Tag Archives: Performance

Android 12 Beta 5 update, official release is next!

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering

Android 12 logo

We’re just a few weeks away from the official release of Android 12! As we put the finishing touches on the new version of Android, today we’re bringing you a final Beta update to help you with testing and development. For developers, now is the time to make sure your apps are ready!

You can get Beta 5 today on your Pixel device, including on the Pixel 5a with 5G, by enrolling here for over-the-air updates. If you’re already enrolled, you’ll automatically get the update. You can also try Android 12 Beta 5 on select devices from several of our partners like Sharp. Visit the Android 12 developer site for details.

Watch for more information on the official Android 12 release coming soon!

What’s in Beta 5?

Today’s update includes a release candidate build of Android 12 for Pixel and other devices and the Android Emulator. We reached Platform Stability at Beta 4, so all app-facing surfaces are final, including SDK and NDK APIs, app-facing system behaviors, and restrictions on non-SDK interfaces. With these and the latest fixes and optimizations, Beta 5 gives you everything you need to complete your testing.

timeline

Get your apps ready!

With the official Android 12 release coming next, we’re asking all app and game developers to complete your final compatibility testing and publish your compatibility updates ahead of the final release. For SDK, library, tools, and game engine developers, it’s important to release your compatible updates as soon as possible -- your downstream app and game developers may be blocked until they receive your updates.

To test your app for compatibility, just install it on a device running Android 12 Beta 5 and work through the app flows looking for any functional or UI issues. Review the Android 12 behavior changes for all apps to focus on areas where your app could be affected. Here are some of the top changes to test:

  • Privacy dashboard — A new dashboard in Settings lets users see which apps are accessing which type of data and when. Users can adjust permissions if needed, and they can request details from your app on the reason for access. More here.
  • Microphone & camera indicators — Android 12 shows an indicator in the status bar when an app is using the camera or microphone. More here.
  • Microphone & camera toggles — New toggles in Quick Settings let users instantly disable microphone and camera access for all apps. More here.
  • Clipboard read notification — A toast alerts users when an app reads data from the clipboard unexpectedly. More here.
  • Stretch overscroll — A new “stretch” overscroll effect replaces the previous “glow” overscroll effect systemwide. More here.
  • App splash screens — Android 12 launches apps with a new splash screen animation. More here.
  • Keygen changes — Several deprecated BouncyCastle cryptographic algorithms are removed in favor of Conscrypt versions. If your app uses a 512-bit key with AES, you’ll need to use one of the standard sizes supported by Conscrypt.More here.

Remember to test the libraries and SDKs in your app for compatibility. If you find any SDK issues, try updating to the latest version of the SDK or reaching out to the developer for help.

Once you’ve published the compatible version of your current app, you can start the process to update your app's targetSdkVersion. Review the behavior changes for Android 12 apps and use the compatibility framework to help detect issues quickly.

Explore the new features and APIs

Android 12 has a ton of new features to help you build great experiences for users. Check out our Android 12 Beta 2 post for a recap and links to Android 12 talks at Google I/O. For complete details on all of the new features and APIs, visit the Android 12 developer site.

Also make sure to try Android Studio Arctic Fox with your Android 12 development and testing. We’ve added lint checks to help you catch where your code might be affected by Android 12 changes, such as for custom declarations of splash screens, coarse location permission for fine location usage, media formats, and high sensor sampling rate permission. You can give these a try by downloading and configuring the latest version of Android Studio.

Get started with Android 12!

Today’s Beta 5 release has everything you need to try the Android 12 features, test your apps, and give us feedback. Just enroll any supported Pixel device to get the update over-the-air. To get started developing, set up the Android 12 SDK.

You can also get Beta 5 on devices from several of our partners like Sharp. For even broader testing, you can try Beta 5 on Android GSI images, and if you don’t have a device, you can test on the Android Emulator. This update is also available for Android TV, so you can check out the latest TV features and test your apps on the all-new Google TV experience.

What’s next?

