Many end users are familiar with poor app performance, including app, crashing, failing to respond, heavy usage of resources, and even slow rendering. Google is changing all of that, thanks to its initiative, Android Vitals, so those who have already published apps on Google Play or are planning to in the nearest future can benefit.
Google’s Android Vitals is a tool that helps to improve the stability and performance of Android apps. Developers will be able to monitor and troubleshoot their technical quality to optimize their apps for stability, better battery usage, speedy performance, and more.
If you’re looking to leverage Android Vitals, there are two ways to use the tool: the Play Console and the Play Developer API reporting. You will be able to gain insights into your app’s data to monitor and fix performance issues.
Android Vitals group data collected from Android users who share usage and diagnostics data and group issues into five major categories. These include:
Stability issues refer to how an app crashes or displays ‘Application Not Responding’ error messages. This category is subdivided into two:
- ANR rate and multiple ANR rate
Apps fail to respond for different reasons, but the fault is characterized by the APP’S UI thread getting blocked for a long time. Android Vitals will display the following:
- Crash rate and multiple crash rate
Apps crash whenever there’s an unexpected existence, usually resulting from unhandled exceptions. Android Vitals combines crash data with usage data to create a normalized metric. It displays the following details:
The Android Vitals displays only impacted sessions, unimpacted sessions, and several sessions for multiple crashes.
2. Start-up and loading times
Android Vitals records the time it takes for the app to load depending on how long it was last opened. It displays the following details:
- Impacted sessions
- Slow cold start (5 seconds or more) ii. Slow warn start (2 seconds or more) iii. Slow hot start (1 second or more)
- Unimpacted sessions
- 90/99th percentile
3. Rendering
Generally, an app’s rendering speed should not exceed 16ms to hit 60 frames per second, as anything longer is considered slow. It further breaks the data into excessive slow frames and excessive frozen frames. Android Vitals displays details via the following:
5. Permissions
Most apps require users to grant them permissions to function properly, but users may choose not to do so. Android Vitals displays the following:
Android Vitals is a helpful tool to improve app quality as it allows monitor and fixing of technical issues. The rewards include a better user experience, higher ratings, and more retained installers when maximized.