برچسب: quality

Android Developers Blog: Introducing Widget Quality Tiers

Posted by Ivy Knight – Senior Design Advocate

Level up your app Widgets with new quality tiers

Widgets can be a powerful tool for engaging users and increasing the visibility of your app. They can also help you to improve the user experience by providing users with a more convenient way to access your app’s content and features.

To build a great Android widget, it should be helpful, adaptive, and visually cohesive with the overall aesthetic of the device home screen.

In order to help you achieve a great widget, we are pleased to introduce Android Widget Quality Tiers!

The new Widget quality tiers are here to help guide you towards a best practice implementation of widgets, that will look great and bring your user’s value across the ecosystem of Android Phone, Tablets and Foldables.

What does this mean for widget makers?

Whether you are planning a new widget, or investing in an update to an existing widget, the Widget Quality Tiers will help you evaluate and plan for a high quality widget.

Just like Large Screen quality tiers help optimize app experiences, these Widget tiers guide you in creating great widgets across all Android devices. Now, similar tiers are being introduced for widgets to ensure they’re not just functional, but also visually appealing and user-friendly.

Widgets that meet quality tier guidelines will be discoverable under the new Widget filter in Google Play.

Consider using our Canonical Widget layouts, which are based on Jetpack Glance components, to make it easier for you to design and build a Tier 1 widget your users will love.

Let’s take a look at the Widget Quality Tiers

There are three tiers built with required system defaults and suggested guidance to create an enhanced widget experience:

Tier 1: Differentiated

Differentiated widgets go further by implementing theming and adapting to resizing.

Tier 1 widgets are exemplary widgets offering hero experiences that are personalized, and create unique and productive homescreens. These widgets meet Tier 2 standards plus enhancements for layout, color, discovery, and system coherence criteria.

For example, use the system provided corner radius, and don’t set a custom corner radius on Widgets.

Add more personalization with dynamic color and generated previews while ensuring your widgets look good across devices by not overriding system defaults.

Tier 1 widgets that, from the top left, properly crop content, fill the layout bounds, have appropriately sized headers and touch targets, and make good use of colors and contrast.

Tier 2: Quality Standard

These widgets are helpful, usable, and provide a quality experience. They meet all criteria for layout, color, discovery, and content.

Make sure your widget has appropriate touch targets.

Tier 2 widgets are functional but simple, they meet the basic criteria for a usable app. But if you want to create a truly stellar experience for your users, tier 1 criteria introduce ways to make a more personal, interactive, and coherent widget.

Tier 3: Low Quality

These widgets don’t meet the minimum quality bar and don’t provide a great user experience, meaning they are not following or missing criteria from Tier 2.

Clockwise from the top left not filling the bounds, poorly cropped content, low color contrast, mis-sized header, and small touch targets.

For example, ensure content is visible and not cropped

Build and elevate your Android widgets with Widget Quality Tiers

Dive deeper into the widget quality tiers and start building widgets that not only look great but also provide an amazing user experience! Check out the official Android documentation for detailed information and best practices.

This blog post is part of our series: Spotlight Week on Widgets, where we provide resources—blog posts, videos, sample code, and more—all designed to help you design and create widgets. You can read more in the overview of Spotlight Week: Widgets, which will be updated throughout the week.

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02/05/2025
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
Alchemer’s commitment to data quality
Recent news of a $10 million survey fraud scheme is sending shockwaves through the market research industry. As investigators uncover the extent of this nearly decade-long scheme, one thing is clear: the integrity of survey data cannot be taken for granted.

As a trusted market research provider, this story is a powerful reminder of why Alchemer’s commitment to ethical research and uncompromising data quality is non-negotiable.

Great insights start with quality data

To put it simply, insights that come from bad data lead to bad decisions. Inaccurate or fraudulent survey responses skew results, erode customer trust, and derail entire programs and strategies.

The spread of AI-powered bots and sophisticated fraudsters poses a significant threat to the integrity of market research studies and the industry as a whole. Survey fraud isn’t just a technical hurdle to overcome—it’s an ethical challenge that impacts researchers, organizations, and the people they aim to serve.

This is why Alchemer’s Research Solutions Team combines advanced technology with human oversight to detect and eliminate fraudulent responses before they compromise a research study.

Alchemer’s approach to fraud prevention

From device fingerprinting and in-survey behavioral analysis to manual response audits, Alchemer takes a multi-step approach to data quality and fraud prevention. With rigorous processes and standards, Alchemer ends up scrubbing 10–15% more fraudulent data than other providers, ensuring the insights you receive are complete, legitimate, and human.