Stay tuned for the official Android 12 launch coming in the weeks ahead! Until then, feel free to continue sharing your feedback through our hotlists for platform issues, app compatibility issues, and third-party SDK issues.

A huge thank you to our developer community for helping shape the Android 12 release! You’ve given us thousands of bug reports and shared insights that have helped us adjust APIs, improve features, fix significant bugs, and in general make the platform better for users and developers.

We’re looking forward to seeing your apps on Android 12!

Android 12 Beta 4 and Platform Stability

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering

Android 12 logo

Today we’re bringing you the fourth Beta of Android 12, and moving into the final phase of the release. We’ve built Android 12 with a new UI that adapts to you, performance improvements, privacy and security enhancements, and more. We’re now shifting our focus to polish, performance, and stability. Thanks for all the feedback you’ve shared to help us refine the release and get us to this point.

For developers, Beta 4 takes us to Platform Stability, which means that Android 12’s APIs and all app-facing behaviors are finalized. For apps, the focus is now on compatibility and quality. It’s time to start preparing your compatible app updates in time for the official release later in the year.

You can try Beta 4 today on your Pixel device by enrolling here for over-the-air updates, and if you previously enrolled, you’ll automatically get today’s update. You can also get Android 12 Beta 4 on select devices from several of our partners like ASUS, Oneplus, Oppo, Realme, Sharp, and ZTE - learn more at android.com/beta. Visit the Android 12 developer site for details on how to get started.

Platform Stability

Android 12 Beta 4 has reached Platform Stability, a milestone that means all app-facing surfaces and behaviors are now final in Android 12. This includes not only the official SDK and NDK APIs, but also final app-facing system behaviors and restrictions on non-SDK interfaces that may affect apps. So from Beta 4, you can confidently release your compatibility updates knowing that the platform won’t change. More on the timeline is here.

Android 12 timeline

We’re asking all app and game developers to start your final compatibility testing now and prepare to publish your compatibility updates as soon as possible ahead of the final release.

For all SDK, library, tools, and game engine developers, it’s even more important to start testing now and release your compatible updates as soon as possible -- your downstream app and game developers may be blocked until they receive your updates. When you’ve released a compatible update, be vocal and let developers know!

App compatibility

For Android, App compatibility means that your app runs as intended on a new version of the platform. You can check your app’s compatibility just by installing the production version of your app on a device or emulator and testing it - if the app looks good and runs properly, then you’re done, it’s compatible!

Testing your app for compatibility is important because with each release, we make integral changes to the platform that improve privacy and security and the overall user experience across the OS. These can affect your apps, so you should take a look at the behavior changes and test against them, then publish a compatible update to your users. It’s a basic but critical level of quality that ensures users have a good app experience.

As people update their devices to Android 12, they want to explore the latest version of Android, and experience it with their favorite apps. If those apps don’t work properly, it’s a major issue, ultimately resulting in uninstalls.

So while there are a ton of new APIs and capabilities to explore, start by testing your current app and releasing a compatible update first.

Get your apps ready

To test your app for compatibility with Android 12, just install your production app from Google Play or other source onto a device running Android 12 Beta 4. Work through all of the app’s flows and watch for functional or UI issues. Review the Android 12 behavior changes for all apps to focus your testing. Here are some changes to watch for:

  • Privacy dashboard - A new dashboard in Settings lets users see which apps are accessing which type of data and when. Users can adjust permissions if needed, and they can request details from your app on the reason for access. More here.
  • Microphone & camera indicators - Android 12 shows an indicator in the status bar when an app is using the camera or microphone. More here.
  • Microphone & camera toggles - New toggles in Quick Settings let users instantly disable microphone and camera access for all apps. More here.
  • Clipboard read notification - A toast alerts users when an app reads data from the clipboard unexpectedly. More here.
  • Stretch overscroll - A new “stretch” overscroll effect replaces the previous “glow” overscroll effect systemwide. More here.
  • App splash screens - Android 12 launches apps with a new splash screen animation. More here.
  • Keygen changes - Several deprecated BouncyCastle cryptographic algorithms are removed in favor of Conscrypt versions. If your app uses a 512-bit key with AES, you’ll need to use one of the standard sizes supported by Conscrypt. More here.

