Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Did you know more than half of users will bail if your app doesn’t load in under three seconds? That’s not a fun stat. But it’s real, and it shows up fast, especially in high-traffic moments. Take an e-commerce app during a big sale. One delay during checkout, one stutter when loading the cart, and users are gone. That team watched retention nosedive because mobile app performance didn’t hold up under pressure. The problem wasn’t the features. It was the lag.

Android app development is the process of building software for Android devices, such as smartphones, smart TVs, tablets and wearables. It’s a Linux-based system and open source, which means manufacturers can customize it. Android version names used to be named after desserts, like Lollipop, Marshmallow, KitKat and Oreo. From version 10, Google switched to number-based names like Android 10, Android 11, Android 12, etc, up to the most recent, Android 15, which was released in September 2024.

More and more businesses are now starting to realize the importance of having a mobile app developed to boost their business and increase customer engagement. There is a good reason to develop a mobile app and hire a mobile app developer to do this. Why? 2017 was a historic year because for the first time mobile internet use overtook desktop searches. Many studies also show that more and more people are using mobile apps to access the internet rather than their web browser.

At the 2025 instalment of its WWDC event, Apple set out its long-term vision for how we think about platform strategy, AI integration and multi-device architecture. If you’re a CTO, staff engineer, or mobile lead, this wasn’t just a conference to watch, it was one to plan your entire roadmap around. What Apple revealed at this year’s WWDS will affect everything from your frontend stack to how your systems talk to hardware.

Before we get started on WebSocket integration, it’s worth quickly explaining how building real-time mobile apps used to work – and why issues with lag and latency led engineers to turn to WebSockets instead. Engineers building real-time Android apps struggled to make sure updates were reflected immediately when a user sent them. To solve this, they tried polling, which meant firing off a GET request to the server, say every five seconds, to a /messages endpoint.

You’ve probably heard of the concept of ‘Frontend decides, backend delivers’ in app development. On the off-chance that you haven’t, it means that the frontend defines the data it needs, and the backend acts on this instruction. This makes the data-fetching process more efficient, simplifies the error handling process and frees us, the devs, from the need to constantly make backend changes. The GraphQL query language for APIs, developed by Facebook, is a vital tool in this regard.

In Android development, performance isn’t something you tack on at the end. It’s foundational. Users don’t care how elegant your architecture is if the app stutters from their first tap of the screen. Responsiveness, fluidity, launch speed; all these things don’t just influence user experience, they define it. Saying “it works fine on my Pixel” is a nice confidence boost, but it doesn’t count as real data. And emulators don’t count either.

There have been huge changes in Android development over the years, but none has been as significant as Jetpack Compose state management. This isn’t just another toolkit update. It’s a flight to freedom, a rethinking of how we build user interfaces from the ground up. Jetpack Compose gives us a new, declarative-style UI development, which means cleaner code and introduces a powerful state management system at the heart of the entire framework.