Empowering developers to build high-quality Android apps is an important part of Google's business. It recently released a new Android development curriculum which gives instructors a plan to follow when teaching students how to write apps for Android devices in Kotlin. Now, it has unveiled the new App Quality section on its dedicated website, which essentially offers a checklist that developers can utilize to build engaging apps.
You can view the App Quality website here where the company's plans for 2021 Q1 are outlined. It focuses on privacy, security, functionality, and visual experience offered by apps. More specifically, Google has updated the Core App Quality checklist in its first release. It describes the minimum quality that all apps are required to meet.
With regards to visual experience, Google encourages using Material Design components which offer a more modern look. To improve functionality, the company has provided information about video playback experience and support for HEVC compression for encoding. Android Sparesheet has been described as the go-to utility for sharing between apps. Lastly, recommendations have also been offered for background services so battery power can be utilized more efficiently by apps.
Other tidbits of information revolve around performance, security, and presentation on Google Play, as can be seen below:
- Performance & Stability - We have added tooling now available such as Android vitals in the Google Play Console. One important point to highlight here is Application Not Responding (ANR). ANRs are caused by threading issues and are something developers can fixed. The ANR troubleshooting guide can help you diagnose and resolve any ANRs that exist in the app.
- Privacy & Security - We have summarized our latest recommendations to take into account the latest safeguards from runtime permission to securely using WebView. We have also expanded to include privacy norms that users come to expect from protecting private data to not using any non-resettable hardware Ids.
- Google Play - In this section, we highlight some of the most important policies for developers and link you to more information on the guidelines.
Google has stated that it plans to update the App Quality checklist on a quarterly basis and will be adding information about other device form factors as well.
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