docs/html/distribute/essentials/optimizing-your-app.jd - platform/frameworks/base - Git at Google

 page.title=Optimize Your App
 page.metaDescription=A look at how to get the most visibility and the highest ratings possible for your app or game. Optimizing the quality of your apps is a key strategy.
 page.image=/distribute/images/gp-optimize-card.jpg

 @jd:body

 <div id="qv-wrapper">
   <div id="qv">
     <h2>Strategies</h2>
     <ol>
       <li><a href="#listen-to-your-users">Listen to Your Users</a></li>
       <li><a href="#measuring-analyzing-responding">Measuring, Analyzing, and Responding to User Behavior</a></li>
       <li><a href="#improve-stability">Improve Stability and Eliminate Bugs</a></li>
       <li><a href="#improve-ui">Improve UI Responsiveness</a></li>
       <li><a href="#improve-usability">Improve Usability</a></li>
       <li><a href="#professional-appearance">Professional Appearance and Aesthetics</a></li>
       <li><a href="#deliver-features">Deliver the Right Set of Features</a></li>
       <li><a href="#integrate">Integrate with the System and Third-Party Apps</a></li>
       <li><a href="#related-resources">Related Resources</a></li>
     </ol>
   </div>
 </div>

 <div class="top-right-float">
   <img src="{@docRoot}images/gp-optimize.png" class="quality-top-image" style=
   "width:239px;padding-left:1.5em;">
 </div>

 <p>
   With thousands of new apps being published in Google Play every week, it's
   important to look for ways to get the most visibility and the highest ratings
   possible. Optimizing the quality of your apps is a key strategy.
 </p>

 <p>
   A higher quality app can translate to higher user ratings, generally better
   rankings, more downloads, and higher retention (longer install periods).
   High-quality apps are much more likely to get positive publicity, such as
   being featured in Google Play or generating social media buzz.
 </p>

 <p>
   The quality of your apps is something you should consider addressing both
   before and after launch. Gaining users after the launch of a poor quality app
   can be hard and recovering costly. On the other hand, maintaining the ranking
   of high-quality apps is made easier if there are continual improvements, a
   practice that also fuels the impression-install-ranking cycle.
 </p>

 <p>
   On this page you can find advice on a number of ways in which you can drive
   improvements to your apps’ quality.
 </p>

 <div class="headerLine">
   <h2 id="listen-to-your-users">
     Listen to Your Users
   </h2>


 </div>

 <div class="figure">
   <img src="{@docRoot}images/gp-optimizing-chat-bubbles.png">
 </div>

 <p>
   Listening and hearing your users can be one of your best tools for success.
   Start listening to your users before launching your apps and continue to
   listen after launch.
 </p>

 <h3>
   <strong>Listening before you launch</strong>
 </h3>

 <p>
   You can listen to your users during the development of your apps. This
   process can start with focus groups to review app features, continue into
   user experience workshops, and onto alpha and beta releases. Listening at
   these stages has two main benefits: <strong>you’ll build apps with features
   users want</strong> and <strong>any issues they identify will be cheaper and
   quicker to fix</strong> than they would be once the app is launched fully.
 </p>

 <p>
   If the practicalities of focus groups and user workshops seem excessive in
   relation to the development of a particular app, drawing on the feedback of
   colleagues, friends, and family can be much more useful than getting no
   feedback at all.
 </p>

 <p>
   It's crucial to conduct user testing before releasing your apps to Google
   Play. If you can only engage with colleagues, friends, and family you’re
   already making a good start. For more extensive testing consider a public
   alpha/beta test or creating your own trusted tester program. You can manage
   app distribution yourself through email or your own website, or you can use
   <a href=
   "{@docRoot}distribute/googleplay/developer-console.html#alpha-beta">beta-testing</a>
   and <a href=
   "{@docRoot}distribute/googleplay/developer-console.html#staged-rollouts">staged
   rollouts</a> in conjunction with <a href=
   "http://www.google.com/+/business/">Google+</a> or <a href=
   "https://groups.google.com/forum/#!overview">Google Groups</a> to distribute
   software and gather feedback to a subset of users. <strong>Users on alpha or
   beta versions cannot leave reviews or ratings</strong>, so there is
   <strong>no risk to your rating</strong> on Google Play.
 </p>

 <p>
   Unless you have to, don’t restrict the users you involve in these stages in
   the information they can share through their social networks and blogs -
   users engaged in these early stages (and listened too) are likely to be great
   ambassadors for your apps and will help create great social media buzz.
 </p>

