Better Android apps using Android vitals

Abstract

Google provides Android Vitals, a set of reports and tools for Android Developers as part of Google Play Console. Android Vitals can help developers improve their Android apps after an app has been launched by providing information on how their app is performing in key areas such as battery use, performance, and stability (freezes and crashes). Android Vitals also provides various comparisons, including against global bad behavior thresholds, against various peer groups of apps, and across releases of this app. Developers confirm Android Vitals notifies them of relevant problems and they found it valuable even if they also use crash reporting and mobile analytics. The underlying data is used by Google to assess the relative quality of Android apps; and the perceived quality may materially affect the visibility of an app in the Google Play Store. Yet little is known about the tools. This paper outlines various experiences from the developers' perspective of using Android Vitals with several popular Android apps to help open discussions and suggest further research areas. It introduces an open source project, created as part of our work, that enables developers to download pertinent data, particularly crash reports. The data can be analysed both by the development team and others. A particular benefit of this tool is to make the data available outside of the Google platform, which allows developers and (indirectly) researchers to develop additional analysis techniques not currently provided by the platform. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Application specific development environments; Software testing and debugging; Empirical software validation.

Improving app quality despite flawed mobile analytics

“…Aspects of the research were published at MobileSoft 2019 [9], WAMA 2019 [12], and in a jointly authored book in 2015/16 [11]. Extracts of Android Vitals data and reports have been made available to the research community.…”

“…Independent development teams of a variety of Android apps (including Moonpig [12], LocalHalo, and Moodspace [12]) confirm they actively use analytics to monitor the quality of their apps and fix crashes reported in these mobile analytics tools. Trello's Android team stress the importance of applying a similar approach [15]; 1 https://github.com/commercetest/vitals-scraper 2 https://github.com/commercetest/android-stability-analysis 3 Release https://github.com/Catrobat/Paintroid/releases/tag/v2.4.1 4 https://sensortower.com/blog/app-revenue-and-downloads-2019…”

A Survey of Performance Optimization for Mobile Applications

“…If that happens, several metrics related to startup time, battery usage, and crash stack traces are recorded. Such metrics can assist developers to monitor memory and energy consumption, to identify synchronization issues, and to avoid application crashes [30].…”

“…Another tool that developers can use to judge the quality and performance of applications are Android Vitals. Statistics including battery consumption, and crashes are collected from real users and reported to developers [30]. Comparisons with regard to non-functional performance characteristics, such as energy consumption, can also be measured with applications of the same category [284].…”