Best 2 design decisions I made for my Android app

I published my first app for the Android ecosystem a bit over a month ago. It's a word puzzle game called Jumblee. There are 2 design decision that I made early on that have paid tremendous dividends and I believe are worthy of consideration for all Android apps.

The first was to include ACRA to capture any app failures no matter what Android version, and to post details of the failure including the stacktrace to a GoogleDoc hosted spreadsheet. You can configure ACRA to report silently or to present a dialog to the user and to capture a variety of information including a user comment. I chose a simple Toast notification and posting of the standard set of fields. I also configured the target spreadsheet so that I receive an email the moment it is modified.

Having ACRA embedded meant that I was aware the instant one of my users found the first bug (and believe me, no matter what testing regime you put in place, Android's heterogeneous hardware and OS environment will cause you to miss something). Before 99% of my users had come across the issue I already had a solution and a new version of my app ready for distribution.

Which leads me to the second decision that has paid back its effort ten fold. Its no use having a new version of your app that fixes a killer bug if no one knows the new version exists. So I built in a component that on startup hits my server to find out the latest version of Jumblee (you could probably have it ping the Market instead using the unofficial market-api). If a more recent version is available it displays a dialog letting the user know and asking if they'd like to download the new version now.

This has meant that my user's have kept rolling forward with new versions quite quickly and I'm not swamped with reports of bugs that have long since been fixed.

I know that the Android Market periodically reminds users about new versions of apps, but the timing of those notifications isn't clear to me, and when I'm confronted with a plethora of updates at once (especially when out of wireless coverage) I sometimes clear and ignore the lot. I'm more likely to accept a single update that is relevant to me right now and I think that is the same for my users.

Well, without these 2, I would have been in a world of pain trying to support my app, and wouldn't have as good a market rating as I do. Its not much of an investment for a heap of gain, so I'd heartily recommend you consider using both techniques.

Bon apetit.