higher ratings?

Overall, the foremost requirement to get higher ratings is to have a good app. If your app doesn’t do what users expect it to do, improve your app rather than obsess about your ratings.

So, before reading on, ask yourself: are you proud of your app?
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How to parse JSON in Dart / Flutter

JSON is a cornerstone in most Android apps, but how do you parse JSON in Dart and Flutter?

As mentioned in my “4 tips to boost your software development career” post, I’ve been experimenting with Flutter recently. Dart, the language used by Flutter, comes with a good library to parse JSON (dart:convert) but after having used gson for years in my Android apps, I had to relearn how to parse JSON.

If you Google gson for Dart , you will also find a library called dson. However, for this code tutorial, I’m focusing on using dart:convert.

To follow the code tutorial, create a new app as follows.

If you’re unsure how to set up a Flutter app, check out Getting started with Flutter official tutorial.

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The analytics checklist: what to measure and look for

When you launch an app or update, you often hope to get new users and/or more revenue. Google Play Developer Console keeps track of those metrics for you, but whether you see numbers you like or dislike, you don’t know much about what drives them.

Analytics, which I’m using in the general sense of collecting data on usage and errors, can help you understand both the pain points and the users of your app, allowing you to focus on removing roadblocks and serving your users’ needs better. This will, in turn, increase your users’ satisfaction, leading to higher ratings and new users, as well as higher revenue per user.

Google Analytics, specifically, comes with an Android SDK and the web interface is already known to many business users, making it a great tool to implement your analytics strategy. There is a whole section on the android developer website taking you around its features. It’s a great product that gives you rich “out of the box” data on your users.

Putting aside the implementation details for a minute, let’s focus on what to measure and look for…

Identify functional problems

  • Crashes – If you don’t already, regularly check the reported Exceptions and ANRs in Google Play Developer Console.

  • Caught Exceptions – Some exceptions are expected but you should still know about them, because they may indicate a latent issue with your app.

  • Communication with servers – Background syncing is vital to delivering a fast, smooth, efficient app. How long do your server calls take? What percentage of your calls end in an IO Exception or a response time of more than 10 seconds? What percentage of your users are on wifi, 4G, 3G and 2G? How often do specific exceptions related to your local caching and server sync happen, for example SQLExceptions?

  • Location, location, location – For exceptions that you catch, do they happen specifically for a given time zone or language? Android is the most popular mobile platform in the world today so you can’t assume that your users live in your country and speak your language.

  • Search – Do users search for what you expect them to? Do they make spelling mistakes in their queries that appropriate suggestions could minimise?

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Delivering an Android app for a large established non-tech company: lessons learned

The last year or so, I’ve been the lead developer for the Android mobile team at British Airways. I was brought on board to help deliver the newly designed app, which we shipped on time on 21st May 2014.

British Airways is a company with a large IT department but, when I joined, very little Android expertise. I think quite a few other Android developers may find themselves in a similar situation, so, hopefully, sharing my lessons learned will benefit others.

Disclaimer: this blog post is my opinion only and doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinion of my employer or colleagues. Blah blah, you know the legal blurb.

Lesson 1: It’s important to evangelise about Android up and down the business ladder

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