برچسب: performance

Building excellent games with better graphics and performance
Posted by Matthew McCullough – VP of Product Management, Android

We’re stepping up our multiplatform gaming offering with exciting news dropping at this year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC). We’re bringing users more games, more ways to play your games across devices, and improved gameplay. You can read all about the updates for users from The Keyword. At GDC, we’ll be diving into all of the latest games coming to Play, plus new developer tools that’ll help improve gameplay across the Android ecosystem.

Today, we’re sharing a closer look at what’s new from Android. We’re making Vulkan the official graphics API on Android, enabling you to build immersive visuals, and we’re enhancing the Android Dynamic Performance Framework (ADPF) to help you deliver longer, more stable gameplays. Check out the video or keep reading below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MN0-qwYAFU

More immersive visuals built on Vulkan, now the official graphics API

These days, games require more processing power for realistic graphics and cutting-edge visuals. Vulkan is an API used for low level graphics that helps developers maximize the performance of modern GPUs, and today we’re making it the official graphics API for Android. This unlocks advanced features like ray tracing and multithreading for realistic and immersive gaming visuals. For example, Diablo Immortal used Vulkan to implement ray tracing, bringing the world of Sanctuary to life with spectacular special effects, from fiery explosions to icy blasts.

Diablo Immortal running on Vulkan

For casual games like Pokémon TCG Pocket, which draws players into the vibrant world of each Pokémon, Vulkan helps optimize graphics across a broad range of devices to ensure a smooth and engaging experience for every player.

Pokémon TCG Pocket running on Vulkan

We’re excited to announce that Android is transitioning to a modern, unified rendering stack with Vulkan at its core. Starting with our next Android release, more devices will use Vulkan to process all graphics commands. If your game is running on OpenGL, it will use ANGLE as a system driver that translates OpenGL to Vulkan. We recommend testing your game on ANGLE today to ensure it’s ready for the Vulkan transition.

We’re also partnering with major game engines to make Vulkan integration easier. With Unity 6, you can configure Vulkan per device while older versions can access this setting through plugins. Over 45% of sessions from new games on Unity^* use Vulkan, and we expect this number to grow rapidly.

To simplify workflows further, we’re teaming up with the Samsung Austin Research Center to create an integrated GPU profiler toolchain for Vulkan and AI/ML optimization. Coming later this year, this tool will enable developers to make graphics, memory and compute workloads more efficient.

Longer and smoother gameplay sessions with ADPF

Android Dynamic Performance Framework (ADPF) enables developers to adjust between the device and game’s performance in real-time based on the thermal state of the device, and it’s getting a big update today to provide longer and smoother gameplay sessions. ADPF is designed to work across a wide range of devices including models like the Pixel 9 family and the Samsung S25 Series. We’re excited to see MMORPGs like Lineage W integrating ADPF to optimize performance on their core target devices.

Lineage W running on ADPF

Here’s how we’re enhancing ADPF with better performance and simplified integration:
Performance optimization with more features in Play Console

Once you’ve launched your game, Play Console offers the tools to monitor and improve your game’s performance. We’re newly including Low Memory Killers (LMK) in Android vitals, giving you insight into memory constraints that can cause your game to crash. Android vitals is your one-stop destination for monitoring metrics that impact your visibility on the Play Store like slow sessions. You can find this information next to reach and devices which provides updates on your game’s user distribution and notifies developers for device-specific issues.

Check your Android vitals regularly to ensure high technical quality

Bringing PC games to mobile, and pushing the boundaries of gaming

We’re launching a pilot program to simplify the process of bringing PC games to mobile. It provides support starting from Android game development all the way through publishing your game on Play. Starting this month, games like DREDGE and TABS Mobile are growing their mobile audience using this program. Many more are following in their footsteps this year, including Disco Elysium. You can express your interest to join the PC to mobile program.

New PC games are coming to mobile

You can learn more about Android game development from our developer site. We can’t wait to see your title join the ranks of these amazing games built for Android. And if you’ll be at GDC next week, we’d love to say hello – stop by at the Moscone Center West Hall!

* Source: Google internal data measuring games on Android 14 or later launched between August 2024 – February 2025.
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29/04/2025
Improve app quality and performance with new Play Console insights
Posted by Dan Brown, Dina Gandal and Hadar Yanos – Product Managers, Google Play

At Google Play, we partner with developers like you to help your app or game business reach its full potential, providing powerful tools and insights every step of the way. In Google Play Console, you’ll find the features needed to test, publish, improve, and grow your apps — and today, we’re excited to share several enhancements to give you even more actionable insights, starting with a redesigned app dashboard tailored to your key workflows, and new metrics designed to help you improve your app quality.