 <h3>
   Listening after launch
 </h3>

 <p>
   Once you have launched, the most obvious way to listen to users is by reading
   and addressing comments on Google Play. Although the comments aren't always
   productive or constructive, some will provide valuable insight on aspects of
   your apps. It's important to remember that users have the opportunity to
   change their ratings and comments as much as they like.
 </p>

 <p>
   There are more interactive ways you can reach users, help them address their
   concerns, and gather more detailed feedback: by setting up support and
   discussion forums. There are some great support tools out there that can put
   you in touch with your users directly, from forums such as <a href=
   "http://groups.google.com/">Google Groups</a> to comprehensive customer
   support products and tools like UserVoice. Once you get set up with such a
   tool, make sure to fill in the support link in your Google Play product
   details page — users do click through to these.
 </p>

 <p>
   Also don’t forget to use the <a href=
   "{@docRoot}distribute/googleplay/developer-console.html#alpha-beta">beta-testing</a>
   and <a href=
   "{@docRoot}distribute/googleplay/developer-console.html#staged-rollouts">staged
   rollout</a> features of Google Play with app updates.
 </p>

 <div class="headerLine" id="measuring-analyzing-responding">
   <h2>
     Measuring, Analyzing, and Responding to User Behavior
   </h2>


 </div>

 <div class="figure">
   <img src="{@docRoot}images/gp-optimize-analytics.png">
 </div>

 <p>
   One of the best ways to spot issues to resolve is by measuring user behavior.
   Optimizing your app becomes much easier when you analyze performance before
   and after you launch. Drop off points, low ratings, and high percent of
   uninstalls can be indicative that there’s a problem. Measuring and responding
   to user-related metrics such as download sources, retention rates, and in-app
   behavior regularly is critical to keeping and bringing back your hard earned
   user base.
 </p>

 <p>
   You can get data from tools in Google Play or third-parties to analyze user
   behavior. You can identify details such as:
 </p>

 <ul>
   <li>
     <p>
       Where installs are coming from.
     </p>
   </li>

   <li>
     <p>
       The types of users you are acquiring.
     </p>
   </li>

   <li>
     <p>
       What is causing user churn and how to reduce it.
     </p>
   </li>
 </ul>

 <h3>
   Statistics for analyzing installs and ratings
 </h3>

 <p>
   Once you’ve published your app, Google Play makes it easy to see how it’s
   doing. The <a href="https://play.google.com/apps/publish/">Developer
   Console</a> gives you access to a variety of anonymized statistics and custom
   charts that show you the app's installation performance and ratings.
 </p>

 <p>
   You can view data and charts for active, daily, and total installs per unique
   devices or users, as well as upgrades and uninstalls. You can also view the
   app's daily average user rating and its cumulative user rating. To help you
   analyze the data, you can view install and ratings statistics across a
   variety of different dimensions such as Android version, device, country, app
   version, and carrier.
 </p>

 <div>
   <img class="border-img" src="{@docRoot}images/gp-dc-stats-mini.png">
 </div>

 <p>
   You can see your app statistics on timeline charts, for all metrics and
   dimensions. At a glance, the charts highlight your app’s installation and
   ratings peaks and longer-term trends, which you can correlate to promotions,
   app improvements, or other factors. You can even focus in on data inside a
   dimension by highlighting specific data points (such as individual platform
   versions or languages) on the timeline.
 </p>

 <p>
   You can download all of your installation data as a CSV file for viewing in
   the business program of your choice.
 </p>

 <h3>
   Tracking and analyzing Marketing campaigns
 </h3>

 <p>
   While you should consider monitoring user behavior data as a part of your
   normal activities, it’s particularly important when you’re running any form
   of marketing campaign, to make sure you’re getting the right users at the
   lowest cost possible.
 </p>

 <p>
   One way to track your marketing campaigns is to link <a href=
   "http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2013/10/improved-app-insight-by-linking-google.html">
   Google Analytics with your Google Play account</a> to analyze activity from
   source to install.
 </p>

 <div style="margin-top:1em;">
   <img src="{@docRoot}images/gp-optimizing-image-4.jpg" class="border-img">
 </div>

 <p>
   You can also use any of the variety of tools on the market to help track your
 marketing success and improvement ROI if you wish. There are also third parties
 who can help automate, measure, and optimize your mobile marketing.
 </p>

