At Kudi, we believe that people of all classes should have access to financial services and seamlessly perform transactions. We make this possible through our agency banking network.
User Experience (UX) has become the word of the day. This refers to not only what your users are able to do, but how much effort it takes for them to get it done.
We have a large number of users who utilize our Android applications in order to carry out agency banking. Two questions are top of mind for us as an organization when it comes to our users:
Do they have access to the features that they need?
How easy is it for them to install or update our app on their devices?
Let's start with the second question.
Installing an application on a mobile device sounds straight-forward until you consider the fact that Android devices come in all shapes and sizes. Tecno manufactures an Android device with 500mb of RAM!
Some devices have memory constraints that cause their owners to hesitate when it comes to installing any app. How then do you get people to install apps? By giving them the smallest possible app.
The smaller the size of the download, the better for the user's bandwidth utilization. This is just a bonus point, but still an important one at that.
Answering the second question leads us back to the first question: how do we give them only the features that they need? Enter Android App Bundles!
The Android developer site defines App Bundles as follows: "An Android App Bundle is a publishing format that includes all your app’s compiled code and resources, and defers APK generation and signing to Google Play.".
App Bundles make it unnecessary to compile different versions of our agent banking app to suit various constrained devices. Instead, Google Play will "use our app bundle to generate and serve optimized APKs for each device configuration so only the code and resources that are needed for a specific device are downloaded ...".
We have built and deployed various versions of the Kudi agent app since 2018, and we have had to add various features over time. As a result, there are some things that not all of our users need. You could call them niche features.
The adoption of app bundles has yielded the following benefits:
a 7.2% reduction in our app size
less bandwidth requirement for app installs
less storage requirement
One of our engineers delivered a talk about Android app bundles at DroidconKE. You may access the slides here.
If you find our use of technology to be of interest and would like to join our team, please take a look at our careers page here, or drop us a note at engineering@kudi.com. Also, please subscribe to receive updates from us on new posts and job openings.
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