Remember to test the libraries and SDKs in your app for compatibility. If you find any SDK issues, try updating to the latest version of the SDK or reaching out to the developer for help.

Once you’ve published the compatible version of your current app, you can start the process to update your app's targetSdkVersion. Review the behavior changes for Android 12 apps and use the compatibility framework to help you detect issues quickly. Here are some of the changes to test for (these apply when your app’s targetSdkVersion is 31 or higher):

  • Foreground service launch restriction - Apps can no longer launch foreground services from the background. For high-priority background tasks, use expedited jobs in WorkManager instead. More here.
  • Approximate location - When apps request permission for precise location, users can now choose to grant either precise or approximate location. More here.
  • New permission for exact alarms - Apps that want to use exact alarms must request a new normal permission, SCHEDULE_EXACT_ALARM. More here.
  • Modern SameSite cookie behaviors in WebView - If your app uses WebView, test your app with the new SameSite cookie behaviors. More here.
  • Safer exporting of components - your app must explicitly specify an android:exported attribute for any app components that use intent filters. More here.
  • Custom notifications - The system applies a standard notification template to fully custom notifications, with affordances for app name, app icon, and expand/collapse data. More here.
  • Notification trampolines restriction - Notifications can no longer launch your app using a “trampoline” - an intermediary broadcast receiver or service that starts the target Activity. More here.

During testing, also watch for uses of restricted non-SDK interfaces in your app and move those to public SDK equivalents instead. You can read about the restricted APIs here.

Get started with Android 12!

Today’s Beta release has everything you need to try the Android 12 features, test your apps, and give us feedback. Just enroll any supported Pixel device to get the update over-the-air. To get started developing, set up the Android 12 SDK.

You can also get Android 12 Beta 4 on devices from some of our partners like ASUS, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Sharp, and ZTE. Visit android.com/beta to see the full list of partners participating in Android 12 Beta. For even broader testing, you can try Android 12 Beta 4 on Android GSI images, and if you don’t have a device, you can test on the Android Emulator.

Beta 4 is also available for Android TV, so you can check out the latest TV features and test your apps on the all-new Google TV experience. Try it out with the ADT-3 developer kit. More here.

Watch for one more Beta coming in the weeks ahead as a release candidate for your final testing.

For complete details on Android 12 Beta, visit the Android 12 developer site.

Android 12 Beta 3 and final APIs

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering

Android 12 logo

Each month we’re bringing Android 12 closer to its final form, with innovative features, a new UI that adapts to you, performance improvements, privacy enhancements, security benefits, and much more. Many of you are already developing and testing on Android 12 through our Beta program - thank you for all of the feedback you’ve shared so far!

There’s still a lot to do to land this release, though, and today we’re pushing out the third Beta of Android 12 for you to try. Along with updates like scrolling screenshots, privacy indicator APIs, and enhanced auto-rotate, Beta 3 also includes the final Android 12 APIs and the official SDK. WIth these, you can start testing and updating your app ahead of Platform Stability, coming up next at Beta 4. Now is the time to make sure your apps are ready!

You can get Beta 3 today on your Pixel device by enrolling here for over-the-air updates, and if you previously enrolled, you’ll automatically get today’s update. You can also get Android 12 Beta 3 on select devices from several of our device-maker partners like Sharp and TCL - learn more at android.com/beta. Visit the Android 12 developer site for details on how to get started.

What’s new in Beta 3?

Beta 3 includes a number of updates to improve functionality, user experience, and performance. Here are a few highlights.

