Android app developers do not expect the users to think that
the application developed by them is the most useful aspect of their phone.
Keeping this in mind all Android app programmers must understand and consider
their user’s environment before they developed applications to fulfill their
requirements.
Scope of an
Android App Developer’s Vision
Android’s Multitasking
Capabilities
Android has expanded itself extensively as a mobile phone
platform and has gone beyond that establishing that it is more than that
albeit, smart phones and tablets take up a large percentage of Android based
devices being used by users from all over the world. The classification of
priority in which smart phones/tablets are preferred is as a phone, an SMS and
email sender/receiver, a camera and as a music device. After all these
preferences only a user looks at a phone’s application built by an Android app programmer and it comes under the category of “other useful stuff”.
Android App
Developer’s Understanding of the User
Though this makes the
application developed by an Android app developer insignificant it should be
noted by them that all top applications which have made millions if not
billions were considered in the last category until they revolutionized the
market. Android app developers have to be aware that not all users use their
Android devices in the same way, some use it just as a phone and may never use
it as a device to use music and such. Thus when an Android application
programmer is designing an application this inherent multitasking aspect
has to be considered as an indispensable feature.
Characteristics
Expected of an Android Application
Predictability and
Necessary Idleness
When the application is not running in the foreground of the
platform it is expected of the Android app developer to have developed an
application which does not continue with its UI updates and network lookups in
the background. Android by default closes event handlers once the application
which runs the activities is paused and is sent to the background, this cannot
be controlled by the Android app programmers but can be overridden. The Android
app developers also realize that there is no point in updating their User Interface
while no one is looking at.
Smooth Revoking of
Idle Applications
One of the major advantages of the Android platform is its
multitasking capabilities. With such swiftness of the platform it is a known
fact that the application developed by Android app developers will often go to
the background and be recalled in foreground. The attribute which is much
expected from the application to have instilled into it by the Android app
programmer is that it comes back to the foreground in a flash and should be
effortless. This can be enabled by the Android app programmers by having an
option to save the last state of the applications and queuing up updates for
the applications until it is revoked to the front screen.
Control over the
Application for User Only
When an application decides for itself when to come back to
the active state when a user is using another application, the chances of the
user finding the application built by the Android app programmer to be very
irritating and this might lead to most users abandoning the application.
Instead the Android app developers can adopt other methods of informing about
the current activity in the application to the user in other subtler ways.
These are some aspects of Android applications and the
platform that may be considered by the Android app developers before they
started designing and implementing the application for the platform.
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