Lessons Building Android Widgets
Article Summary
Matt Bowen and the Shopify team discovered their Android widgets were making up to 5 unnecessary network calls per update cycle. Their solution? A clever 60-second cache that transformed widget performance.
Shopify's mobile team rebuilt their Android widgets from scratch to match their iOS 14 redesign, creating a data-rich experience for merchants to monitor business metrics. The team tackled unique Android challenges including RemoteViews limitations, dynamic layouts for Android 12, and the complexities of building widgets outside React Native.
Key Takeaways
- Short-lived cache eliminated 2-5 redundant network calls per widget update
- Custom bitmap approach bypassed RemoteViews restrictions for charts and custom views
- Dynamic decoder strategy enables flexible metric queries based on merchant configuration
- Widget flickering reduced by rendering cached data during updates
- Android 12's responsive layouts hit 665KB Binder buffer limit unexpectedly
Building production Android widgets requires creative workarounds for RemoteViews constraints, aggressive caching to prevent redundant updates, and careful buffer management for complex layouts.
About This Article
Shopify's Android widget configuration screen couldn't track analytics when merchants resized widgets on Android 12. The onAppWidgetOptionsChanged() method didn't have access to the view mapping needed to figure out which layout size was being used.
The team tried mapping width and height measurements in dp back to layout sizes. After testing on multiple devices, they realized this approach was unreliable and would produce inaccurate analytics data.
Shopify removed the reconfiguration analytics event from Android altogether. They're hoping this limitation gets enough attention that Google will address it in a future Android release.
