GooglePlaytime: Protecting and Respecting the Ecosystem
Playtime is a multi-track event hosted by Google Play team. Attendance can just be with an invitation and the event’s sessions are divided into two main topics: apps and games. Target groups of the event are that generally product managers and business decision makers. But, I attended Playtime as a developer 🙂 and I followed apps sessions. Last week, I made a presentation to my own team in the company, and after the presentation I decided to share my observations during the event and topics with a story. And also you can find related source links in this post. Let’s start…
Protecting the ecosystem
One of two main topics of the event is that Protecting the ecosystem. Because, 116 billion apps and games have been downloaded from Google Play since last 12 moths. This type of huge ecosystem must be protected with Google and its shareholders who make a huge contribution to growth of the ecosystem.
Protecting Google Play
In 2020, following updates will be published to protect Google Play, the users and your business ;
- Teacher approved apps
- Updated subscription policies
- Appropriate location access
- Updated SDK policies
- ML / Human Reviewed developer account creation
- ML / Human Reviewed new and updating app submission
With this updates, Google Play team highly recommends to use App Licensing and SafetyNet Attestation SDK to protect the business.
During the event, my favorite session is the one that is presented by Chet Haase from Google. Because, he mentioned about two topics these attracts attention:
1. Focus on user
2. Focus on developer
Focus on user
Privacy of the user has top priority under this title. And Android 10 Privacy updates have been explained especially about location. Because, to get user location, there are lots of different ways. With Android 10, users have more control over apps that need the location. At the same time, there are many privacy updates like Scoped Storage, restrictions background activity starts(with this title, I think the number of blocked popups is important: 17.8M in 1st week of December), clipboard data, camera metadata and more… You can find all privacy changes in Android 10 below:
Focus on developer
“Focus on developer” is the most important part for me as you guess 😉. Under this topic, it has been mentioned about Modern Android Development.
After Google I/O 2017, Kotlin is announced as preferred language for Android App Development by Google. After the I/O, most of Android Developers start to develop their app with Kotlin. And now, 60% of the top 1,000 apps are developed and 53% of pro Android developers continue to develop their apps with Kotlin.
The most important part of the Modern Android Development is Android Jetpack. Jetpack is a powerful bundle of libraries, tools and more that is used to develop high-quality and testable applications with best practices. Jetpack provides developers a powerful guidance with its components. Jetpack Compose is powerful tool to build native UI. At the event, using of Compose is also recommended to use.
Last step of Modern Android Development is of course Android Studio. With Android Studio v3.5, lost of performance updates have been made to accelerate building app, which are listed below:
- 60% drop in UI freeze times
- 40% drop in UI hangs
- >50 memory leaks fixed
- 23% drop in gradle sync failures
- 57% faster deployment
- 50k lines of code deleted
Modern Distribution
Android App Bundle announced in Google I/O 2018 is the official publishing format of Google Play. The most important advantage of App Bundle is smaller app size. Moreover, it enables to develop modular app and customizes feature delivery. Some statical data are shared about App Bundle in the event:
- 270k+apps in production
- 25% of active installs
- 30% of top apps and games
The most important sentence under this topic is that “Storage constrained users are much more likely to uninstall app”. When this sentence has been detailed, a new metric is announced to display “active devices and uninstalls from devices with <1GB free”.
To modularize your app and customize delivery, four main points are recommended to use:
In-app updates provides new update flow to active user, and is also recommended to use for painless testing with App Bundles and Dynamic feature modules.
- 3M updates a day
- 10% of top apps and games
- 24% average acceptance rate
With internal app sharing, you can share your app bundles or APKs with internal team instantly. Most important part of internal app sharing is that the uploaded app bundles or APKs aren’t signed and you can upload debuggable version.
A/B Testing
One of the session was about A/B testing and different speakers from different companies share their experiences. At this time, I want to remark key sentences below:
- A winning A/B test is not always a winner
- Foster a culture
- Prioritize ruthlessly
- Get everyone involved / Test everything
- Become data-aware / Reset your mindset
- Beware of cost / Resources are finite
You can find other shared titles and related links during the event and also presentation recordings:
- Google Play Points
- Android Studio 4.0 Canary
- Game Assets EAP (Optimized resource delivery)
- Google Play Billing Library 2.0
Respecting the ecosystem
That’s all! I have tried to mention about my Playtime experience. Thanks for reading, and I hope you found something useful. 🙂 If you have any thoughts or comments about the post, I want to hear your words.
