by Carl Harroch and Tim Craven
As if our rebrand wasn’t enough excitement for one month, October also saw the much-anticipated return of Londroid – London’s biggest community of Android developers – with huge thanks to our generous hosts and providers of pizza, Deliveroo.
It felt brilliant to be back, to welcome two excellent speakers and share the Android love by raffling off tickets to join us at Droidcon London 2022.
A huge thank you to everyone who came along and made our Londroid return such a brilliant night. And if you couldn’t make it this time, join the Londroid: The London Android Community Meetup to make sure you don’t miss the next one.
Here’s a round-up of the talks and takeaways (Deliveroo pun intended) from the night.
Novoda’s Mission: Mobile-First Mastery
‘Mobile-First Mastery’ is our buzz phrase for 2023. It means we’re on a mission to support businesses to put mobile first in their digital strategy.
Native apps account for 89% of mobile internet usage and 83% of people expect a flawless experience across all devices. There’s no denying it: the businesses that succeed will be the ones that put mobile first.
With the growth of mobile-native businesses like Deliveroo and Monzo, people are becoming increasingly used to managing their money, shopping, and leisure through apps. And if businesses selling online products and services fail to make the transition to mobile, delivering a user experience on par with mobile-native brands, it’s likely they won’t survive.
We don’t want that to happen. As a community, we mobile engineers need to be generous with our knowledge, educate businesses and tech leaders, and focus on supporting our organisations and clients to deliver exceptional mobile experiences.
The two biggest challenges we see businesses face in their mobile strategy are:
- There’s not enough knowledge sharing across industries – by creating opportunities to share insights and learn from each others’ mistakes, we can learn faster and make smarter choices for our organisations and clients
- Businesses don’t know how much budget they need to invest in mobile – we need to educate people about time, resources, priorities, tech stack, skill sets and costs to help them make the right choices at the right time
In future Londroid events, we’ll be focusing on these challenges and working together to find solutions.
Why Testing is Vital for Mobile-First Mastery
This month’s Londroid event focused on a vital element of mobile-first mastery: testing.
We received 2 excellent talks. The first was from Android Software Engineer Dmytro Shuba and the second was from Deliveroo’s team of Ed Harker, Connie Reinholdsson and Jamie Adkins.
Guide to testing in Jetpack Compose
An active user and big fan of Jetpack Compose, Dmytro Shuba provided a great introduction to testing using Jetpack Compose UI.
When it comes to mobile products, the quality of your user experience can be make or break. To be confident that your user journey is seamless, you’ll need an advanced level of testing – which Jetpack Compose can provide.
What’s more, if your team is spending all their time fixing bugs because your testing was ineffective, then you’ll struggle to scale quickly – or you won’t scale at all. Ingraining a strong testing culture is critical for success.
Watch Dymtro’s talk in full
Why You Should Run A/B Tests in Your Android Apps
Mobile-first masters, Deliveroo are always running in-app A/B tests – and they sometimes return unexpected results.
[NAME AND JOB TITLE] from the Deliveroo Engineering Team delivered a brilliant, interactive tour of their most interesting A/B tests and asked us to vote on which one we thought would be more successful before revealing the result.
The most interesting test was when they changed their pricing structure from one membership tier to three, and initially, people couldn’t downgrade within the app. So, they created an in-app test that would allow people to downgrade their subscription more easily – and surprisingly, it drove more people to upgrade!
Running tests like this which respond to user requests – and being curious about the result – ultimately delivers a better user experience, more customers and faster growth.
Watch Deliveroo’s talk in full:
Get involved in the Londroid community
If you are interested in speaking or hosting Londroid please get in touch via the below form.