 <div class="headerLine">
   <h2 id="improve-stability">
     Improve Stability and Eliminate Bugs
   </h2>


 </div>

 <p>
   There are many tools and techniques for testing and profiling your app on
   different devices and user scenarios.
 </p>

 <p>
   One noteworthy and yet relatively underused tool for catching stability
   issues such as crashes is the <a href=
   "{@docRoot}tools/help/monkey.html">UI/Application Exerciser Monkey</a>
   (Monkey). Monkey will send random UI events to your app's activities,
   allowing you to trigger user flows that can uncover stability problems.
 </p>

 <p>
   Also, with the Google error-reporting features built into most Android
   devices, users have a way to report application crashes to you. The error
   reports show up in aggregate in the Google Play Developer Console. Make sure
   to read these reports often and act on them appropriately.
 </p>

 <p>
   Last, keep an external bug and feature request tracker and let users know how
   to find it. This will enable them to engage with the app at a closer level,
   by following features and bugs that affect them. User frustration with app
   problems can be effectively managed with diligent issue tracking and
   communication. Several community support tools offer issue tracking features,
   and if your project is open source, most popular repository hosting sites
   offer this as well.
 </p>

 <div class="headerLine">
   <h2 id="improve-ui">
     Improve UI Responsiveness
   </h2>


 </div>

 <div class="figure">
   <img src="{@docRoot}images/gp-optimize-speed.png">
 </div>

 <p>
   One sure-fire way to lose your users is to give them a slow, unresponsive UI.
   Research has shown that <a href=
   "http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/speed-matters.html">speed
   matters</a>, for any interface, on mobile, web, or desktop. In fact, the
   importance of speed is amplified on mobile devices since users often need
   their information on the go and in a hurry.
 </p>

 <p>
   You can improve your apps' UI responsiveness by moving long-running
   operations off the main thread to worker threads. Android offers built-in
   debugging facilities such as StrictMode for analyzing your app's performance
   and activities on the main thread. See more recommendations in <a href=
   "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4znvD-7VDA">Writing Zippy Android Apps</a>,
   a developer session from Google I/O 2010.
 </p>

 <p>
   A great way to improve UI performance is to minimize the complexity of your
   layouts. If you open up <a href=
   "{@docRoot}tools/help/hierarchy-viewer.html">hierarchyviewer</a> and see that
   your layouts are more than 5 levels deep, it may be time to simplify your
   layout. Consider refactoring those deeply nested <a href=
   "{@docRoot}reference/android/widget/LinearLayout.html">LinearLayouts</a> into
   <a href="{@docRoot}guide/topics/ui/layout/relative.html">RelativeLayout</a>.
   The impact of View objects is cumulative — each one costs about 1 to 2 KB of
   memory, so large view hierarchies can be a recipe for disaster, causing
   frequent VM garbage collection passes which block the main (UI) thread. You
   can learn more from the Google I/O session <a href=
   "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDBM6wVEO70">World of ListView</a>.
 </p>

 <p>
   Lastly, as pointed out in the blog post <a href=
   "http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/10/traceview-war-story.html">Traceview
   War Story</a>, tools like <a href=
   "{@docRoot}tools/help/traceview.html">traceview and ddms</a> can be your best
   friends in improving your app by profiling method calls and monitoring VM
   memory allocations, respectively.
 </p>

 <div class="headerLine">
   <h2 id="improve-usability">
     Improve Usability
   </h2>


 </div>

 <div class="sidebox-wrapper" style="float:right;">
   <div class="sidebox">
     <p>
       <strong>Tip:</strong> As you’re designing or evaluating your app's UI,
       make sure to read and become familiar with the <a href=
       "{@docRoot}design/index.html">Android Design</a> guidelines. Included are
       many examples of UI patterns, styles, and building blocks, as well as
       tools for the design process.
     </p>
   </div>
 </div>

 <p>
   In usability and in app design too, you should listen carefully to your
   users. Ask a handful of real Android device users (friends, family, etc.) to
   try out your app and observe them as they interact with it. Look for cases
   where they get confused, are unsure of how to proceed, or are surprised by
   certain behaviors. Minimize these cases by rethinking some of the
   interactions in your app. See the <a href=
   "{@docRoot}design/patterns/index.html">Patterns section</a> for tips to
   improve your design.
 </p>

 <p>
   In the same vein, two problems that can plague some Android user interfaces
   are small tap targets and excessively small font sizes. These are generally
   easy to fix and can make a big impact on usability and user satisfaction. As
   a general rule, optimize for ease of use and legibility, while minimizing, or
   at least carefully balancing, information density.
 </p>

