Android App Development Mistakes Every Developer Must Watch Out For!
5 min readThe smartphone industry comprises more than 3 million users. What makes 3 million people use smartphones every day? Of course, mobile applications.
The popularity of mobile apps is ever-surging, and as technology will grow more, the demand will increase too.
The current most game players of the mobile app development industry are- Android and iOS. According to the data shared by IDC.com for 2019, Android covers 86.1% market share, while iOS applications include 13.9%, which is why it is safe to say that the two game-players ruling the mobile application development industry are iOS and Android.
A clear winner here is Android.
The android application development business alone is worth about a trillion dollars, and there are no significant reasons to believe that android apps will fail to bring revolutionary changes in the digital world.
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There is no doubt about if the operating system is gaining popularity or not, the statistics are a clear answer to that.
There are a thousand benefits you can obtain if you give your business the online edge. Entrepreneurs worldwide have taken full advantage of these android applications and have given their business the boost all companies crave.
However, as an android app development agency in the UK, we understand the gamut of android app development. Therefore we know the best practices and the worst- the ones that can be hazardous for your business.
Since almost everyone claims to know what’s best for them, we decided to bring forth what’s not.
Hence, in this article, we’ll cover every android app development practice that can drag you down in your development game.
The things you should NEVER do:
Not using the source control for your codebase:
This is the most common mistake a novice developer makes. Managing frequent backups of the codebase by taking them into an external hard disk or a flash drive, is not just time-consuming but hectic and can possess security glitches. It can be pretty risky in case you forget to take a backup or make a silly mistake.
Start using portals such as Github or Bitbucket to safely store your android project’s data and overcome the additional challenges with a bit of smart work.
Always remember,
“Prepare and prevent, don’t repair and repent.” – Unknown
Cramming Up everything in a Fragment:
If you are starting fresh, you may encounter many instances where you write everything or every method inside a fragment of an activity.
It is prevalent, and the result of it can be a really really messy code.
Segregate your elements into single views or widgets; this will help you handle changes for the components inside the class of that component. Build utility classes and provide appropriate utility methods to those classes, rather than lining it all up in an activity.
This is not just restricted to cleaner code, but also increases the code’s re usability for future work.
Excessive Nesting in Layouts:
Rendering layouts with too much nesting embedded in it is hard to carry out for any android developer since the system has to pass through each level to render the entire thing accordingly.
This might not be a problem in many cases, but it is always better to optimize your layouts to make sure your application’s layout is rendered with the least latency.
You must know which view group to apply while writing your XML code for the layout; doing this; you can achieve as minimal nesting as possible.
Hardcoding strings in Java and XML codes:
We often choose the easy-lazy way and embed strings in Java code or XML layout while we set any text in EditText or TextView hint. We want to mention that this approach may give you a clear coast in many scenarios, but if you wish to change some shared text or integrate several languages into your application, this method may make you repent.
As an android app development agency, we would suggest that you make it a habit to put down the string in the generic string.xml or on individual string.xml for every language you integrate.
Ignoring the testing task after bumping target SDK:
It is a known fact that Android changes with every new version update, this update can support or break the back of your application based on how well and assessed it is implemented.
For example, imagine what the state of your application would be if you would have bumped up target SDK to 21 or 22 when the new marshmallow update was launched (without asking for the runtime permission in the code)?
If you had done that, your users would get the message stating, “unfortunately, the app has stopped working.”
You will encounter this if your application runs at a lower SDK level; in such cases, the Android will assume that your app would not be able to manage the updates and the new changes. However, if you update your app’s SDK level, you can ensure your app tick-boxes the optimization level.
Ignoring the memory leaks in your application:
Think of Android as your neighborhood, now imagine if one of your neighbors is consuming too much space, taking over your lawn for his pool, how would you feel?
This is exactly what an android app must refrain from, each element in the application must work collaboratively without gobbling up too much device memory.
The best way to ensure your app’s high-class performance is to ensure that your app possesses no or minimal memory leaks.
The most common mistake leading to this is creating a static reference to an entire fragment. This can create a massive memory leak in the system holding the activity reference even if not required.
There are other vast and little memory leaks you can encounter during your development process if you skip doing your well-researched homework.
Wishing your users will report clashes:
When most users encounter a glitch or a crash in your application, they either try again or simply uninstall and move to a different app. Only some “ideal” users take the pain of reporting the crash with reasons and everything, but believe us; the segment is quite low.
Android is a vast ecosystem. Therefore many manufacturers modify the OS as per their requirements. Hence, it is likely that your app may suffer crashes on many devices. However, since many users do not report a crash, you may remain unaware of that.
So rather than relying on your users, you must integrate your automatic crash reporting mechanism into your app.
Conclusion:
There are many other “never-do” things that you will encounter as you scale towards developing your application. You can always choose to take a little guidance from an android app development agency if you face any challenges that are not mentioned above or the ones you do not know of.
Android app development is undoubtedly a bumpy ride, but if you have an excellent vehicle (professional support), you will drive through the rough road with no damage.
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