How Twitter used Doze in Android 6 0 Marshmallow to Improve Notification Performance

Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

In October, we published a blog post about how Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) works with Doze in Android 6.0 Marshmallow to bring performance and usability improvements to the user. In this scenario, normal priority messages allow the device to stay in Doze, while high priority messages take the device out of Doze. For a great example of this capability and best practices on Android, we’ve spoken with the engineering team at Twitter.

Twitter has researched extensively which messages should get high priority -- given that this priority can awaken a device in Doze. To meet their particular need, Twitter wanted Direct Messages to be delivered on high priority, where mentions would be at normal priority.

Luke Millar, Android Engineering Manager at Twitter commented "With Android M we have a greater ability to be good citizens when it comes to conserving battery life. This feature lets us specify which notifications will wake up a device in Doze and which ones wont. Normally, we tell GCM to wait to deliver push notifications until the next time the users phone wakes up. However, users expect to receive some push notifications immediately, like notifications for Direct Messages, so we set those as high priority. Its nice being able to specify when and how those notifications make it to our users."

To test Doze, Twitter’s engineers followed the steps outlined on the Android Developers site. These guide you to use adb commands to simulate doze on either a physical or virtual device. Following this method, Twitter was able to successfully test how their messaging priorities would work in a real-world environment.

One other best practice that Twitter used was in transmitting larger payloads, such as when delivering Twitter Highlights. In this case, they opted to pass metadata in the notification, which was then used to sync the application to get the requested Highlights. In other words, they didn’t transmit the contents of Highlights in a notification, instead triggering a sync mechanism to update the contents of the app.

For more details on using GCM with your app in standby environments, check out the documentation.
You can learn more about Google Cloud Messaging and how to use it for notifications in your Android, iOS and Web Applications at the Google Developers site here.

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Runtastic on Android Wear

By Austin Robison, Product Manager, Android Wear

Fitness apps make  great additions to Android Wear. Let’s take a look at one of our favorites, Runtastic. Runtastic is a fitness app that lets you track your walks, runs, bike rides and more. With Runtastic on Android Wear, youll see your time, distance, and calories burned at a glance on your wrist. You can also start, stop and pause your activity by touch. Tuck your phone away in a pocket or backpack and do everything on your watch.

Its challenging to build user experiences that really come alive on Android Wear because its such a new type of device. Runtastic does a great job of showing the right information and providing just the right controls on the screen on your wrist. Lets dig into some of the Android Wear platform features that Runtastic uses to make such a great user experience.

Voice Actions

Android Wear enables developers to launch their activities with voice. Runtastic responds to “Ok Google, start running” by beginning to track a session and displaying a card with your total time. This means you can start exercising without needing to pull your phone out of a pocket or arm strap. Android Wear is all about bringing you useful information just when you need it and enabling users to quickly and easily take action.

Responding to platform voice intents on Wear is as simple as declaring a standard intent filter to start an activity.  For example, to launch your activity for the “start running” voice action, add the following to your activity’s entry in your AndroidManifest.xml:

<intent-filter>

   <action android_name="vnd.google.fitness.TRACK"/>

   <category android_name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT"/>

   <data android_mimeType="vnd.google.fitness.activity/running"/>

</intent-filter>

Custom Cards

Once a user has started a run, Runtastic inserts a card in the stream as an ongoing notification to ensure it is ranked near the top of the stream during the activity. This card uses the setDisplayIntent() function to display custom UI. It provides quick, glanceable information, showing your activity time. Cool!

When the user swipes to the right of the card to expose its actions, we see some quick and easy to understand options; following the Android Wear style guidelines means that Runtastic has a familiar UI and feels like a natural extension of the watch. There are actions for pausing, stopping, and an action to see more details on the run.  This action launches a full screen Activity where Runtastic draws a completely custom layout.

You’ll notice this data updates live; Runtastic makes use of the Wearable Data Layer API in Google Play Services to synchronize data between the phone and the watch. Its an easy to use API for syncing data between your devices.

Background Services

When a user finishes their run, Runtastic presents them with a special summary card that appears only on the watch. In this case, the notification is generated directly on the watch by a Service. This Service uses the Data Layer to receive information about the completed activity from the phone to the watch, including an image of a map of the user’s run generated through the Google Maps API.

To show that information, the app uses Android Wear’s NotificationManager, which functions just like the NotificationManager on a phone or tablet, except that instead of creating notifications in the pull-down shade, they appear in the stream.

Runtastics implementation on Android Wear is a perfect example of how to take advantage of wearables to make something truly useful for users. For more information on these and other great platform features, please see the developer documentation.

For more inspiring Android Wear user experiences, check out this collection on the Play Store!

Posted by Mano Marks, Google Developer Platform Team

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