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.
For this post we spoke with Thomas Smale, e-commerce expert and founder of FE International, a leading M&A advisor for online businesses, on what considerations e-commerce 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.
In this part, I'll show you how to implement our new responsive images solution, which enables you to optimize the image you deliver based on the requesting device's resolution and the available dimensions. This new feature can help you to simplify the many complexities of creating multiple variants of every media assets, with on-the-fly manipulation and fast delivery through the CDN.
As a mobile developer, enabling users to upload images and share them with other users is a very common requirement. When developing those capabilities, we need to take into account that most users won't think twice about uploading the massive images that their high-resolution mobile cameras capture. Those huge files are not only overkill for on-screen display, but can also cause significant slow downs in upload and delivery times. And of course those same users wouldn't think twice about complaining or abandoning our app if their overall user experience wasn't smooth and fast.
Search ranking algorithms utilize various signals to determine how websites rank against each other on the internet either via desktop or mobile searches. One such signal is Site speed. In 2010, Google introduced Site speed as a signal in their search ranking algorithms. However, this only applied to web search ranking. Starting in July 2018, site speed will be a ranking factor of mobile searches. This change is another signal that developers must wake up and focus on improving the performance of their applications, since speed and load time affects a user’s experience of your page.
ExoPlayer is a media player library for Android developed and maintained by Google, which provides an alternative to the Android’s MediaPlayer. It comes with some added advantages over the default MediaPlayer, including dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH), smooth streaming and common Encryption. One of its greatest advantage, however, is its easy customization.
Confession: I’m kind of addicted to hackathons. Ever since graduating from Coding Dojo earlier this year, I’ve been on the hunt for new places to expand my skills and meet new people in the tech space. iOS Developer Camp’s 10th Anniversary event bowled me over. Initially, because of its length. 48 hours? Yeesh. I had no idea that those 48 hours would change my life. But let’s first get a little backstory on my favorite topic: dogs.
In Android, working with images (bitmaps) is really difficult because the application runs out of memory (OOM) very frequently. OOM is the biggest nightmare for Android developers.
There are some well known open source libraries that can help us deal with such problems like Picasa, Glide, and Fresco.
Developing applications for mobile consumption requires facing, and overcoming, some difficult challenges. Apps need to limit their RAM, CPU and battery usage while still performing the required tasks in a reasonable time frame. If too many background tasks are running, the mobile device can become sluggish, with the battery running out very quickly. Coordination with other apps is crucial to keep the device responsive and make the battery last longer.