Step 1: Pre-survey forensic screening

Before a respondent ever sees a question, they are screened using real-time device-level fingerprinting and forensic analysis. This initial checkpoint evaluates more than 40 unique markers and assigns a fraud score based on the likelihood and type of fraudulent behavior detected. Helping to identify and block:
- Bots and automated behavior
- Emulators and simulators
- Residential proxies and data center IPs
- Dark web-originated traffic
- Location and browser spoofing
- Device/account duplication
- Device oscillation and velocity anomalies
Step 2: Post-survey human and algorithmic review

After a respondent completes a survey, there is an additional step to ensure data accuracy. Using advanced technology and human expertise, the Research Solutions Team reviews open-ended answers for unnatural language patterns, odd phrasing, or copy/paste behavior, and flag responses that move too quickly or don’t follow logical patterns.

This extra layer of review helps identify:
- Contradictory or nonsensical answers
- Pre-written or scripted responses
- Unusually fast completion times
- Responses that don’t reflect real human input
Preventing survey fraud together

Maintaining data integrity is a shared responsibility and that responsibility starts with awareness and vigilance. As partners in the research process, the Research Solutions Team is committed to helping you uphold the highest standards of data quality.

In every client engagement the Reseach Solutions Team recommends the following best practices:
1. Stay informed: Keep up with evolving best practices in survey design and fraud prevention. From smart screening techniques to subtle shifts in question phrasing, even small adjustments make a big impact in deterring fraud and protecting the reliability of your data.
1. Embed quality checks throughout: Build data validation, logic traps, and timing checks into your surveys from the start. This proactive approach allows you to identify potential issues in real time and significantly reduces the risk of bad data slipping through the cracks.
1. Be vigilant: Pay close attention to red flags, such as inconsistent answers, patterned responses, or unusually fast completions. These warning signs may indicate fraudulent behavior and should prompt a deeper review.
1. Collaborate with the Research Solutions Team: When something seems off, they are there to help. Our team of experts can assist in identifying potential anomalies, adjusting your survey setup, and reinforcing your fraud prevention strategies.
Confidence with every decision

At Alchemer, we will continue to prioritize data quality in everything we do, because we understand that without good data, even the most sophisticated study loses its value.

Trust in research begins with trust in data, and that’s a responsibility we take seriously every day.

For more information about our data quality practices or to discuss your current or future research projects, please contact the Research Solutions Team today.
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25/04/2025
Some Pixel 9 owners are convinced video quality just got worse
Joe Maring / Android Authority
TL;DR

Owners of Pixel 9 family phones report stuttering and tearing video recorded from their cameras.

The issues seem to manifest when recording while zoomed in.

It’s possible a recent software update may be responsible
Across the world of smartphones, the landscape is always evolving. Every day we see the arrival of new updates, apps, and firmware patches that change the mobile experience for users in myriad ways — both desired and not. And while some of those changes are quite conspicuous, others are much more difficult to characterize, and we’re left wondering if something’s truly different, or if we’re just imagining things. Right now, we find ourselves in just such that kind of situation, asking if Pixel 9 video recording quality is getting worse, or if we’re just hallucinating.

While browsing Reddit’s GooglePixel sub the other day, we spotted a post from user oowwweee that caught our our eye, complaining about worse-than-expected video quality when filming on a Pixel 9 Pro XL past 3x zoom. Even though they were a pretty new owner of the phone, they noted that they only first observed the problem after installing the latest updates.

We might write that off as new-user unfamiliarity, but a number of other owners of Pixel 9-series phones chimed in with their own complaints, and it’s hard to ignore all the details aligning. We seem to be looking at some kind of temporal issue, with stuttering frames or images tearing. It only appears to manifest at intermediate zoom levels, and users report first noticing it after installing recent updates.

Compared to some of the other ways video quality could be impacted, not everyone’s going to necessarily notice or even really be bothered by something like this. That almost makes us even more curious: Is this an actual problem? Let’s hear from you:

Has your Pixel 9 gotten worse at recording video recently?

0 votes

More than just knowing whether or not you’re dissatisfied with zoomed video quality on your phone, we want to know exactly which Pixel model you’re experiencing this with. We’ve seen reports mentioning both the 9 Pro and 9 Pro XL, but we’re curious if this is impacting any other handsets, too.

After responding to our poll, scroll down and let us know in the comments which Pixel model you’re testing with, as well as when you first noticed a problem. Hopefully that will give us a little more data towards working out exactly what might be going on here.

Got a tip? Talk to us! Email our staff at news@androidauthority.com. You can stay anonymous or get credit for the info, it’s your choice.
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22/04/2025
How to Maintain Software Quality with Outsourced Teams
Outsourcing software development has become a popular choice for businesses looking to save costs and access global talent. However, maintaining software quality while working with outsourced teams can be a major challenge. In this article, we will explore strategies and best practices for ensuring the quality of software when working with outsourced teams. From effective communication to setting clear expectations and standards, we will discuss the key steps that businesses can take to maintain software quality and achieve successful outcomes with their outsourced partners.

