Development of highly loaded Android applications

Mobile phones and apps have become a key part of modern life, and as a result, the number of apps continues to skyrocket. For AVADA-MEDIA, as a software developer for business, the development of high-load Android applications is an important area of ​​activity. It is important for us to create applications that users will like, because the competition between applications is very high.

What really makes users happy? High performance. In fact, 96% of users think application performance is important. So let’s talk about five ways to achieve high performance that delights users.

First, let’s define high performance and why it is so important to a pleasant user experience. A high-performance Android app responsibly consumes device resources and helps users get things done quickly. Essentially, high-performance applications reduce the perceived latency experienced by their users.

Perceived latency is an important term here: it is the latency that users experience from the moment they press a button until any interface change occurs. Depending on what action the user is performing and where the required data is coming from, there can be many ways to reduce perceived latency.

Now let’s take a look at five user interaction and data loading scenarios to see how you can reduce perceived latency and make applications respond quickly (and pleasantly) to user requests.

• Download from the nearest source

The distance between your users and the web servers serving your application cannot always be controlled, and this is a common cause of increased latency. To reduce perceived latency, it is desirable to serve most of the application’s content from the closest possible source. This avoids repeated calls to your internal servers and further improves the responsiveness for users.

• Caching and prefetching

Many resources downloaded from the web server are often reused. An intelligent caching mechanism that stores objects or API responses for reuse over a period of time avoids long and slow data transfer cycles. Many web or image loading libraries already do this, and you can simply customize these libraries to suit your requirements. These cached objects load instantly, and the latency is often so low that users won’t notice them at all.

• Fast API loading

If API data loads quickly, users will spend less time waiting and more time using the application. You need to ensure that as many APIs as possible are loaded from the closest available source.

You can also reduce the size of the data transferred between the application and back-end servers so that API responses load faster. For this we use the Colfer or Protobuf buffer protocols. By transforming the data before sending it over the network, these formats significantly reduce the size of the request or response over the API compared to JSON. It is worth noting that additional overhead is required to work with these protocols, but in many cases the performance gain will be obvious.

• Optimizing images and videos

Typically, mobile apps download a lot of images and videos. To achieve this optimization, we use several proven solutions (Akamai Image Manager, adaptive video streaming, various file formats, etc.)

• Optimizing local animation

Animations that take too long to complete seem boring. Animations that are too short or choppy are too fast for the user to understand what happened. Both leave a poor user experience. Thoughtful animations will also take into account battery consumption, so they will please the user without wasting a lot of resources.

According to Google guidelines, large animations on mobile devices should be between 300 and 400 milliseconds long. Smaller animations can last anywhere from 150 to 200 milliseconds.

Keeping track of the details described and using resources wisely is the key to high performance in high-load applications. Of course, this task requires expertise.

If you contact AVADA MEDIA, our experienced developers will create an Android application that will fully meet the needs of your business.