uttam tripathi:hello, and welcome to the new, exciting show ofgdl that we're recording out of the india studio. with me, i have todayis anirudh dewani, who is the dpe developerprogram engineer on the android
Android developer salary, developer relations team. he has worked with indiandevelopers for many years, so i think he'san expert to talk about what indian developershave been building
and what are some ofthe advice that he has. so welcome, anirudh,to our show today. anirudh dewani: thanks, uttam. it's great to be back in indiaand to be joining you guys. uttam tripathi: it's apleasure to have you. so before we get started,anirudh, talk a little bit more about the kind ofindian developers you have worked with,the kind of partners, and what do you see is a commontrend emerging out of india.
anirudh dewani: sowhen i was in india, and i was for thelast three years-- i just recently movedto new york this year. so when i was inindia, we worked with a lot of top mediacompanies, news companies, and a lot of the big,big, big partners. and we also interacteda lot with the community and developers who areindependent and building some amazing apps withsome innovative stuff,
a lot of startups. so we worked withthe entire spectrum of developers and contentgenerators here in india. uttam tripathi: great. so let me start with this. what do you think is one commonmistake that you see developers from this part of theworld, from our region, make when they build anapp and put it out there. anirudh dewani: yeah,that's a great question.
so what i noticed was thatthe apps that were coming out of india were reallyfeature heavy. i mean they would try to doa lot of things, wherein they could instead concentrateon a smaller feature set and maybe do it in a betterway, providing fuller, complete experienceto the user, focusing on more important stuff likeux and navigation and all those things. so instead ofmaking cluttered uis
and packing in a lotof functionality, remember it's a mobile device. the real estate is limited,the use is limited, and you have to takecare of touch targets and provide appropriate spacing. so instead of making itfeature heavy and cluttered, just focus on a lesser number ofthings and make them beautiful. a question that weget-- a common request we get from developers-- how canwe get featured on play store,
what does it taketo get featured? so what would you sayare the top three or five things that the teams lookwhen they are deciding on getting an appfeatured on play store? anirudh dewani: in general,the experience for the user should be amazing. so when you start with thatmentality, you would do well. so that includes building theright ux, following the patents and guidelines that arepublished by the android team.
and there are plentyof those to make your app consistentwith the other apps and the system ui itself. we regularly updateour guidelines across whenever there arenew version releases and there are newthings coming up. so i would say navigation,interaction design, ux, and support for allsorts of devices. support for tabletsis important.
making no assumptionson user behavior. there are some developerswho release their app with just a portrait ora landscape orientation, thinking this is how auser would use my app. but there are users whohave different habits. so taking care of thesethings are important, and they really go a longway in bringing good reviews to your apps. how important would you sayis focusing on tablet apps,
or making sure that you havea tablet version of your app? how important wouldyou say is that? anirudh dewani: soreally, there are a lot of large screendevices that are coming. and it's important for usersto experience your apps on these devices. i myself am a heavyuser of a tablet, and i look forward to accessmy favorite apps on the tablet. and there are a lot oftablets in the market that
are there now. so it's really important nowto focus on tablets as well. during your developmentprocess, if you get that thoughtin early, that you have to build atablet-friendly ui, it's actually much easierto achieve the goal. there are many developerswho start out with, ok, i'm going to doa phone ui, and maybe after six months or one-yearperiod, i will do a tablet ui.
that actually complicatesthe development process. so if you have thosegoals set in your mind that my app shouldrun on all devices, there are features ofit in the framework, like fragments,that can help you, can actually go a long way inmaking it simpler and easier to develop applications. i think that's greatfeedback for the developers. so you talked about thesebest practices and guidelines
that are documented. where can developersgo and find them? anirudh dewani: so inour developer site, which is developer.android.com,we have a section dedicated to app quality, where weenlist the core app quality guidelines, which cover thebasic things that an app should have. that includes permissions andpolicies and interaction design and stuff like that.
