One of the most promising operating systems available today is Android. Being a product development company, we at Goibibo constantly monitor the latest developments in Android stack. This helps us in delivering a quality product. For example, recently new design guidelines for Android were released called the Material Design.
Android Material Design
Material Design is inspired from the elements of print based design. According to Google, material design is not limited to Android devices only. It is targeted to build a similar user experience across different platforms and devices. Giving the user a freeform border-less user experience which is intuitive. As per specification, Material Design enhances the user experience by using lights and shadows in the general view hierarchy, giving the apps a better interface. For full specs have a look at this document.
In the latest release of Goibibo android app, the foundation stone for android material design has been laid. We recently included the functionality of toolbar and material tabs . This helps us in showing material design across a wide range of android devices including the older versions of android as well.
Android Studio
The interesting part about Android development is that, not only the framework is evolving. But also its development platform is evolving day by day. Recently one of the most significant changes in the Android development has been the evolution of Android Studio. Till now the standard development platform for android, has been the Eclipse IDE + ADT bundle. But now Android Studio has been declared as the official Android development IDE, and working on Android studio is like development on steroids.
Android Studio gives us a completely new build platform with flexible gradle based system. This gives us an added advantage of compiling different build variants from the same code base without manually changing a single line of code. This feature of Android Studio is being actively used in the Goibibo’s Android project. It helps us in releasing multiple build variants in a rapid paced development environment, utilising every second of a minute. Therefore in an android product development ecosystem, it is advised to move to Android Studio, otherwise slow build cycles could kill your productivity.
Another great feature of Android studio is efficiently and effectively track the memory allocations in real time. This feature of Android Studio helps in performance improvement of the Android app.
Although working in Goibibo Android team, I can say that- moving from eclipse to android studio has been an extensive activity. As while picking up the change, we also picked up the task of implementing material design with code cleanup, which turned out to be a very time consuming task. But it also resulted in an app which complies with the latest android development standards to pioneer the industry.