Make your app shine on Google Play
By: Padmini Murthy
Tags: Android Developers, Featured, Android App Development, Latest, Google Play

Make your app shine on Google Play

1 of 3 — Design and build apps to turn that “back of the napkin” idea into a product that delights users

This post was co-authored by Padmini Murthy and Carol Soler

At Google Play, you may have heard us talk about the three key stages of a developer’s journey to build, engage, and grow your app and user base. You can easily chart your course across all the three stages of your app’s lifecycle with the Play knowledge ecosystem. There are learning paths, thought leadership articles, best practices corners, podcasts, support documents, and more. We have shared articles by experts to manage an app’s user journey from installs to churns.

However, in this article, our spotlight is on developers (or publishers) and their challenges. There are quite a few moving parts to create and maintain these high-quality digital experiences, from design and development to release and monetization. Across the various stages of the development journey, you will see us talk of these “think principles” here. These are the core building blocks to navigate that stage with ease.

In the first part of this ‘make your app shine’ series we will cover the primary stages of design and build.

In the first phase, ideation, design , and prototyping will be the foundational components. We will go through prototyping mechanics and usability testing methodologies. If the usability experience foundation is strong, the rest of the pieces to build the engagement and monetization paths will fall in place. So, even if it takes a little longer to craft the usability matrix, it is worth spending that time.

, and prototyping will be the foundational components. We will go through prototyping mechanics and usability testing methodologies. If the usability experience foundation is strong, the rest of the pieces to build the engagement and monetization paths will fall in place. So, even if it takes a little longer to craft the usability matrix, it is worth spending that time. In the second phase, we will guide you through the actual build process. This starts with the selection of the right integrated development environment (IDE) for your Android app. For Google Play, that is Android Studio, and we will dive a bit deeper into how you can use Android Studio to manage app performance, quality, security, and analytics.

Ideation, UX, and design

You have identified your next app idea. Great! What next? At Google Play, we believe that the first logical step should be to create a UX prototype. This is not just a primary aspect of design, but an intrinsic component of your product strategy to build a high-quality user experience.

Here’s our ‘think principles’ checklist for this first, foundational design phase:

Think emotions — The best user experiences are those that touch the heart and solve a burning need. And to create that experience, it is essential to do primary research with your target audience to understand what they would most value in the app. And then, focus on UX design — to help them traverse through the app to get to the endpoint most efficiently and most intuitively. It is almost like the app recognizes the users’ psychographics and tailors the personalization to that.

Think about many form factors — It is a given that you have to prepare to provide a superlative experience in more than a few form factors today. Of course, Android phones, tablets, and watches are defaults, but add to that list Android Auto, Android TV, and AR Core experiences.Your app has to be ready to present itself cohesively on all these devices. Here’s a guide to optimizing design for a large screen experience. Also check out a guide to start thinking about all the Android form factors to help prepare for your app.

Think conversion centric design — At Google, we created material design as a system of engagement that helps you build that perfect experience for your users and drive conversion. Using the right components, icons, visual transitions, theming, transitions, and other usability constructs — you can now build an intuitive and engaging digital experience.

Here’s an example of how Trip.com used material design to create an excellent travel and booking experience across the globe. The design principles also help build the right navigation and exploration, perform in-app searches, product reviews, comparisons, and set up registrations and payment systems.

Think immersive with 3D and AR/VR — Virtual and augmented reality have gained prominence to build an ‘immersive experience’, especially for health, beauty, logistics, entertainment, and e-commerce segments. With this, you can now easily visualize how that shade of lipstick would work for you or how many last miles you’re away from that museum, which is tucked away in nested streets. From a virtual reality standpoint, imagine the close to reality experience of visiting your favorite vacation home in the Bahamas, or playing your favorite sport or video game — like golf or Roblox, perhaps? Here’s a guide for you to start thinking about creating this immersive experience using AR and VR.

Build, test, and release with frameworks

Android Studio is perhaps the easiest way to build and ship Android apps, and developers worldwide have vouched for it. Designed specifically for Android apps with visual editors, APK analyzers, real-time profilers, and emulators, it is everything in a box for developers to bring their app to life. Here’s a complete guide to writing, building, configuring, testing, and debugging your Android app and a guide to all the developer tools in the Android Studio. We are always working on adding new and improved features to Android Studio, and there’s something new with Android Studio quite frequently. Look at what’s new with Android Studio 4.0 here. Let’s build your first Android App now!

Regardless of what tool you use to build your Android app, here are some ‘think principles’ to consider for the build stage:

Think performance — APK sizes, data heftiness (potentially due to integration with third-party services like payment gateways or map APIs), and advanced features affect the app performance and load times. Most times, poor app performance might result in uninstalls and lead to a significant churn.

This becomes more critical for e-commerce and other conversion-driven apps. As a best practice at Google, we recommend evaluating the features to make a smart trade off for optimal performance. Android App Bundles helps manage the APK size — so deliver a great experience to your audience with a smaller app size. We have to call out Netflix’s story on reducing the app size by over 33% with app bundles. We also recommend reviewing Android Vitals to monitor your app’s performance and stability.

Think quality — This is perhaps the single most important step in the build process. Here are some core app quality guidelines for your reference. Ensuring quality with the device-specific guidelines and form factors should be a focus before you release it. Here’s a comprehensive quality guideline bible from Google Play. We recommend that you test your Android app against these guidelines for an excellent user experience and get additional exposure for Wear OS, Android TV and Auto.

Think policy and security — The safety and security of the Android ecosystem for both users and developers is critical. We want to help you build secure apps that conform to policies that protect you and your users and reduce policy violations. This means using the right encryption protocols, only authorized API services, robust authentications, using tokens to identify sessions instead of device identifiers, and thoroughly running security testing, and staying in overall compliance. And don’t forget to keep your SDKs updated as well, to make sure they follow all the latest Google Play Policies. Here’s a quick overview of getting started on the Play policies.

Think pre-launch — Last but not the least on this list is to understand your app’s pre-launch performance by running betas, and testing and iterating before the launch. The pre-launch report provides an overview of errors or warnings with recommendations on how to resolve them. Every time you publish an APK, you will also receive a pre-launch report — this is specific to closed betas and test tracks. You will have to set up your app on Google Play Console to receive these reports, run in our test lab. Linked somewhat to pre-launch is pre-registration, which is all about creating excitement and awareness of your apps and games before they are launched. There are however, some specific requirements for pre-registration and assessing whether it’s right for your app. Take a look at this learning path and also this article to prepare for pre-registration.

What’s next in the make your app shine series?

In our next blog, we will talk about what happens once you have submitted and published your APK to Google Play. Once the app is evaluated and is live, you will need to drive acquisition and build engagement to drive usage and then ensure retention. That means several different things and a whole new think tank. The think principles in this case can be broken into phases for building the first momentum with acquisition and engagement. And we will dive into retention strategies with promotions, offers, and much more.

Stay tuned!

What do you think?

Do you have thoughts on how to get from ideation to design and build? Let us know in the comments below or tweet using #AskPlayDev and we’ll reply from @GooglePlayDev, where we regularly share news and tips on how to be successful on Google Play.