Surviving the Google Play Onslaught: When Droids Attack

Colin Lee

@colinmlee

Who Are You?

Colin Lee

Android Software Engineer

@ Vidku

Twitter: @colinmlee

Vidku: @colin

Surviving Google Play

Quality
Design
Pick Your Battles

The Zen of Quality

Why We Put Apps on Google Play

To get more customers
To make more money
To be more happy

Why We Fix Bugs

To help users reach the value
To get more customers
To make more money
To be more happy

No one gives a damn about your backlog if it does not drive value.

(Except your PM and BA and they're half-robot)

A lot of things companies do don't drive value.

What not to do matters

10,000+ devices
Gingerbread must die
Fire phone is a disaster
Kindle only matters for Amazon
Xiaomi is HUGE, but did you do Mandarin?

Battery Seppuku

Crashes Every 10 Mins

Quality is Value.

Not crashing is NOT quality. Value is.

But... If you crash too often, value is lost.

Analytics

Real data should assist decisions.

Twitter Fabric

Mobile Crash Alerts

Get Real Devices

Test on a Crappy Phone

Automated Testing

Is nice, but does not replace device QA.

Support & Email

May sound smart to make devs handle initial support, but you're paying $50-100/hr to burn them out.

Get case management software.

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war,

while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.

- The Art of War

Product is Hypothesis

You must let it fail to succeed.

An advantage of Google Play is you can test more hypotheses faster.

Beta Testing

Users love to beta test.

More so when they know they signed up for it.

Even so, make sure it's not TOO broken

Design

Design Isn't Value

But it can make value easier to find.

Design Cannot Make Up For Value

But it does matter!

You should A/B test your user interface and store listing.

Tablets Matter!

And Google Cares A Lot About It

Design for

Engagement

Deep links, Google search integration, and social sharing drive virality and growth.

Pick Your Battles

who wishes to fight must first count the cost

- The Art of War

Platform Cost

Each supported platform imposes a potential cost. There are over 10,000 devices to support.

Research phones and markets you need. Make sure it works on those phones and languages.

Fail gracefully if not.

Feature Bloat

Features need to prove themselves with data.

If users do not use a feature, you may be wasting money supporting it across devices.

Cook some sacred cows.

Prioritization

No app would ever be released on Google Play without bug prioritization.

There will always be bugs on some device somewhere.

One must make time to iterate and find real value.