Characteristics of great apps

Great Games

• Entertaining and fun.

• Challenging.

• Progressive levels of difficulty.

• Show your scores and use leaderboards to record high scores.

• Provide audio and visual feedback.

• Offer single-player, multiplayer and networked versions.

• Have high-quality animations.

• Offloading input/output and compute-intensive code to separate threads of execution to improve interface responsiveness and app performance.

• Innovate with augmented reality technology—enhancing a real-world environment with virtual components; this is particularly popular with video-based apps.

Useful Utilities

• Provide useful functionality and accurate information.

• Increase personal and business productivity.

• Make tasks more convenient (e.g., maintaining a to-do list, managing expenses).

• Make the user better informed.

• Provide topical information (e.g., the latest stock prices, news, severe storm warnings, traffic updates).

• Use location-based services to provide local services (e.g., coupons for local businesses, best gas prices, food delivery).

General Characteristics

• Up-to-date with the latest Android features, but compatible with multiple Android versions to support the widest possible audience.

• Work properly.

• Bugs are fixed promptly.

• Follow standard Android app GUI conventions.

• Launch quickly.

• Are responsive.

• Don’t require too much memory, bandwidth or battery power.

• Are novel and creative.

• Enduring—something that your users will use regularly.

• Use professional-quality icons that will appear in Google Play and on the user’s device.

• Use quality graphics, images, animations, audio and video.

• Are intuitive and easy to use (don’t require extensive help documentation).

• Accessible to people with disabilities (http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/accessibility/index.html).

• Give users reasons and a means to tell others about your app (e.g., you can give users the option to post their game scores to Facebook or Twitter).

• Provide additional content for content-driven apps (e.g., game levels, articles, puzzles).

• Localized (Chapter 2) for each country in which the app is offered (e.g., translate the app’s text and audio files, use different graphics based on the locale, etc.).

• Offer better performance, capabilities and ease-of-use than competitive apps.

• Take advantage of the device’s built-in capabilities.

• Do not request excessive permissions.

• Are designed to run optimally across a broad variety of Android devices.

• Future-proofed for new hardware devices—specify the exact hardware features your app uses so Google Play can filter and display it for only compatible devices (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/06/future-proofing-your-app.html).