5 Take Away points from Droidcon 2016

Droidcon is a global developer conference series focusing on the best of Android, supporting the Android platform and creating a strong network for developers and startups. Droidcon covers all aspects of the Android ecosystem from mobile devices, to TV, to cars, to gaming, and so much more.

The idea behind the droidcon conferences is to support the Android platform and create a global network for developers and companies. The platform offers high-class talks from leaders from different parts of the ecosystem, including core development, embedded solutions, augmented reality, business solutions and games.

The speakers of the conference were some of the leaders from Android space, Yigit Boyar- Google Express, Dario Laverde- HTC, Jenny Yuen- Software Engineering Manager – Android at Facebook, Evelio Tarazona Caceres- Lyft, Israel Ferrer Camacho- Twitter, Christina Lee- Hightlights, Huyen Tue Dao- Trello and many others, who spoke about Android Development and the future of Android.

The 5 take away points from this conference were:

1. Application Architecture:
   An application architecture describes the behavior of applications used in a business, focused on how they interact with each other and with users. It is focused on the data consumed and produced by applications rather than their internal structure.Yigit Boyar explained the need and necessity of Application architecture in developing mobile applications that can work offline as well. Mobile networks are unreliable and if the application does not account for it, your user suffers from the worst user experience, which would in return affect your application; this motivates developers to design an application that can work offline and improve user experience with better architectural decisions from online behavior.

2. Auto Profiling Apps on Every Build:
   Evelio Tarazona Caceres of Lyft highlighted, not only Architecture alone, but performance also is always a concern when working with resource constrained environments like Android. In addition to that, developers also have to deal with another limited resource: time. It is quite common that adding new features or fixing bugs is way more relevant than ensuring the application works smoothly. Just measuring the performance of certain view takes a good amount of time, so why not automate it?“At Lyft we found that gathering data with every continuous integration build would help us to not only detect regressions but also to ensure a smooth ride for all our users.”, He added.

3. Borrowing The Best of the Web to Make Native Better:
   Christina Lee while addressing conference, said, “The fast iteration of the web has yielded several very promising paradigms to mitigate problems by thoughtfully separating concerns.” She spoke about how they are exploring ways to borrow principles from React, Flux, Redux and Cycle. JS to bring the best of web data flow management to Android Applications. She provided an overview of the relevant principles, including samples from apps in production.

4. Fluid Gesture:
   Material design on Android has ushered an age of delightful animation and meaningful transition leading to more engaging and sophisticated Apps. Eric Leong laid emphasis on examples of unique, but effective gestures, especially those unique to certain App Categories. To demonstrate the ease of developing a gesture-based interface, even in a production application. Eric used Tumbler Gestured, to show how important is implementing gestures using a backboard and rebound, libraries that help tie user interaction to on-screen motion.

5. Loving Lean Layouts:
   XML Layouts are a fundamental part of android development at all levels. Getting started is a straightforward but creating an efficient layout while still achieving a high level of control, takes some practice and few tricks

Android powers more than 80% of smartphones worldwide and shipped on over 1 billion devices. However, Android forks now account for over 20% of the global Android ecosystem and 41% of new devices. The Droidcon covered all aspects of the Android ecosystem, provided overview of future of android and revealed statistics and introduced specific strategies to help developers reach a wider audience with their applications.