As a dedicated Android app developer you already know how important it is to stay equipped with the latest technology and the evolved, matured ways of making an app better. Yes, as more apps and consequent use cases continue to come making us realise the fault lines and opportunities even deeper, we need to take a fresh look at the evolving techniques and technologies to give our apps further push. To withstand competition and to stay lucrative in your niche, you have no other option but to make your design and development better. Let us introduce here a few invaluable tips to give your Android app a push with some latest know-how.

Android Auto, make your app usable while driving

To address the traffic rules no concerns that univocally tell us not to use our smartphones while driving, now we have an android Auto, a latest Google offering in smart mobile enabled car infotainment systems. Apart from allowing you are looking at the map guides on your smartphone docked on the car dashboard the new feature also allows you to make and receive calls, take control of the car air conditioning and play your favourite music tracks without really needing to touch a button. It's pretty impressive a feature introduced in the Play Store that developers in any Android app development company can take advantage of while building new apps.

While your smartphones can be in control, of most of your activities while at home, workplace or on the sidewalk, when you are behind the steering, the car's infotainment system can be enough to do the needful to replace your handheld device. Both from the security point of view and usability this can give developers enough boost to create new apps specially designed keeping both Android phones and Android auto infotainment in mind.

Android auto apps can be developed for five main categories such as:

• Maps and navigation
• Voice control for in-car systems
• Voice calls and messaging
• Music and radio
• Important notifications

Using Graphic and Video for your Play Store listing

The basic tenets of ASO including keywords, description, logo and screenshots are already well known among developers. But since, these have already become bare minimum and common among the majority of apps, you need to push conversion further with a few more visual elements. Yes, by incorporating graphics in your Play Store presence, you can create a better mood for your app. To feature graphic in your Play Store description, you need to ensure these two things:

• JPEG or 24-bit PNG format (no alpha)
• 1024px by 500px dimension

As for designing graphic in your Play Store description follow these principles.

• Don't allow any other information or visual in the surrounding area of the graphic.
• Always use bigger sizes of a typeface.
• Remember the feature graphic can just be rendered as standalone sans the app icon.
• Just see if changing the colour scheme or theme seasonally or prior to some events give the app better chance of conversion.
• Always A/B test the graphic to ensure that it contributes to enhanced conversion.

Using Video for your Play Store listing

If an image is worth a thousand words, a video is worth at least thousand images if used appropriately. With more users preferring to watch a video to assess the usability and look and feel of an app, using video in Play Store description has already become popular. Besides reading a distinct identity for your app, a video also pushes your conversion rate to a great extent. Moreover, you can just add your YouTube video there inside the description. Remember the following things.

• Make sure you use a short, crisp and instantly engaging video featuring key USPs of your app.
• The time length ideally should not be more than a minute unless there are too many things to say.
• Use te video that perfectly address the concerns and preferences of your target audience.
• Finally, always localize the video by uploading the video in different languages or uploading it with a transcript that Google automatically display as per the selected language by the user.

This is just to let you know that, Google Play store video views are counted by YouTube helping you push your YouTube marketing as well.

Automated testing over manual testing

We all are aware of the seminal importance of app testing to ensure quality and glitch free performance. For a diversified and truly multifaceted device platform like Android, app testing is just irrefutable. Your app needs to be tested across various devices and screen sizes to ensure making it work the way you liked it to be or you users want it to be.

Automated mobile app testing has evolved to be the most popular app testing mechanism for a highly fragmented platform like Android where one needs to test e app on a multitude of devices. Automated testing can save developers cost of development and make the time to market faster. Here are the key advantages of automated testing. Faster testing process across multiple devices and consequently, quicker time to market

• Enhancing productivity for the development team
• Early detection of bugs and glitches.
• Cost saving for software maintenance
• Quick response to bugs detected during implementation or deployment

The Android testing framework is the most powerful, and user optimised testing frameworks built to perform from within the Android SDK tools. Here are few important aspects of knowing about this robust automated testing framework.

• The framework includes testing tools within the SDK tools which are integrated into Eclipse IDE or else, they are capable of running as command line.
• MonkeyRunner: This is another tool of the framework that offers several APIs to write programs used for controlling Android devices.
• The test package contains respectively Test case classes that rule the test methods for executing on the target apps and Mock objects containing mock data to allow using them for sample test cases.

Android as a platform is continuously maturing on every front and to ensure better usability, feature set, glitch free performance and quicker time to market, and developers are always on the lookout for new technologies and tools. The ones mentioned above offer some fresh perspective for a new age of Android development.