How to Fix App Quality Issues with Android Vitals (Part 1)
Article Summary
Over 40% of one-star reviews on Google Play mention app stability issues. Google's Android Vitals can help you fix them before users bail.
Wojtek Kaliciński from Google's Android team breaks down how to use Android Vitals in the Play Console to identify and fix two critical app quality issues: excessive wakeups that drain battery and ANR events that freeze your UI. This is part one of a two-part series on improving app performance metrics.
Key Takeaways
- Excessive wakeups: more than 10 per hour triggers the bad behavior threshold
- Use JobScheduler or Firebase JobDispatcher instead of AlarmManager for smarter batching
- ANRs happen when main thread blocks: never perform disk or network I/O there
- StrictMode catches accidental blocking calls during development before users see them
- Better ratings and reviews lead to higher Play Store rankings and more installs
Fixing excessive wakeups and ANR events directly improves user ratings, which boosts your Play Store ranking and drives more installs.
About This Article
Finding where apps schedule wakeup alarms is hard for developers. These alarms drain battery quickly, and blocking calls like URL#equals and SharedPreferences can trigger unexpected main thread operations.
Wojtek Kaliciński suggests using Android Studio's Find Usages feature to search for RTC_WAKEUP and ELAPSED_REALTIME_WAKEUP flags. Replace them with JobScheduler or Firebase JobDispatcher instead, which handles batching and persistence automatically.
Apps that reduce excessive wakeups and ANRs get better user ratings and reviews. This leads to higher Play Store rankings and more installs compared to apps with performance problems.