Scrolling screenshots - To make it easier to capture and share scrolling content, we’re adding scrolling screenshots. Starting in Beta 3, when users capture a screenshot of content that’s scrollable, they’ll now see a “Capture more” button to extend the screenshot to the full content and they can then adjust the crop.

capturing a scrolling screenshot in the Settings app

Capturing a scrolling screenshot in the Settings app

Scrolling screenshots work out-of-the-box for most apps -- if your app uses a standard View-based UI, no changes should be needed. For apps and UI toolkits that are not using View-based UI or that use highly customized UI, we’re introducing a new ScrollCapture API to support scrolling screenshots. With this API, the system notifies your app of scroll capture requests and provides a Surface for you to draw your UI into. We’re continuing to iterate on scrolling screenshots and in Beta 4 you’ll see improvements to the default support, such as for scrolling ListViews. We're also working to provide support for a wider variety of content (such as web content). Let us know what you think!

On-device search - With Beta 3 we’re highlighting platform support for AppSearch, a new high-performance on-device search engine. With AppSearch, apps can index structured data and search over it with built-in full-text search capabilities, and they can use native features like highly-efficient indexing and retrieval, multi-language support, and relevancy ranking.

AppSearch comes in two flavors: a local index for your app to use that’s backward-compatible through a new AppSearch Jetpack library, and a central index that’s maintained for the entire system in Android 12 (and later releases). When you participate in the central index, the system will be able to display your app’s data on System UI surfaces unless you choose to opt out. Additionally, you can securely share data with other apps, allowing them to search your app’s data as well as their own. More here.

Privacy indicator APIs in WindowInsets - In Beta 2 we added support for privacy indicators in the status bar that show when an app is using the device camera or microphone. Since the indicators can be displayed when an app is in immersive mode and could potentially cover controls or content, apps need to know where the indicators can be drawn and make any adjustments needed to prevent useful content from being covered. In Beta 3 we’ve added new privacy indicator APIs to WindowInsets that let you get the maximum bounds of the indicators and their relative placement on the screen, taking into account the current orientation and language settings. More here.

Camera and microphone toggles configurable for enterprises - In Beta 2 we also introduced new toggles that let users instantly turn off access to the device microphone and camera for all apps. We’ve now made these accessible to enterprise administrators who can set any restrictions needed on fully managed devices. More here.

New permission for CDM-paired apps starting foreground services - To better support companion apps carrying out core functionality while providing transparency to the system, apps paired with Companion Device Manager (CDM) can launch foreground services from the background by declaring a new normal permission. More here.

Better, faster auto-rotate - We’ve enhanced Android’s auto-rotate feature with face detection, using the front-facing camera to more accurately recognize when to rotate the screen. This is especially helpful for people who are using their devices while lying down on a couch or in bed, for example. For developers, this means that the auto-rotation behavior will provide a better user experience for users who have opted in through Settings. The enhanced auto-rotate feature lives within our recently announced Private Compute Core, so images are never stored or sent off the device. In Beta 3 this feature is available on Pixel 4 and later Pixel devices.

To make screen rotation as speedy as possible on all devices, we’ve also optimized the animation and redrawing and added an ML-driven gesture-detection algorithm. As a result, the latency for the base auto-rotate feature has been reduced by 25%, and the benefits of the face detection enhancement build on top of those improvements. Give the auto-rotate improvements a try and let us know what you think.

Android 12 for Games - With Game Mode APIs, you can react to the players' performance profile selection for your game - like better battery life for a long commute, or performance mode to get peak frame rates. These APIs will be tied to the upcoming game dashboard which provides an overlay experience with quick access to key utilities during gameplay. The game dashboard will be available on select devices later this year.

play as you download image

Play as you download on Android 12 with Touchgrind BMX

Meanwhile, play as you download will allow game assets to be fetched in the background during install, getting your players into gameplay faster.

Visit the Android 12 developer site to learn more about all of the new features in Android 12.

Final APIs and SDK

Over the past several weeks we've been working to finalize the Android 12 APIs and today we're releasing them with Beta 3, along with the official API Level 31 SDK. We plan to reach full Platform Stability at Beta 4, when all app-facing system behaviors and non-SDK interface restrictions will also be final, in addition to the API surfaces.

If you’re compiling your app against the Android 12 APIs, we recommend using today’s release to update your environment and recompile your apps with the final SDK and latest tools.

