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Your Android app’s visibility in the Google Play Store can be just as important as building the app itself. Today we’re sharing a few tips to optimize your Android app’s Google Play Store listing and improve its visibility for users.

Of course, total installs and positive reviews are extremely helpful for your app’s visibility, but there are also steps you can take to ensure that Google’s search algorithm will prioritize your app as highly as possible in the search results.

Keywords in the Application Title

Use keywords in your application title. Google takes app title into account when ranking your app in search results, so adding a few relevant and descriptive keywords to your app’s title can help it rank higher. There are 50 characters (recently upped from 30) to work with, so come up with a name that succinctly summarizes your app. For example, the GrubHub Google Play Store listing’s title is not just “Grubhub” it is “Grubhub Food Delivery/Takeout”.

Keywords in the App Description

Use keywords in the app description. In the Google Play Store, description greatly affects your app’s ranking (unlike Apple’s App Store, which provides a separate keyword field and does not take the description into account when ranking). Repeat your chosen keywords several times in your description, but use them in a way that sounds natural (Google has policies against spamming keywords, see here).

Long-tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords refer to phrases that are specific enough to target users that are in the later stages of their search for an app. These users are more likely to find what they are looking for in your app, and thus are more likely to install. Long-tail keywords also face less competition than more generic keywords in search results. Think “local used car shopping” vs. just “shopping”. An app that helps users find used cars for sale in their area is more likely to show up in a search for “local used car shopping” than in a search for “shopping” because fewer apps are using that same combination of keywords. Keep this concept in mind when determining what keywords to include in your app’s store listing.

External Links

Use external links that send users to your app’s Google Play Store page. External links to your app’s listing cause Google to rank your app a bit higher in search results. You should encourage reputable sites, blogs, etc. to include links to your app’s store listing.

These few tips are easy to implement and are great options for optimizing your Android app for the Google Play Store. If you need help launching your Android App to the Google Play Store, let us know!

 

If you’re in the process of preparing to release an app into the Google Play Store, you may find these quick tips helpful.

Package Name

Before releasing your app into the Google Play Store, you should review and confirm your app’s package name. It cannot be changed once the app is released. The package name looks something like “io.oakcity.appname” and is your app’s unique identifier on the Google Play Store and on Android devices. For the most part, it is not visible to users, but it is in the URL for your app’s listing on the Play Store. That means a user may see it, but it also means it can affect SEO and your app listing’s discoverability. You’ll definitely want your app’s name included somewhere in the package name.

Discoverability

Discoverability of your app may be challenging at first. Searching your app by name in the Google Play Store may not yield your app anywhere in the search results right away. More installs, ratings, and reviews will of course help, but you should make sure your app’s description and all other text content in the app listing contains relevant keywords as well. There is a ton of content on the web detailing ASO/SEO (App Store Optimization / Search Engine Optimization), this post provides a good overview.

Automation

You can automate the process of uploading builds to the Google Play Store (as well as generating your apk, running tests, and a whole host of other things) with a tool called Fastlane. Specifically, the supply tool can be used to upload your apk to any track (alpha, beta, or release) along with store listing description and other text content, images, and even app screenshots.

When I think about automation, the first thing that pops into my head is a giant warehouse teeming with robots that scurry around, filling orders and shipping them off to fulfill the whims of internet shoppers. Something like this:

It’s not exactly the Jetson’s yet, but they’re getting there. And robots are cool.

But automation really applies to anything that can save us time, reduce errors and make us more efficient (which is code for saving money). The best targets for automation are tasks that are well defined, repetitive and common. In other words, chores that are boring, tedious and error prone. Fortunately for developers, we have plenty of these targets.

Our primary goal here is to automate the journey from code repository to finished product. A developer should be able to check code into the git repo and the system will build an installable product with no human intervention.

Benefits of Automation — Fast, Consistent, Correct

Let’s look more specifically at what automation can do for developers. At Oak City Labs, we build mobile apps and their backend servers that live in The Cloud. What sort of concrete things do we get from automation? We’re able to save time, ensure dependability and have confidence in every build. Automation creates builds that are fast, consistent and correct.

Saving time is the most obvious benefit of the whole process. When I have a bug to fix, I track it down and fix the errors on my laptop. Once I check that fix into git, I’m done. The automation kicks in, notices the change, runs through the build process and uploads the fixed app to a beta distribution service. Our QA folks get an email that the new app is ready to install and test. That whole process takes 30 minutes, but I’m free and clear as soon as I check into git. That’s 30 minutes of waiting for builds, running tests, and waiting for uploads that I don’t have to worry about or monitor. I’m on to tracking down the next bug. Saving half an hour a couple of times a week adds up, and sometimes it’s more like a couple of times a day. With those extra hours, I can fix more bugs and write more tests!

