Posted by the Android staff
Kakaonavi prides itself on offering quick, correct routes whereas providing a number of different useful options, together with instructions to the closest EV charging stations, automotive wash order companies, navigation information, upkeep reminders, and extra. As Korea’s prime rating driving assistant, Kakaonavi desires to make the each day driving expertise as simple as potential for its customers. Lately, that meant making its companies constant throughout units.
With an growing variety of folks utilizing massive display screen and foldable Android units, Kakaonavi noticed a must evolve its software to optimize the driving expertise throughout all display screen sizes and shapes. To do that, the Kakaonavi staff centered on establishing a high-quality person expertise for big screens by utilizing Android’s newest software program options.
Assembly the rising demand for big screens and foldables
Earlier than updating its app, Kakaonavi’s person expertise wasn’t tailor-made for big screens and foldables. The totally different sizes of units brought on the UI to be displayed improperly on them, which affected the person expertise as a result of display screen ratio and determination have a big affect on usability.
Kakaonavi additionally acknowledged that a lot of its customers most well-liked foldables as a result of they’re simpler to place in autos, permitting drivers to prop their machine on a dashboard or middle console. “The explanation we determined to deal with foldables is as a result of versatile show choices offered by them,” stated Jaesun Lee, Android developer at Kakaonavi. “Drivers can view the map nonetheless they like relying on how they fold or unfold the machine inside their automobile.”
 Moreover, some drivers, together with professionals like truck drivers and taxi drivers, use Kakaonavi with three to 4 different apps concurrently via Android OS’s split-screen mode. On the time, the Kakaonavi staff had solely established this sort of multi-window helpfor units with normal resolutions, resulting in a few of its customers experiencing UI points when attempting to run a number of purposes directly. |
Cohesive experiences throughout type components
Builders at Kakaonavi addressed these points by creating a typical UI for big display screen and foldable units. They wanted to make sure the UI was constant whether or not the machine was folded or unfolded, or in portrait or panorama mode. The UI additionally needed to work effectively whereas customers ran a number of apps on their machine’s predominant show. As a result of the power to show map and placement data on a bigger display screen is without doubt one of the advantages of those units, creating consistency throughout layouts was important to Kakaonavi’s success.
Utilizing ConstraintLayout, which lets builders create massive, complicated layouts with a flatter app construction, the Kakaonavi staff displayed a uniform, responsive UI whatever the display screen dimension or ratio. To deal with configuration adjustments which are frequent on these units, equivalent to resizing home windows or orientation adjustments, Kakaonavi’s builders overrode onConfigurationChanged().
Overriding onConfigurationChanged() ensured the app ran easily on all display screen sizes and through view mode adjustments by stopping the system from recreating UI components triggered by folding and unfolding a tool or opening a number of home windows. Manually configuring these adjustments to protect UI components, moderately than robotically deleting and recreating them, drastically improved the app’s UI efficiency for these new type components.
“For the reason that map and UI state are up to date incessantly by GPS, we determined that the app would carry out higher by responding solely to adjustments in display screen orientation and display screen dimension with onConfigurationChanged(), moderately than restoring the earlier state by restarting the Exercise,” stated Jaesun.
The Kakaonavi staff additionally used multi-resume to reinforce the app’s multi-window help for big screens and foldables. Multi-resume lets its customers hold a number of purposes in an lively state whereas on display screen, making multitasking extra handy and dependable.
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Optimistic outcomes and increasing alternatives
The variety of folks utilizing massive display screen and foldable units has grown considerably and can proceed to develop as extra of those units turn into accessible. At present, there are greater than 270 million massive display screen Android units in use, together with tablets, foldables, and Chrome OS units.
Kakaonavi has seen this identical development in units utilized by its customers. For the reason that model started optimizing its software for big screens in January 2022, its variety of month-to-month lively customers who use the app on foldables has elevated by 24.5%, and the corporate has acquired constructive suggestions from drivers utilizing tablets and foldables as their predominant supply of navigation. As of at present, Kakaonavi is optimized for all accessible tablets and foldables.
The Kakaonavi staff is worked up by the alternatives these new type components will convey by giving its customers extra methods to work together with the app. Wanting forward, the model plans to additional optimize its UI with Jetpack Compose and is already contemplating the right way to additional tailor its multi-window help to massive screens and foldables.
“There will likely be extra units with numerous display screen sizes and ratios sooner or later,” stated Jaesun. “That’s why we consider it’s vital to at all times present an optimized UI and meet the wants of customers’ incessantly altering screens.”
Optimize your app for all type components
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