App compatibility

With many early-adopter users and developers getting Android 12 Beta on Pixel and other devices, now is the time to make sure your apps are compatible and ready for them to use!

To test your app for compatibility with Beta 3, just install the published version from Google Play or other source onto a device or emulator running Android 12 Beta. Work through all of the app’s flows and watch for functional or UI issues. Review the behavior changes to focus your testing on areas where underlying changes may affect your app. There’s no need to change your app’s targetSdkVersion at this time, so once you’ve resolved any issues, we recommend publishing an update as soon as possible for your Android 12 Beta users.

platform stability

As mentioned earlier, Android 12 will reach Platform Stability in the next release, Beta 4. With Platform Stability, all app-facing system behaviors, SDK/NDK APIs, and non-SDK restrictions will be finalized. At that time, you can begin your final compatibility testing and release a fully compatible version of your app, SDK, or library. More on the Android 12 timeline for developers is here.

Get started with Android 12!

Today’s Beta release has everything you need to try the latest Android 12 features, test your apps, and give us feedback. Just enroll any supported Pixel device to get the update over-the-air. To get started developing, set up the Android 12 SDK.

You can also get Android 12 Beta 3 on devices from some of our top device-maker partners like Sharp and TCL. Visit android.com/beta to see the full list of partners participating in Android 12 Beta. For even broader testing, you can try Android 12 Beta on Android GSI images, and if you don’t have a device you can test on the Android Emulator.

Beta 3 is also available for Android TV, so you can check out the latest TV features and test your apps on the all-new Google TV experience. Try it out with the ADT-3 developer kit. More here.

For complete details on Android 12 Beta, visit the Android 12 developer site.

Google I/O 2019 – What sessions should SEOs and webmasters watch?

Google I/O 2019 is starting tomorrow and will run for 3 days, until Thursday. Google I/O is our yearly developers festival, where product announcements are made, new APIs and frameworks are introduced, and Product Managers present the latest from Google to an audience of 7,000+ developers who fly to California.

However, you don't have to physically attend the event to take advantage of this once-a-year opportunity: many conferences and talks are live streamed on YouTube for anyone to watch. Browse the full schedule of events, including a list of talks that we think will be interesting for webmasters to watch (all talks are in English). All the links shared below will bring you to pages with more details about each talk, and links to watch the sessions will display on the day of each event. All times are Pacific Central time (California time).



This list is only a small part of the agenda that we think is useful to webmasters and SEOs. There are many more sessions that you could find interesting! To learn about those other talks, check out the full list of “web” sessions, design sessions, Cloud sessions, machine learning sessions, and more. Use the filtering function to toggle the sessions on and off.

We hope you can make the time to watch the talks online, and participate in the excitement of I/O ! The videos will also be available on Youtube after the event, in case you can't tune in live.

Posted by Vincent Courson, Search Outreach Specialist

User experience improvements with page speed in mobile search

To help users find the answers to their questions faster, we included page speed as a ranking factor for mobile searches in 2018. Since then, we've observed improvements on many pages across the web. We want to recognize the performance improvements webmasters have made over the past year. A few highlights:

  • For the slowest one-third of traffic, we saw user-centric performance metrics improve by 15% to 20% in 2018. As a comparison, no improvement was seen in 2017.
  • We observed improvements across the whole web ecosystem. On a per country basis, more than 95% of countries had improved speeds.
  • When a page is slow to load, users are more likely to abandon the navigation. Thanks to these speed improvements, we've observed a 20% reduction in abandonment rate for navigations initiated from Search, a metric that site owners can now also measure via the Network Error Logging API available in Chrome.
  • In 2018, developers ran over a billion PageSpeed Insights audits to identify performance optimization opportunities for over 200 million unique urls.

Great work and thank you! We encourage all webmasters to optimize their sites’ user experience. If you're unsure how your pages are performing, the following tools and documents can be useful:

  1. PageSpeed Insights provides page analysis and optimization recommendations.
  2. Google Chrome User Experience Report provides the user experience metrics for how real-world Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web.
  3. Documentation on performance on Web Fundamentals.