 <p>
   Another way to incrementally improve usability, based on real-world data, is
   to implement <a href=
   "http://code.google.com/mobile/analytics/docs/">Analytics</a> throughout your
   app to log the use of particular sections. Consider demoting infrequently
   used sections to the overflow menu in the <a href=
   "{@docRoot}design/patterns/actionbar.html">Action bar</a>, or removing them
   altogether. For often-used sections and UI elements, make sure they're
   immediately obvious and easily accessible in your app's UI so that users can
   get to them quickly.
 </p>

 <div class="headerLine">
   <h2 id="professional-appearance">
     Professional Appearance and Aesthetics
   </h2>


 </div>

 <p>
   There's no substitute for a real user interface designer — ideally one who's
   well-versed in mobile and Android, and handy with both interaction and visual
   design. One popular venue to post openings for designers is <a href=
   "http://jobs.smashingmagazine.com/">jobs.smashingmagazine.com</a>, and
   leveraging social networks can also surface great talent.
 </p>

 <p>
   If you don't have the luxury of working with a UI designer, there are some
   ways in which you can improve your app's appearance yourself. You can use
   Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Fireworks, GIMP, Inkscape or other image editing
   tools. Mastering the art of the pixel in these apps takes time, but honing
   this skill can help build polish across your interface designs. Also, master
   the resources framework by studying the framework UI assets and layouts and
   reading through the <a href=
   "{@docRoot}guide/topics/resources/index.html">resources documentation</a>.
   Techniques such as 9-patches and resource directory qualifiers are somewhat
   unique to Android, and are crucial in building flexible yet aesthetic UIs.
 </p>

 <p>
   Before you get too far in designing your app and writing the code, make sure
   to visit the <a href="{@docRoot}design/index.html">Android Design section</a>
   and learn about the vision, the building blocks, and the tools of designing
   beautiful and inspiring user interfaces.
 </p>

 <div class="headerLine">
   <h2 id="deliver-features">
     Deliver the Right Set of Features
   </h2>


 </div>

 <p>
   Having the <em>right</em> set of features in your app is important. It's
   often easy to fall into the trap of feature-creep, building as much
   functionality into your app as possible. Providing instant gratification by
   immediately showing the most important or relevant information is crucial on
   mobile devices. Providing too much information can be as frustrating (or even
   more so) than not providing enough of it.
 </p>

 <p>
   Again, listen to your users by collecting and responding to feature requests.
   Be careful, though, to take feature requests with a grain of salt. Requests
   can be very useful in aggregate, to get a sense of what kinds of
   functionality you should be working on, but not every feature request needs
   to be implemented.
 </p>

 <div class="headerLine">
   <h2 id="integrate">
     Integrate with the System and Third-Party apps
   </h2>


 </div>

 <p>
   A great way to deliver a delightful user experience is to integrate tightly
   with the operating system. Features like <a href=
   "{@docRoot}guide/topics/appwidgets/index.html">Home screen widgets</a>,
   <a href="{@docRoot}design/patterns/notifications.html">rich
   notifications</a>, <a href="{@docRoot}guide/topics/search/index.html">global
   search integration</a>, and <a href=
   "{@docRoot}reference/android/widget/QuickContactBadge.html">Quick
   Contacts</a> are fairly low-hanging fruit in this regard.
 </p>

 <p>
   For some app categories, basic features like home screen widgets are
   expected. Not including them is a sure-fire way to tarnish an otherwise
   positive user experience. Some apps can achieve even tighter OS integration
   with Android's contacts, accounts, and sync APIs.
 </p>

 <p>
   Third-party integrations can provide even more user delight and give the user
   a feeling of device cohesiveness. It's also a really nice way of adding
   functionality to your app without writing any extra code (by leveraging other
   apps' functionality). For example, if you're creating a camera app, you can
   allow users to edit their photos in another app before saving them to their
   collection, if they have that third-party application installed. More
   information on this subject is available in the Android Training class
   <a href="{@docRoot}training/basics/intents/index.html">Interacting with Other
   Apps</a>.
 </p>

