“Man, do we really still need to support Android 1.0?”
Up until recently, that was a pretty hard question for Android Devs to answer. Unless they built in a bit of system profiling code and had it send that info over to their server, Android devs really just didn’t really have any idea who was running their apps. Supporting a platform is a bit harder when you think you need to test on 15+ different versions of it.
Fortunately, Google’s gone out of their way to shed a light on the unknown. How? With good ol’ fashion stats!
Google is no stranger to statistics; their Analytics product has helped web developers around the globe count every last page view and mouse click. Today, their introducing something along the lines of Analytics for Android developers: Application Statistics.
The new App Stats page in the Developer Console will brief devs on:
- What language your users use
- Which countries are downloading your app the most
- Which devices are using it the most? Big ol’ powerful superphones, or dinky antiques? It’s important to know.
- What build of Android are your users running? Do you even need to be testing on Android 1.0, or 1.5 anymore — or is 99% of your user base on 2.0?+
It’s all incredibly important information. Imagine finding out the 80% of your users have their handset set to Japanese, and you’ve only got it running in English. What if all it took to double your sales was to translate your app?