For any questions, feel free to drop by our help forums (like the webmaster community) to chat with other experts.


Posted by Genqing Wu and Doantam Phan

Google I/O 2018 – What sessions should SEOs and Webmasters watch live ?

Google I/O 2018 is starting today in California, to an international audience of 7,000+ developers. It will run until Thursday night. It is our annual developers festival, where product announcements are made, new APIs and frameworks are introduced, and Product Managers present the latest from Google.

However, you don't have to physically attend the event to take advantage of this once-a-year opportunity: many conferences and talks are live streamed on YouTube for anyone to watch. You will find the full-event schedule here.

Dozens upon dozens of talks will take place over the next 3 days. We have hand picked the talks that we think will be the most interesting for webmasters and SEO professionals. Each link shared will bring you to pages with more details about each talk, and you will find out how to tune in to the live stream. All times are California time (PCT). We might add other sessions to this list.


Tuesday, May 8th

3pm - Web Security post Spectre/Meltdown, with Emily Schechter and Chris Palmer - more info.
5pm - Dru Knox and Stephan Somogyi talk about building a seamless web with Chrome - more info.


Wednesday, May 9th

9.30am - Ewa Gasperowicz and Addy Osmani talk about Web Performance and increasing control over the loading experience - more info.
10.30am - Alberto Medina and Thierry Muller will explain how to make a WordPress site progressive - more info.
11.30am - Rob Dodson and Dominic Mazzoni will cover "What's new in web accessibility" - more info.
3.30pm - Michael Bleigh will introduce how to leverage AMP in Firebase for a blazing fast website - more info.
4.30pm - Rick Viscomi and Vinamrata Singal will introduce the latest with Lighthouse and Chrome UX Report for Web Performance - more info.


Thursday, May 10th

8.30am - John Mueller and Tom Greenaway will talk about building Search-friendly JavaScript websites - more info.
9.30am - Build e-commerce sites for the modern web with AMP, PWA, and more, with Adam Greenberg and Rowan Merewood - more info.
12.30pm - Session on "Building a successful web presence with Google Search" by John Mueller and Mariya Moeva - more info.



This list is only a sample of the content at this year's Google I/O, and there might be many more that are interesting to you! To find out about those other talks, check out the full list of web sessions, but also the sessions about Design, the Cloud sessions, the machine learning sessions, and more… 

We hope you can make the time to watch the talks online, and participate in the excitement of I/O ! The videos will also be available on Youtube after the event, in case you can't tune in live.


Posted by Vincent Courson, Search Outreach Specialist, and the Google Webmasters team

Launching SEO Audit category in Lighthouse Chrome extension


We're happy to announce that we are introducing another audit category to the Lighthouse Chrome Extension: SEO Audits.

Lighthouse is an open-source, automated auditing tool for improving the quality of web pages. It provides a well-lit path for improving the quality of sites by allowing developers to run audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps compatibility and more. Basically, it "keeps you from crashing into the rocks", hence the name Lighthouse.

The SEO audit category within Lighthouse enables developers and webmasters to run a basic SEO health-check for any web page that identifies potential areas for improvement. Lighthouse runs locally in your Chrome browser, enabling you to run the SEO audits on pages in a staging environment as well as on live pages, public pages and pages that require authentication.

Bringing SEO best practices to you

The current list of SEO audits is not an exhaustive list, nor does it make any SEO guarantees for Google websearch or other search engines. The current list of audits was designed to validate and reflect the SEO basics that every site should get right, and provides detailed guidance to developers and SEO practitioners of all skill levels. In the future, we hope to add more and more in-depth audits and guidance — let us know if you have suggestions for specific audits you'd like to see!

How to use it

Currently there are two ways to run these audits.