 <div class="headerLine">
 <h2 id="related-resources">Related Resources</h2>
 </div>
 <div class="resource-widget resource-flow-layout col-13"
   data-query="collection:distribute/essentials/optimizing, tag:addia"
   data-sortOrder="-timestamp"
   data-cardSizes="6x3"
   data-maxResults="3"></div>
 <div class="resource-widget resource-flow-layout col-13"
   data-query="tag:adia"
   data-sortOrder="-timestamp"
   data-cardSizes="6x3"
   data-maxResults="3"></div>
	page.title=Optimize Your App
	page.metaDescription=A look at how to get the most visibility and the highest ratings possible for your app or game. Optimizing the quality of your apps is a key strategy.
	page.image=/distribute/images/gp-optimize-card.jpg

	@jd:body

	<div id="qv-wrapper">
	<div id="qv">
	<h2>Strategies</h2>
	<ol>
	<li><a href="#listen-to-your-users">Listen to Your Users</a></li>
	<li><a href="#measuring-analyzing-responding">Measuring, Analyzing, and Responding to User Behavior</a></li>
	<li><a href="#improve-stability">Improve Stability and Eliminate Bugs</a></li>
	<li><a href="#improve-ui">Improve UI Responsiveness</a></li>
	<li><a href="#improve-usability">Improve Usability</a></li>
	<li><a href="#professional-appearance">Professional Appearance and Aesthetics</a></li>
	<li><a href="#deliver-features">Deliver the Right Set of Features</a></li>
	<li><a href="#integrate">Integrate with the System and Third-Party Apps</a></li>
	<li><a href="#related-resources">Related Resources</a></li>
	</ol>
	</div>
	</div>

	<div class="top-right-float">
	<img src="{@docRoot}images/gp-optimize.png" class="quality-top-image" style=
	"width:239px;padding-left:1.5em;">
	</div>

	<p>
	With thousands of new apps being published in Google Play every week, it's
	important to look for ways to get the most visibility and the highest ratings
	possible. Optimizing the quality of your apps is a key strategy.
	</p>

	<p>
	A higher quality app can translate to higher user ratings, generally better
	rankings, more downloads, and higher retention (longer install periods).
	High-quality apps are much more likely to get positive publicity, such as
	being featured in Google Play or generating social media buzz.
	</p>

	<p>
	The quality of your apps is something you should consider addressing both
	before and after launch. Gaining users after the launch of a poor quality app
	can be hard and recovering costly. On the other hand, maintaining the ranking
	of high-quality apps is made easier if there are continual improvements, a
	practice that also fuels the impression-install-ranking cycle.
	</p>

	<p>
	On this page you can find advice on a number of ways in which you can drive
	improvements to your apps’ quality.
	</p>

	<div class="headerLine">
	<h2 id="listen-to-your-users">
	Listen to Your Users
	</h2>


	</div>

	<div class="figure">
	<img src="{@docRoot}images/gp-optimizing-chat-bubbles.png">
	</div>

	<p>
	Listening and hearing your users can be one of your best tools for success.
	Start listening to your users before launching your apps and continue to
	listen after launch.
	</p>

	<h3>
	<strong>Listening before you launch</strong>
	</h3>

	<p>
	You can listen to your users during the development of your apps. This
	process can start with focus groups to review app features, continue into
	user experience workshops, and onto alpha and beta releases. Listening at
	these stages has two main benefits: <strong>you’ll build apps with features
	users want</strong> and <strong>any issues they identify will be cheaper and
	quicker to fix</strong> than they would be once the app is launched fully.
	</p>

	<p>
	If the practicalities of focus groups and user workshops seem excessive in
	relation to the development of a particular app, drawing on the feedback of
	colleagues, friends, and family can be much more useful than getting no
	feedback at all.
	</p>

	<p>
	It's crucial to conduct user testing before releasing your apps to Google
	Play. If you can only engage with colleagues, friends, and family you’re
	already making a good start. For more extensive testing consider a public
	alpha/beta test or creating your own trusted tester program. You can manage
	app distribution yourself through email or your own website, or you can use
	<a href=
	"{@docRoot}distribute/googleplay/developer-console.html#alpha-beta">beta-testing</a>
	and <a href=
	"{@docRoot}distribute/googleplay/developer-console.html#staged-rollouts">staged
	rollouts</a> in conjunction with <a href=
	"http://www.google.com/+/business/">Google+</a> or <a href=
	"https://groups.google.com/forum/#!overview">Google Groups</a> to distribute
	software and gather feedback to a subset of users. <strong>Users on alpha or
	beta versions cannot leave reviews or ratings</strong>, so there is
	<strong>no risk to your rating</strong> on Google Play.
	</p>

