Thousands of apps are launched on Google Play everyday. This makes the competition very tough for app developers.

It is common knowledge that creating Android apps are easier. However, in reality, there are too many tools to choose from to optimize your app. This makes it difficult to choose the most suitable one, which will make your app stand out from the rest.

In order to avoid getting lost in the multitude of tools, it is critical to get both enough visibility and high ratings. So, we discuss a few tools here which will help you in the process of optimizing your app to get better results.

1. Android Monitor

You can find Android Monitor in Android Studio by default. It is located at the bottom left corner of the user interface (UI) and has two tabs, namely Logcat and Monitors. The monitors contain four different graphs that you can use: Network, CPU, GPU, and Memory.

The Network graph displays the incoming and outgoing traffic in KB/s, while the CPU monitor shows the CPU usage percentage. The GPU monitor helps you understand how much time it takes to render the frames of a UI window and the Memory graph is used to determine the amount of free and utilized memory. You can also use Memory monitor to do Time Allocation Tracking, which can be started or stopped according to your convenience.

2. GPU Overdraw

GPU Overdraw is a helper tool for Android which can be activated from the Developer Options section when you enable the developer mode.

This tool is helpful in tracking overdraw areas in your app. An overdraw is a situation where the developer draws pixels on top of each other which affects the speed with which the app draws views on screen.

GPU Overdraw uses a color code to signify the results. For example, blue indicates one overdraw, green is two, pink is three, and red is four. The best scenario is when you see true color; however, a slight blue or green on your screen is probably fine. You should take some action if you see a lot of red, since it indicates that you have to work further on your app to reduce the overdraw.

3. GPU Rendering

The Developer Options section has another handy tool called Profile GPU Rendering. This tool helps you detect any skipped frames in your app. It provides a visual presentation of the time taken to render the frames of a UI window in comparison to the 16-minutes-per-frame benchmark.

When navigating inside this tool, you will notice a “On screen as bars” popup option. Selecting this option will show you some colored bars on the screen. When you choose your app, you will see the bars being updated as it interacts with the screen.

To determine if you are doing a good job, check whether the bars are getting smaller, since the smaller the better. Also, pay attention to the animations in your app and the smoothness of the scrolling action.

4. Hierarchy Viewer

This is a very effective tool for app developers as it helps to keep your app in shape. There is a chance that your app’s layout can cause a sluggish performance speed. But, this tool will help you debug and optimize your UI. It provides you with a visual of the layout’s View hierarchy, along with performance information for each node in the layout.

5. Google Location Services API

It is a common practice to ask for users’ location data in apps these days. For example, Uber, Yelp and restaurant apps always ask for this information. The Google Location Services API is one of the best options when deciding on a service since it has multiple useful functions.

While this tool is one of the best, you must keep a few things in mind when using it to optimize your app, such as only use specific location services when required. For example, you do not require the exact location when designing a weather app. Even if you only get the city or region, you can already provide accurate information much faster and without draining the battery too much.

These are just a handful of tools from the Android Studio that could be of some help. You can probe further to find more tools that will assist you in chiselling out a better looking and more efficient app for Google Play.