Using the Lighthouse Chrome Extension:

  1. Install the Lighthouse Chrome Extension
  2. Click on the Lighthouse icon in the extension bar 
  3. Select the Options menu, tick “SEO” and click OK, then Generate report

Running SEO Audits in Lighthouse extension


Using Chrome Developer tools on Chrome Canary:
  1. Open Chrome Developer Tools 
  2. Go to Audits 
  3. Click Perform an audit 
  4. Tick the “SEO” checkbox and click Run Audit. 

Running SEO Audits in Chrome Canary

The current Lighthouse Chrome extension contains an initial set of SEO audits which we’re planning to extend and enhance in the future. Once we're confident of its functionality, we’ll make the audits available by default in the stable release of Chrome Developer Tools.

We hope you find this functionality useful for your current and future projects. If these basic SEO tips are totally new to you and you find yourself interested in this area, make sure to read our complete SEO starter-guide! Leave your feedback and suggestions in the comments section below, on GitHub or on our Webmaster forum.

Happy auditing!

Posted by Valentyn, Webmaster Outreach Strategist.

Using page speed in mobile search ranking

People want to be able to find answers to their questions as fast as possible — studies show that people really care about the speed of a page. Although speed has been used in ranking for some time, that signal was focused on desktop searches. Today we’re announcing that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.

The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.

We encourage developers to think broadly how about performance affects a user’s experience of their page and to consider a variety of user experience metrics. Although there is no tool that directly indicates whether a page is affected by this new ranking factor, here are some resources that can be used to evaluate a page’s performance.

  • Chrome User Experience Report, a public dataset of key user experience metrics for popular destinations on the web, as experienced by Chrome users under real-world conditions
  • Lighthouse, an automated tool and a part of Chrome Developer Tools for auditing the quality (performance, accessibility, and more) of web pages
  • PageSpeed Insights, a tool that indicates how well a page performs on the Chrome UX Report and suggests performance optimizations

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please visit our webmaster forums.

Posted by Zhiheng Wang and Doantam Phan

Android vitals: Increase engagement and installs through improved app performance

Posted by Fergus Hurley, Product Manager, Google Play

Poor app performance is something that many users have experienced. Think about that last time you experienced an app crashing, failing to respond, or rendering slowly. Consider your reaction when checking the battery usage on your own device, and seeing an app using excessive battery. When an app performs badly, users notice. In fact, in an internal analysis of app reviews on Google Play, we noticed that half of the 1-star reviews mentioned app stability.

Conversely, people consistently reward the best performing apps with better ratings and reviews. This leads to better rankings on Google Play, which helps increase installs. Not only that, but users stay more engaged, and are willing to spend more time and money.

At Google I/O 2017, we announced the new Android vitals dashboard in the Google Play Console. Android vitals is designed to help you understand and analyze bad app behaviors, so you can improve your app's performance and reap the benefits of better performance.

Android vitals in the Google Play Console

Android vitals helps identify opportunities to improve your app's performance. The dashboards are useful for engineers and business owners alike, offering quick reference performance metrics to monitor your app so you can analyze the data and dedicate the right resources to make improvements.

You'll see the following data collected from Android devices whose users have opted in to automatically share usage and diagnostics data:

  • Stability: ANR rate & crash rate
  • Render time: slow rendering (16ms) and frozen UI frames (700ms)
  • Battery usage: stuck wake locks and excessive wakeups

See how Busuu increased their rating from 4.1☆ to 4.5☆ by focusing on app performance

Busuu is one of the world's largest language learning apps. Hear from Antoine Sakho, Head of Product about how Busuu increased user ratings.

Learn more about engineering for high performance with tools from Android and Google Play

Read our best practice article on Android vitals to understand the data shown in the dashboards, and how you can improve your app's performance and stability. Watch the I/O session to learn about more tools from Android and Google Play that you can use to identify and fix bad behaviors:

Learn more about other Play Console features, and stay up to date with news and tips to succeed on Google Play, with the Playbook app. Join the beta and install it today.

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TensorFlow Benchmarks and a New High-Performance Guide

Posted by Josh Gordon on behalf of the TensorFlow team

We recently published a collection of performance benchmarks that highlight TensorFlow's speed and scalability when training image classification models, like InceptionV3 and ResNet, on a variety of hardware and configurations.