Less obvious than the time savings is consistency. Automation is codified process, so these builds happen exactly the same way each time. The automation always takes the same steps, in the same order, in the same context every time. Doing builds manually, I might use my laptop or my desktop, which are mostly the same, but not quite. Because I’m in a hurry, I might forget one of those simple steps, like tagging the repo with the build number, which won’t matter until I try to backtrack a buggy build later. With automation, we just don’t have those worries. Even better, I can go on vacation. Any of the developers on our team can build the app correctly. If the client needs a trivial fix, like changing a copyright date, it’s simple. Anyone on the team can update the text in the code repository and a few minutes later, a build is ready to test. Not only does the automation reduce the chances of human error, but it makes sure we no longer have to rely on a particular human to operate the controls.

Along with consistency, we also have confidence in every build. Consistency builds confidence, but so does testing and regimen. We build our software with a healthy dose of testing. As part of our automated builds, the testing ensures that the code behaves as we expect and that a change in one part of the code hasn’t inadvertently caused an error elsewhere. Of course we don’t catch every bug, but when there is a bug, we add a test to make sure we don’t make that mistake again.

Our automation is a tool we use every day as part of our development habits. It’s not a special task that’s only run at the full moon to bless our new release. It’s our daily driver, that reliable Toyota Camry we drive every day that always runs. It might need a little maintenance now and then, but it’s not your crazy uncle’s antique Mustang that only works a third of the time when he tries to take it out on a Saturday afternoon. This is really important when crisis mode comes around. Imagine if the app has some critical bug that needs to be patched ASAP. Because we have confidence in our consistent and correct automation, we can focus on fixing the bug and know that once it’s fixed, releasing the new version to users will be a smooth standard procedure.

Automation has been something we’ve grown to rely on in our development process because it make us more efficient and saves us time. For our clients, saving time means saving them money. We can get more work done because we can focus on the real challenge of writing apps and leave the boring tedium to our trusted automation. With the consistency and confidence that automation adds to our workflow, we can always be proud to deliver a top notch product to our clients. Fast, consistent and correct — automation delivers all three!

How the Magic Happens

So… automation is great and wonderful and makes the grass greener and the sun shine brighter, but how does it work? We’ve been talking in very vague terms so far, so let’s get down to the bits and bytes of how to put it all together.

For the last several years, we’ve been using a git branching strategy based on the excellent git-flow model. You can read all the brilliant details in the link, but the short story is that you have two long lived branches, master and dev. The master branch contains production level code that is always ready to release. The dev branch is the main development version that gets new features and maintenance fixes. Once a new feature set is ready in dev, it gets merged into master. This maps very nicely onto our concrete goals for automation.

Our projects have two deployment modes: beta and production. Beta is code from the dev branch. This is code ready for internal testing. For mobile apps, beta builds are distributed to QA devices for testing against the staging server. For server apps, beta builds are deployed to the staging server for testing before rolling out to production. Production mode is the real deal. Production mobile apps go to the app stores and to real users. Production server apps are rolled out to public servers ready to support users.

The automation workflow maps from git-flow into our deployment environments with the dev branch always feeding the beta environment and the master branch feeding the production environment.

The engine we use for our automation is a continuous integration server called TeamCity from JetBrains. It’s a commercial product, but it’s free for small installations. TeamCity coordinates the automation workflow by

  1. monitoring both master and dev branches in git
  2. downloading new code
  3. building the new version of the app
  4. running all the tests
  5. deploying to beta or production

If any of those steps fail, the process stops and the alarms go off. Our dev team is alerted via email and Slack and we’re on the problem like minions on a banana.

The last three steps are specific to the product type. For iOS, we use the wonderful Fastlane tools to orchestrate building the app, running tests, and uploading to either Fabric’s Crashlytics beta distribution service or to Apple’s App Store for production release.

We use Fastlane for Android, as well, so the flow is very similar. Beta releases go to Crashlytics, but production releases are shipped to the Google Play Store.

Our servers are written in Python and our web applications are in Angular. Testing for both uses the respective native testing tools, driven from TeamCity. For deployment, we use Ansible to push new versions to our beta and production clusters. We love Ansible because it’s simple and only requires an ssh connection to a node for complete management. Also, since Ansible is Python, it’s easy to extend when we need to do something special.

Since all of our build paths go through TeamCity, the TC dashboard is a great place to get a quick rundown of the build status across all projects.

With TeamCity coordinating our workflow automation and using tools like Ansible and Fastlane to enable builds and deployments, we’ve been able to build a system that is fast, consistent and correct, relieving us of the tedium of builds and letting us focus on the hard problems of building great apps for ourselves and our awesome clients.