	<p>
	Unless you have to, don’t restrict the users you involve in these stages in
	the information they can share through their social networks and blogs -
	users engaged in these early stages (and listened too) are likely to be great
	ambassadors for your apps and will help create great social media buzz.
	</p>

	<h3>
	Listening after launch
	</h3>

	<p>
	Once you have launched, the most obvious way to listen to users is by reading
	and addressing comments on Google Play. Although the comments aren't always
	productive or constructive, some will provide valuable insight on aspects of
	your apps. It's important to remember that users have the opportunity to
	change their ratings and comments as much as they like.
	</p>

	<p>
	There are more interactive ways you can reach users, help them address their
	concerns, and gather more detailed feedback: by setting up support and
	discussion forums. There are some great support tools out there that can put
	you in touch with your users directly, from forums such as <a href=
	"http://groups.google.com/">Google Groups</a> to comprehensive customer
	support products and tools like UserVoice. Once you get set up with such a
	tool, make sure to fill in the support link in your Google Play product
	details page — users do click through to these.
	</p>

	<p>
	Also don’t forget to use the <a href=
	"{@docRoot}distribute/googleplay/developer-console.html#alpha-beta">beta-testing</a>
	and <a href=
	"{@docRoot}distribute/googleplay/developer-console.html#staged-rollouts">staged
	rollout</a> features of Google Play with app updates.
	</p>

	<div class="headerLine" id="measuring-analyzing-responding">
	<h2>
	Measuring, Analyzing, and Responding to User Behavior
	</h2>


	</div>

	<div class="figure">
	<img src="{@docRoot}images/gp-optimize-analytics.png">
	</div>

	<p>
	One of the best ways to spot issues to resolve is by measuring user behavior.
	Optimizing your app becomes much easier when you analyze performance before
	and after you launch. Drop off points, low ratings, and high percent of
	uninstalls can be indicative that there’s a problem. Measuring and responding
	to user-related metrics such as download sources, retention rates, and in-app
	behavior regularly is critical to keeping and bringing back your hard earned
	user base.
	</p>

	<p>
	You can get data from tools in Google Play or third-parties to analyze user
	behavior. You can identify details such as:
	</p>

	<ul>
	<li>
	<p>
	Where installs are coming from.
	</p>
	</li>

	<li>
	<p>
	The types of users you are acquiring.
	</p>
	</li>

	<li>
	<p>
	What is causing user churn and how to reduce it.
	</p>
	</li>
	</ul>

	<h3>
	Statistics for analyzing installs and ratings
	</h3>

	<p>
	Once you’ve published your app, Google Play makes it easy to see how it’s
	doing. The <a href="https://play.google.com/apps/publish/">Developer
	Console</a> gives you access to a variety of anonymized statistics and custom
	charts that show you the app's installation performance and ratings.
	</p>

	<p>
	You can view data and charts for active, daily, and total installs per unique
	devices or users, as well as upgrades and uninstalls. You can also view the
	app's daily average user rating and its cumulative user rating. To help you
	analyze the data, you can view install and ratings statistics across a
	variety of different dimensions such as Android version, device, country, app
	version, and carrier.
	</p>

	<div>
	<img class="border-img" src="{@docRoot}images/gp-dc-stats-mini.png">
	</div>

	<p>
	You can see your app statistics on timeline charts, for all metrics and
	dimensions. At a glance, the charts highlight your app’s installation and
	ratings peaks and longer-term trends, which you can correlate to promotions,
	app improvements, or other factors. You can even focus in on data inside a
	dimension by highlighting specific data points (such as individual platform
	versions or languages) on the timeline.
	</p>

	<p>
	You can download all of your installation data as a CSV file for viewing in
	the business program of your choice.
	</p>

	<h3>
	Tracking and analyzing Marketing campaigns
	</h3>

	<p>
	While you should consider monitoring user behavior data as a part of your
	normal activities, it’s particularly important when you’re running any form
	of marketing campaign, to make sure you’re getting the right users at the
	lowest cost possible.
	</p>

	<p>
	One way to track your marketing campaigns is to link <a href=
	"http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2013/10/improved-app-insight-by-linking-google.html">
	Google Analytics with your Google Play account</a> to analyze activity from
	source to install.
	</p>

	<div style="margin-top:1em;">
	<img src="{@docRoot}images/gp-optimizing-image-4.jpg" class="border-img">
	</div>

