Android vitals: Increase engagement and installs through improved app performance

Posted by Fergus Hurley, Product Manager, Google Play

Poor app performance is something that many users have experienced. Think about that last time you experienced an app crashing, failing to respond, or rendering slowly. Consider your reaction when checking the battery usage on your own device, and seeing an app using excessive battery. When an app performs badly, users notice. In fact, in an internal analysis of app reviews on Google Play, we noticed that half of the 1-star reviews mentioned app stability.

Conversely, people consistently reward the best performing apps with better ratings and reviews. This leads to better rankings on Google Play, which helps increase installs. Not only that, but users stay more engaged, and are willing to spend more time and money.

At Google I/O 2017, we announced the new Android vitals dashboard in the Google Play Console. Android vitals is designed to help you understand and analyze bad app behaviors, so you can improve your app's performance and reap the benefits of better performance.

Android vitals in the Google Play Console

Android vitals helps identify opportunities to improve your app's performance. The dashboards are useful for engineers and business owners alike, offering quick reference performance metrics to monitor your app so you can analyze the data and dedicate the right resources to make improvements.

You'll see the following data collected from Android devices whose users have opted in to automatically share usage and diagnostics data:

Stability: ANR rate & crash rate
Render time: slow rendering (16ms) and frozen UI frames (700ms)
Battery usage: stuck wake locks and excessive wakeups

See how Busuu increased their rating from 4.1☆ to 4.5☆ by focusing on app performance

Busuu is one of the world's largest language learning apps. Hear from Antoine Sakho, Head of Product about how Busuu increased user ratings.

Learn more about engineering for high performance with tools from Android and Google Play

Read our best practice article on Android vitals to understand the data shown in the dashboards, and how you can improve your app's performance and stability. Watch the I/O session to learn about more tools from Android and Google Play that you can use to identify and fix bad behaviors:

Learn more about other Play Console features, and stay up to date with news and tips to succeed on Google Play, with the Playbook app. Join the beta and install it today.

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