You can watch all the videos on the Droidcon Paris Youtube channel but I especially recommend these 3 talks.

Scaling Android Development at Twitter

Scaling Android Development at Twitter

This talk by Jan Chong, engineering manager at Twitter for Android, was about how Twitter’s mobile team transitioned from a 5-people team to a 70+ contributors effort. Here are some key points from the talk.

You can watch it here.

Operations

  • In 3 years, Twitter for Android went from a 8 to 12 weeks release schedule to 1 release a week
  • The key quality indicator they’re following are crashed : they analyzed that when a user experienced a crash, his engagement would drop significantly for the next month (of course, they use Crashlytics, that they own)
  • API released for mobiles need to be supported for a loooooong time
  • They baked an API mechanism to support A/B testing within their apps that does not require republishing
  • They also have an interesting feature switch system where they remotely control a device/manufacturer/OS version matrix to swith features on and off, again to be able to tune their apps and avoir crashes without the need to republish

Tools and processes

  • They’re using Gradle and Android Studio
  • Twitter practice dogfooding
  • They switched from Robotium to Espresso
  • They also use uiautomator
  • They use a release train schedule to run their and transitioned from a single 4-week train to two concurrent 2-weeks trains to reduce the gap between deadlines
  • They also use a “+1/+2” code review system

How Open Source Powers Facebook on Android, by Simon Stewart

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Petit Design pour Grande Humanité, by Geoffrey Dome

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