Developers that want to test whether their apps would cause hardware latency on Android devices can now use WALT Latency Timer to do so. It is a tool that has been used by Google internally for some time and the company has posted its source code on GitHub. Here’s what you need to know.
When you’re a developer, you’d want to give your users the best experience possible. Nothing is more infuriating for end-users than an app that lags on their devices. Certain aspects of the code could be causing delays in hardware response times.
This is something Google is looking into since instant response times makes users feel more connected to a device and it had been using the WALT tool internally to measure touch and audio latency in its Android products.
Walt is relatively inexpensive to build and Google has posted the source code on GitHub. The company hopes developers will test their own code using WALT to better understand and reduce latency on Android devices.
Google software engineer Mark Koudritsky explains:
“An important innovation in WALT (a descendant of QuickStep) is that it synchronises an external hardware clock with the Android device or Chromebook to within a millisecond. This allows it to measure input and output latencies separately as opposed to measuring a round-trip latency.”
You can read more about WALT over on the Android Developer blog.
[Via Android Developer Blog]
Comments
One response to “You Can Test Lag On Android Devices With The WALT Latency Timer”
Considering how slow Google’s own apps are to load and run on the Nexus 6P, I don’t think devs should use this if they care about their apps.