Google’s recommendations for Android: from Google I/O 2019
It’s been a few months since the Google I/O 2019 took place — for those who are unfamiliar with it, it is Google’s annual conference where they announce the years new features.
In order to keep up with Tech trends, Idean France sent me there, to California, as one of their Android engineers. I would like to remind you what has been said as well as the current status of Google’s recommendations when it comes to Android development.
Announcements
Let’s face it, the Android news are quite thin this year. The teams in charge of mobile development at Google have made the decision to focus primarily on bug fixing rather than new features. However, for those who might have missed it, here is a list of notable Android Q announcements :
- Dark Theme: a heavily requested feature
- Notifications now have an order of priority
- Location gets a new level of permission
- Gesture Navigation is becoming official (they’re the gestures replacing physical or on-screen navigation buttons)
As well as other technical announcements such as Jetpack Compose (currently still in development).
Recommendations
Google heavily insists on the importance of the following key points while developing Android applications:
A. MATERIAL DESIGN
Material Design is a design language created by Google in 2014. It is intended to unify every Android applications when it comes to design and user experience.
[NB: This is a reminder that Android and iOS are platforms with different design and user experience conventions, that should not be overlooked.]
Every year, it evolves and improves. It’s *the* design recommendation from Google. This year being no exception, you can find every Google I/O sessions about design here
B. ACCESSIBILITY
Accessibility has always been one of Google’s concerns from the start; part of its mission.
An “accessible” application is an application usable by anyone, whatever the capabilities of the device’s user. More than 15% of the population is living with a handicap, which makes the topic non negligible during an application’s conception phase. It is therefore necessary to plan the experience for every user, including for the visually impaired (ie: add a description for every visual element like images and icons), the hearing impaired (ie: add subtitles to videos, visual indicators when necessary to go with important sounds), and for people with reduced mobility (ie: clickable zones have to be big enough)
Watch every session on accessibility at Google IO 2019 here
C. KEEP EVERYONE IN MIND / DIVERSITY
When it comes to developing for everyone, Google wants us to keep these in mind:
- Entry-level smartphones, less powerful devices or with smaller screens…
- Internet is slow and expensive in certain regions of the planet. Consequently, app developers have to be aware of their target audience, and develop accordingly without excluding a big part of the population. For example, Facebook has a lite version of all their apps. They are smaller in size than the original ones and rely less on the internet, to provide a simplified access for people without a lot of storage or on 2G/slower networks.
- Try to handle the oldest versions possible, within your target audience. Almost 25% of users are still running Lollipop or older (Android 5.0, released in 2014).
D. ALL MEDIUMS
To be able to reach the most people and have the best user experience possible, Google recommends using every possible medium. It allows the user experience to continue beyond the app itself. This includes:
- Putting together an appropriate notification system (useful, non-intrusive, configurable, etc)
- Developing traditional actions for the Google Assistant to allow the user to communicate with the application with only their voice
- Going further by developing “Smart Home” actions for the Google Assistant, to communicate with/through the user’s home appliances (Google Home, Google Nest Hub, etc)
- Building a watch application but only adding features that are right for the medium (small screen, no keyboard, very limited clickable zone)
E. DARK THEME
Last but not least, Dark Theme allows the user to switch their entire phone to a dark theme. As a result, applications developers now have the option to create 2 versions of their app’s theme and components: a ‘Light’ (the theme by default when Dark Theme is disabled) and a ‘Dark’ one. This is an important point for Google. The engineers who gave the talk about Dark Theme urged us to understand, rightly so, that when users switch over to Dark, any applications without a dark version would stand out (definitely not in a good way) and therefore would not be perceived very well. Which might result in them not staying installed as long as they used to.
If you are wondering how to adapt your themes to Dark Theme, this talk is for you.
That’s it for now with this quick Android summary. Stay tuned for the next article on how to implement Dark Mode as well as how it works.