Focus on the metrics that matter with the redesigned app dashboard

The first thing you’ll notice is the redesigned app dashboard, which puts the most essential insights front and center. We know that when you visit Play Console, you usually have a goal in mind — whether that’s checking on your release status or tracking installs. That’s why you’ll now see your most important metrics grouped into four core developer objectives:
Each objective highlights the three metrics most important to that goal, giving you a quick grasp of how your app is doing at a glance, as well as how those metrics have changed over time. For example, you can now easily compare between your latest production release against your app’s overall performance, helping you to quickly identify any issues. In the screenshot below, the latest production release has a crash rate of 0.24%, a large improvement over the 28-day average crash rate shown under “Monitor and Improve.”

The redesigned app dashboard in Play Console helps you see your most important metrics at a glance.

At the top of the page, you’ll see the status of your latest release changes prominently displayed so you know when it’s been reviewed and approved. If you’re using managed publishing, you can also see when things are ready to publish. And based on your feedback, engagement and monetization metrics now show a comparison to your previous year’s data so you can make quick comparisons.

The new app dashboard also keeps you updated on the latest news from Play, including recent blog posts, new features relevant to your app, and even special invitations to early access programs.

In addition to what’s automatically displayed on the dashboard, we know many of you track other vital metrics for your role or business. That’s why we’ve added the “Monitor KPI trends” section at the bottom of your app dashboard. Simply scroll down and personalize your view by selecting the trends you need to monitor. This customized experience allows each user in your developer account to focus on their most important insights.

Later this year, we’ll introduce new overview pages for each of the four core developer objectives. These pages will help you quickly understand your performance, showcase tools and features within each domain, and list recommended actions to optimize performance, engagement, and revenue across all your apps.

Get actionable notifications when and where you need them

If you spend a lot of time in Play Console, you may have already noticed the new notification center. Accessible from every page, the notification center helps you to stay up to date with your account and apps, and helps you to identify any issues that may need urgent attention.

To help you quickly understand and act on important information, we now group notifications about the same issue across multiple apps. Additionally, notifications that are no longer relevant will automatically expire, ensuring you only see what needs your attention. Plus, notifications will be displayed on the new app dashboard within the relevant objectives.

Improve app quality and performance with new Play Console metrics

One of Play’s top goals is to provide the insights you need to build high-quality apps that deliver exceptional user experiences. We’re continuing to expand these insights, helping you prevent issues like crashes or ANRs, optimize your app’s performance, and reduce resource consumption on users’ devices.

Users expect a polished experience across their devices, and we’ve learned from you it can be difficult to make your app layouts work seamlessly across phones and large screens. To help with this, we’ve introduced pre-review checks for incorrect edge-to-edge rendering, while another new check helps you detect and prevent large screen layout issues caused by letterboxing and restricted layouts, along with resources on how to fix them.

We’re also making it easier to find and triage the most important quality issues in your app. The release dashboard in Play Console now displays prioritized quality issues from your latest release, alongside the existing dashboard features for monitoring post-launch, like crashes and ANRs This addition provides a centralized view of user-impacting issues, along with clear instructions to help you resolve critical user issues to improve your users’ experiences.

The quality panel at the top of the release dashboard gives you a prioritized view of issues that affect users on your latest release and provides instructions on how to fix them.

A new “low memory kill” (LMK) metric is available in Android vitals and the Reporting API. Low memory issues cause your app to terminate without any logging, and can be notoriously difficult to detect. We are making these issues visible with device-specific insights into memory constraints to help you identify and fix these problems. This will improve app stability and user engagement, which is especially crucial for games where LMKs can disrupt real-time gameplay.

The low memory kill metric in Android vitals gives you device-specific insights into low memory terminations, helping you improve app stability and user engagement.

We’re also collaborating closely with leading OEMs like Samsung, leveraging their real-world insights to define consistent benchmarks for optimal technical quality across Android devices. Excessive wakelocks are a leading cause of battery drain, a top frustration for users. Today, we’re launching the first of these new metrics in beta: excessive wake locks in Android vitals. Take a look at our wakelock documentation and provide feedback on the metric definition. Your input is essential as we refine this metric towards general availability, and will inform our strategy for making this information available to users on the Play Store so they can make informed decisions when choosing apps.

Together, these updates provide you with even more visibility into your app’s performance and quality, enabling you to build more stable, efficient, and user-friendly apps across the Android ecosystem. We’ll continue to add more metrics and insights over time. To stay informed about all the latest Play Console enhancements and easily find updates relevant to your workflow, explore our new What’s new in Play Console page, where you can filter features by the four developer objectives.
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25/04/2025