there are tablet-specificguidelines available. and then there'sa section on how to improve your app quality. so if you launch an app, and youstart getting some user reviews and ratings, which say,ok, this is crashing here, or this is reallyinaccessible, i could not find thisfeature in the app. how do you engage with the user,with groups and communities, and other things inthis one, user reviews,
with reply to review features? and so there is a wholesection dedicated to that. so we will have these published. and the other thing that wehave is there's a lot of content that comes in forms of videoson youtube and posted on g+ by our engineers, themembers of my team. and there are videos that arededicated to helping you design your apps really well andperformance tips and stuff like that.
so yeah, there's a lotof content available. yeah, so just getall the guidelines, the best practices ondeveloper.android.com, follow the team on google+. also, i think you guys arevery active on stack overflow, so these can be someof the avenues-- some of our developers can getin touch with the team and get the best practices. so finally, before we move tothe second part of our show,
we will have you talk aboutthe latest things that have come out withthe android kitkat. what would be onefinal advice, if you are asked to give one adviceto developers in our region? how can they bereally successful? what would be that? anirudh dewani:focus on the user. and there are someimportant considerations when you're in an emergingmarket like india,
in terms of dataconnectivity and stuff. so focus on those things,make sure you do not load heavy assets on lower enddevices, which are available and plenty in india. so taking care of thatstuff, making the user experience reallywonderful, is-- and by following all theguidelines that i mentioned about-- is what youshould start with. uttam tripathi: great, ithink that's a great feedback.
and great advice for all thedevelopers in the region. so the second partof the show, i want you to talk about-- wehad the recent android update, the kitkat that came out,and a lot of developers have already been using itand playing around with it. but if you can talkabout some of the key highlights thatthe team rolled out as part of thelatest release, that would be really usefulfor our developers.
anirudh dewani: right. so we've always had thistheme with jelly bean, about their ui as what we said. so with kitkat, thefocus was really on creating an operating systemand a framework for apps, which would chart a reallylow memory footprint and making it run onlower end devices. i think the number published,we said, is 512 mb of ram, is what kitkat should run on.
and that's especiallyrelevant for, again, in an emergingmarket like india, right, so this was areally important project. there was a lot ofengineers working towards makingthe footprint low. and so we've enabled someapis also for developers. there's an api whereyou can find out if your app is runningon a low ram device, and then you canadjust accordingly,
adapt your applicationto lower specs. so this was a big effort. there are some tools thatcame out of it, like procstats for helping youanalyze process memory. apart from that,there were a bunch of features that came out. there's the host card emulationfor payments and gateways and a lot of programs,which can help you make nfc-basedsecure payments.
we rolled out a completelynew print framework, which can allow you to printyour content over wi-fi or cloud services likegoogle cloud print. it can also helpprinter manufacturers to write their ownpluggable modules, which can enable you to interactwith special printers that they may come out with. there was a lot of improvementin the media platform, starting with support for dashand captioning and adaptive
playback. apart from that, we rolledout the new storage access framework, which would helpapps to retrieve documents from their preferred documentprovider, maybe box or google drive or whatever it is. it's a common ui,a consistent ui. and then there werea lot of features, other features of two newprofiles added to bluetooth, and a new hardware batchand framework for sensors,
which reduces your powerconsumption on the device, support for captioning inthe accessibility section. yeah, a lot offeatures came out, and these are all detailedon our developer site again. yeah, it sounds like alot of exciting stuff that the team came out with. so with that, this is thewrap for today's show. i'm sure you guys would followsome of the advice and best practices that anirudh hadto talk to you guys about.
also, the latest thingsthat were rolled out as part of the androidkitkat release. i'm sure that you guysare already working on it. we can't wait to hear moreabout what you guys are working, so do get in touch with us ongoogle+ and some of the other channels that anirudhmentioned here. and we would like to learnwhat you guys are working on,
and our goal isto make developers successful in the region.
so with that, it's awrap for today's show. thanks once again for joiningin, and i'll see you guys soon.