	<p>
	You can also use any of the variety of tools on the market to help track your
	marketing success and improvement ROI if you wish. There are also third parties
	who can help automate, measure, and optimize your mobile marketing.
	</p>

	<div class="headerLine">
	<h2 id="improve-stability">
	Improve Stability and Eliminate Bugs
	</h2>


	</div>

	<p>
	There are many tools and techniques for testing and profiling your app on
	different devices and user scenarios.
	</p>

	<p>
	One noteworthy and yet relatively underused tool for catching stability
	issues such as crashes is the <a href=
	"{@docRoot}tools/help/monkey.html">UI/Application Exerciser Monkey</a>
	(Monkey). Monkey will send random UI events to your app's activities,
	allowing you to trigger user flows that can uncover stability problems.
	</p>

	<p>
	Also, with the Google error-reporting features built into most Android
	devices, users have a way to report application crashes to you. The error
	reports show up in aggregate in the Google Play Developer Console. Make sure
	to read these reports often and act on them appropriately.
	</p>

	<p>
	Last, keep an external bug and feature request tracker and let users know how
	to find it. This will enable them to engage with the app at a closer level,
	by following features and bugs that affect them. User frustration with app
	problems can be effectively managed with diligent issue tracking and
	communication. Several community support tools offer issue tracking features,
	and if your project is open source, most popular repository hosting sites
	offer this as well.
	</p>

	<div class="headerLine">
	<h2 id="improve-ui">
	Improve UI Responsiveness
	</h2>


	</div>

	<div class="figure">
	<img src="{@docRoot}images/gp-optimize-speed.png">
	</div>

	<p>
	One sure-fire way to lose your users is to give them a slow, unresponsive UI.
	Research has shown that <a href=
	"http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/speed-matters.html">speed
	matters</a>, for any interface, on mobile, web, or desktop. In fact, the
	importance of speed is amplified on mobile devices since users often need
	their information on the go and in a hurry.
	</p>

	<p>
	You can improve your apps' UI responsiveness by moving long-running
	operations off the main thread to worker threads. Android offers built-in
	debugging facilities such as StrictMode for analyzing your app's performance
	and activities on the main thread. See more recommendations in <a href=
	"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4znvD-7VDA">Writing Zippy Android Apps</a>,
	a developer session from Google I/O 2010.
	</p>

	<p>
	A great way to improve UI performance is to minimize the complexity of your
	layouts. If you open up <a href=
	"{@docRoot}tools/help/hierarchy-viewer.html">hierarchyviewer</a> and see that
	your layouts are more than 5 levels deep, it may be time to simplify your
	layout. Consider refactoring those deeply nested <a href=
	"{@docRoot}reference/android/widget/LinearLayout.html">LinearLayouts</a> into
	<a href="{@docRoot}guide/topics/ui/layout/relative.html">RelativeLayout</a>.
	The impact of View objects is cumulative — each one costs about 1 to 2 KB of
	memory, so large view hierarchies can be a recipe for disaster, causing
	frequent VM garbage collection passes which block the main (UI) thread. You
	can learn more from the Google I/O session <a href=
	"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDBM6wVEO70">World of ListView</a>.
	</p>

	<p>
	Lastly, as pointed out in the blog post <a href=
	"http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/10/traceview-war-story.html">Traceview
	War Story</a>, tools like <a href=
	"{@docRoot}tools/help/traceview.html">traceview and ddms</a> can be your best
	friends in improving your app by profiling method calls and monitoring VM
	memory allocations, respectively.
	</p>

	<div class="headerLine">
	<h2 id="improve-usability">
	Improve Usability
	</h2>


	</div>

	<div class="sidebox-wrapper" style="float:right;">
	<div class="sidebox">
	<p>
	<strong>Tip:</strong> As you’re designing or evaluating your app's UI,
	make sure to read and become familiar with the <a href=
	"{@docRoot}design/index.html">Android Design</a> guidelines. Included are
	many examples of UI patterns, styles, and building blocks, as well as
	tools for the design process.
	</p>
	</div>
	</div>

	<p>
	In usability and in app design too, you should listen carefully to your
	users. Ask a handful of real Android device users (friends, family, etc.) to
	try out your app and observe them as they interact with it. Look for cases
	where they get confused, are unsure of how to proceed, or are surprised by
	certain behaviors. Minimize these cases by rethinking some of the
	interactions in your app. See the <a href=
	"{@docRoot}design/patterns/index.html">Patterns section</a> for tips to
	improve your design.
	</p>

