Adding code to display an image in your application is one of the most common tasks for almost every application developer. However, when it comes to Android applications, there is no inbuilt support for any image related tasks, which could be a potential pain when Android developers need to handle loading (and reloading) images into the view, handling the caching and memory issues, and supporting simple UI functionality.
ExoPlayer, a media player for Android, was developed and is being maintained by Google as an alternative for Android’s default MediaPlayer. Among ExoPlayer’s advantages over MediaPlayer are dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH), smooth streaming, and common encryption. A major advantage, however, is ExoPlayer’s easy customization.
Recently we added the Cloudinary Demo - eCommerce App to the Google Play Store. This app demonstrates the best practices for optimal delivery of images on a storefront, including category pages, product pages, and a shopping cart. At the time, we published Introducing the Cloudinary Demo Android App, Part 1, which provided an under-the-hood tour of how the eCommerce Android App was designed and how Cloudinary was integrated throughout.
TL;DR
We live in a visual world, often while on the go, and consumers expect media-rich web content. Accordingly, the loading speed of images and videos is a big factor in user experience. To optimize customer satisfaction with mobile content, you must focus on the quality, format, and size of your digital assets. With Cloudinary, optimization is simple, not only enhancing your mobile web and app performance but also upping your SEO game and boosting customer satisfaction.
React Native is a popular open source software that enables you build mobile applications easily with JavaScript. Other similar and popular options out there include Ionic, Lungo, Sencha Touch and NativeScript Vue. You can use your existing knowledge of HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to develop mobile applications without having to learn a different set of skills.
Currently, the Android platform boasts the highest demand for mobile solutions, as evidenced by Google’s announcement in 2017 that there were two billion monthly active Android devices, a number that is likely to increase in the years ahead. For app developers like you, now is the right time to build and release solutions for Android. you might have also noticed that a higher percentage of apps being developed nowadays are filled with visual media: images and videos.
Globally, approximately two billion people now own smartphones, which also feature cameras capable of capturing photos and videos of a tonal richness and quality unimaginable even five years ago. Until recently, those cameras behaved mostly as optical sensors, catching light that determines the resulting image's pixels. The next generation of cameras, however, can blend hardware and computer-vision algorithms that apply to an image's semantic content, spawning creative mobile photo and video apps.
For this post we spoke with Thomas Smale, eCommerce expert and founder of FE International, a leading M&A advisor for online businesses, on what considerations eCommerce companies should be making when it comes to creating optimal mobile experiences.
For our first in a series of Q&A posts with our ImageCon 2018 speakers, we spoke with Ryan Cooke, a Software Engineer and Android Developer at Pinterest, a site that serves up billions of images everyday. In the following post he discusses why improving mobile images was important for improving the user experience and offers advice on building a mobile-first site.