To help you build highly scalable models, we've also added a new High-Performance Models guide to the performance site on tensorflow.org. Together with the guide, we hope these benchmarks and associated scripts will serve as a reference point as you tune your code, and help you get the most performance from your new and existing hardware.

When running benchmarks, we tested using both real and synthetic data. We feel this is important to show, as it exercises both the compute and input pipelines, and is more representative of real-world performance numbers than testing with synthetic data alone. For transparency, we've also shared our scripts and methodology.

Collected below are highlights of TensorFlow's performance when training with an NVIDIA® DGX-1™, as well as with 64 NVIDIA® Tesla® K80 GPUs running in a distributed configuration. In-depth results, including details like batch-size and configurations used for the various platforms we tested, are available on the benchmarks site.

Training with NVIDIA® DGX-1™ (8 NVIDIA® Tesla® P100s)

Our benchmarks show that TensorFlow has nearly linear scaling on an NVIDIA® DGX-1™for training image classification models with synthetic data. With 8 NVIDIA Tesla P100s, we report a speedup of 7.99x (99% efficiency) for InceptionV3 and 7.91x (98% efficiency) for ResNet-50, compared to using a single GPU.
The following are results comparing training with synthetic and real data. The benchmark results show a small difference between training data placed statically on the GPU (synthetic) and executing the full input pipeline with data from ImageNet. One strength of TensorFlow is the ability of its input pipeline to saturate state-of-the-art compute units with large inputs.




Training with NVIDIA® Tesla® K80 (Single server, 8 GPUs)

With 8 NVIDIA® Tesla® K80s in a single-server configuration, TensorFlow has a 7.4x speedup on Inception v3 (93% efficiency) and a 7.4x speedup on ResNet-50, compared to a single GPU. For this benchmark, we used Google Compute Engine instances.

Distributed Training with NVIDIA® Tesla® K80 (up to 64 GPUs)

With 64 Tesla K80s running on Amazon EC2 instancesin a distributed configuration, TensorFlow has a 59x speedup (92% efficiency) for InceptionV3 and a 52x speedup (82% efficiency) for ResNet-50 using synthetic data.

Discussion

During our testing of the DGX-1 and other platforms, we explored a variety of configurations using NCCL, a collective communications library, part of the NVIDIA Deep Learning SDK. Our hypothesis before testing began was that replicating the variables across GPUs and syncing them with NCCL would be the optimal approach. The results were not always as expected. Optimal configurations varied depending not only on the GPU, but also on the platform and model tested. On the DGX-1, for example, VGG16 and AlexNet performed best when replicating the variables on each of the GPUs and updating them using NCCL, while InceptionV3 and ResNet performed best when placing the shared variable on the CPU. These intricacies highlight the need for comprehensive benchmarking. Models have to be tuned for each platform, and a one size fits all approach is likely to result in suboptimal performance in many cases.

To get peak performance, it is necessary to benchmark with a mix of settings to determine which ones are likely to perform best on each platform. The script that accompanies the article on creating High-Performance Models was created not only to illustrate how to achieve the highest performance, but also as a tool to benchmark a platform with a variety of settings. The benchmarks page lists the configurations that we found which provided optimal performance for the platforms tested.

As many people have pointed out in response to various benchmarks that have been performed on other platforms, increases to samples per second does not necessarily correlate to faster convergence, and as batch sizes increase it can be more difficult to converge to the highest accuracy levels.

As a team, we hope to do future tests that focus on time to convergence to high levels of accuracy. We hope these numbers and the guide will prove useful to you as you tune your code for performance.

We'd like to thank NVIDIA for sharing a DGX-1 for benchmark testing and for their technical assistance. We're looking forward to NVIDIA's upcoming Voltaarchitecture, and to working closely with them to optimize TensorFlow's performance there, and to expand support for FP16.

Thanks for reading, and as always, we look forward to working with you on forums like GitHub issues, Stack Overflow, the [email protected]list, and @TensorFlow.