	<p>
	In the same vein, two problems that can plague some Android user interfaces
	are small tap targets and excessively small font sizes. These are generally
	easy to fix and can make a big impact on usability and user satisfaction. As
	a general rule, optimize for ease of use and legibility, while minimizing, or
	at least carefully balancing, information density.
	</p>

	<p>
	Another way to incrementally improve usability, based on real-world data, is
	to implement <a href=
	"http://code.google.com/mobile/analytics/docs/">Analytics</a> throughout your
	app to log the use of particular sections. Consider demoting infrequently
	used sections to the overflow menu in the <a href=
	"{@docRoot}design/patterns/actionbar.html">Action bar</a>, or removing them
	altogether. For often-used sections and UI elements, make sure they're
	immediately obvious and easily accessible in your app's UI so that users can
	get to them quickly.
	</p>

	<div class="headerLine">
	<h2 id="professional-appearance">
	Professional Appearance and Aesthetics
	</h2>


	</div>

	<p>
	There's no substitute for a real user interface designer — ideally one who's
	well-versed in mobile and Android, and handy with both interaction and visual
	design. One popular venue to post openings for designers is <a href=
	"http://jobs.smashingmagazine.com/">jobs.smashingmagazine.com</a>, and
	leveraging social networks can also surface great talent.
	</p>

	<p>
	If you don't have the luxury of working with a UI designer, there are some
	ways in which you can improve your app's appearance yourself. You can use
	Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Fireworks, GIMP, Inkscape or other image editing
	tools. Mastering the art of the pixel in these apps takes time, but honing
	this skill can help build polish across your interface designs. Also, master
	the resources framework by studying the framework UI assets and layouts and
	reading through the <a href=
	"{@docRoot}guide/topics/resources/index.html">resources documentation</a>.
	Techniques such as 9-patches and resource directory qualifiers are somewhat
	unique to Android, and are crucial in building flexible yet aesthetic UIs.
	</p>

	<p>
	Before you get too far in designing your app and writing the code, make sure
	to visit the <a href="{@docRoot}design/index.html">Android Design section</a>
	and learn about the vision, the building blocks, and the tools of designing
	beautiful and inspiring user interfaces.
	</p>

	<div class="headerLine">
	<h2 id="deliver-features">
	Deliver the Right Set of Features
	</h2>


	</div>

	<p>
	Having the <em>right</em> set of features in your app is important. It's
	often easy to fall into the trap of feature-creep, building as much
	functionality into your app as possible. Providing instant gratification by
	immediately showing the most important or relevant information is crucial on
	mobile devices. Providing too much information can be as frustrating (or even
	more so) than not providing enough of it.
	</p>

	<p>
	Again, listen to your users by collecting and responding to feature requests.
	Be careful, though, to take feature requests with a grain of salt. Requests
	can be very useful in aggregate, to get a sense of what kinds of
	functionality you should be working on, but not every feature request needs
	to be implemented.
	</p>

	<div class="headerLine">
	<h2 id="integrate">
	Integrate with the System and Third-Party apps
	</h2>


	</div>

	<p>
	A great way to deliver a delightful user experience is to integrate tightly
	with the operating system. Features like <a href=
	"{@docRoot}guide/topics/appwidgets/index.html">Home screen widgets</a>,
	<a href="{@docRoot}design/patterns/notifications.html">rich
	notifications</a>, <a href="{@docRoot}guide/topics/search/index.html">global
	search integration</a>, and <a href=
	"{@docRoot}reference/android/widget/QuickContactBadge.html">Quick
	Contacts</a> are fairly low-hanging fruit in this regard.
	</p>

	<p>
	For some app categories, basic features like home screen widgets are
	expected. Not including them is a sure-fire way to tarnish an otherwise
	positive user experience. Some apps can achieve even tighter OS integration
	with Android's contacts, accounts, and sync APIs.
	</p>

	<p>
	Third-party integrations can provide even more user delight and give the user
	a feeling of device cohesiveness. It's also a really nice way of adding
	functionality to your app without writing any extra code (by leveraging other
	apps' functionality). For example, if you're creating a camera app, you can
	allow users to edit their photos in another app before saving them to their
	collection, if they have that third-party application installed. More
	information on this subject is available in the Android Training class
	<a href="{@docRoot}training/basics/intents/index.html">Interacting with Other
	Apps</a>.
	</p>

	<div class="headerLine">
	<h2 id="related-resources">Related Resources</h2>
	</div>
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