Clear communication and expectations
- Establish clear guidelines and objectives for the outsourced team
- Use project management tools for transparent communication
- Regularly update on progress and any changes in requirements
- Conduct regular meetings to address any issues or concerns promptly
For more information on effective communication in outsourcing, visit our hospitality and travel page.

Use of standardized processes and documentation
- Ensures consistency and accountability in software development.
- Facilitates communication and collaboration among outsourced teams.
- Improves efficiency and reduces errors in the development process.
- Enhances quality control and risk management in software projects.
For more information on mobile app development services in New York, visit AnyAlpha.

Regular code review and testing
- Ensure outsourced teams conduct routine code reviews and testing to maintain software quality.
- Utilize tools like GitLab, Jira, and Jenkins for efficient code collaboration and testing.
- Learn more about code review and testing by visiting our CMS-CRM page.
  
  Continuous monitoring and evaluation of performance
- Regularly review outsourced team’s outputs
- Utilize performance metrics to track progress
- Provide feedback and guidance for improvement
- Implement quality assurance measures
- Visit AnyAlpha Web Designing Company in California for more information.
  
  Establishing a strong partnership with the outsourced team
- Clearly define roles and responsibilities
- Foster open communication channels
- Set clear expectations and goals
- Provide regular feedback and updates
- Build trust and mutual respect
- Utilize collaboration tools effectively
For more information on how to maintain software quality with outsourced teams, visit AnyAlpha’s eCommerce Store Development Company.

Providing necessary resources and support
- Ensure outsourced teams have access to required tools and technology
- Offer guidance and training to enhance their skills
- Regular communication and feedback to address any issues promptly
- Provide a supportive work environment to promote productivity
- Visit our website for more information about resources and support.
  
  Addressing cultural and time zone differences
- Foster open communication to bridge cultural gaps
- Schedule meetings and milestones at convenient times for all parties
- Utilize collaboration tools for efficient communication
- Establish clear expectations and guidelines for all team members
Learn more about how to effectively manage outsourced software teams at Anyalpha Web Development Services.

Ensuring compliance with quality standards and regulations
- Regular audits and performance evaluations
- Clear communication of quality expectations
- Training sessions on industry regulations
- Utilizing tools for tracking and monitoring quality
- Staying up-to-date with latest standards and regulations
For more information on ensuring compliance with quality standards and regulations, visit AnyAlpha

Encouraging feedback and open communication
- Provide regular avenues for team feedback
- Utilize collaboration tools for seamless communication
- Foster a culture of transparency and trust
- Encourage open dialogue to address issues promptly and effectively
For more information on how effective communication can maintain software quality with outsourced teams, visit Web Development in California.

Implementing quality assurance measures throughout the project lifecycle
- Set clear quality standards from the outset
- Regularly review and assess the outsourced team’s performance
- Conduct thorough testing at each stage of development
- Utilize automated testing tools to streamline the QA process
- Provide feedback and incorporate changes promptly
For more information on software quality assurance, visit our website.

Conclusion

In order to maintain software quality with outsourced teams, it is essential to prioritize clear communication and set expectations from the beginning. Using standardized processes and documentation, regularly reviewing code, and performing thorough testing are also crucial steps. Continuous monitoring and evaluation of the team’s performance, establishing a strong partnership, providing necessary resources and support, addressing cultural and time zone differences, ensuring compliance with quality standards, encouraging feedback and open communication, and implementing quality assurance measures throughout the project lifecycle are all vital components. By following these practices, organizations can ensure that their outsourced teams deliver high-quality software solutions that meet their expectations and adhere to industry standards.

To ensure software quality with outsourced teams, it is essential to establish clear communication channels, set up regular feedback sessions, and provide detailed documentation. Additionally, utilizing a centralized platform like DeltaWriter can help streamline the collaboration process by allowing teams to track tasks, share files, and provide real-time updates. For more tips on maintaining software quality with outsourced teams, visit https://DeltaWriter.com.
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15/04/2025
Advancing mobile app inventory quality with app reviews

How to prepare for the changes

We recommend publishers complete the app review process by linking mobile apps to supported app stores and claiming their mobile apps to prevent potential interruptions in monetization. If next steps are required from a publisher to complete the process, we’ll send timely updates in the publisher’s account, the policy center or via email.

We’re excited about the benefits app review can bring to publishers and advertisers. And we’ll continue to share our efforts in creating a healthy and sustainable ads ecosystem.

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15/04/2025