So we covered a lot today, but in this posting I decided to concentrate on improving the number of installs of your Android App, and bettering the stats of your website. In fact there is a common theme behind achieving both goals, and it all comes down to making life better for users – which should be no surprise.

The statistics that drive this advice are amazing. For example, for every 6MBs of extra size for an Android App, installs decrease by 1%. You may think this is an emerging market issue (lower connection speeds etc), but it turns out that it as true for all territories, even the US. Google also shared some stats which normally only they get to see. For example, even though users click the Install button in the Play Store, how many actually complete the download and install. Even for very small apps, the best that is usually achieved is 75%; but this drops to below 50% as the app size increases. Furthermore, users opt for smaller apps, even if they have a lower rating than other larger apps – so size actually gives rating a run for its money.

Google has an initiative called Android Go, which is a variant of Android designed for more modest hardware. The market opportunity for these lower cost products is significant, and again it’s not just emerging markets – they expect 50% of Android phones in the US to be Android Go devices.

So how is Google helping developers to make their apps smaller? The big news here at Google IO is a new distribution format/mechanism called Android App Bundle – it’s just one click for developers to use, and typically reduces app sizes between 15-60%. There actually isn’t anything that clever about the way it works, and is arguably how Google should have done it in the first place. But hey, they get to look good because their initial attempt (APKs) wasn’t very clever. There are other tips too, for example, graphics-heavy apps can use the WebP graphics format which gets extremely good compression ratios.

The same principles apply to websites. By now everybody should know that they need to do Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) and follow the PRPL Principle . But why? Here come some new stats that Google has gathered via CrUX and Lighthouse: the bounce rate for a website increases 53% if a web page takes longer than 5 seconds to load, 79% of shoppers who have performance problems don’t return to a site, conversion rates drop 7% for every 1 second delay in load time. So if a site is improved, what sort of improvements might you expect? Well Pinterest did some work to reduce their TTI (Time To Interaction) from 26 seconds to 5.6 seconds. The result was that they have a 40% increase in users who spent longer than 5 minutes on the site, user-generated Ad revenues were up 44%, Ad click-throughs were up 50%, and Core Engagement went up 60%.

To help developers with all the above, Google has launched various tools – too many to cover here. But one that caught my eye was that this cool feature which will estimate the increase in revenues you will achieve by speeding up your site. This helps decision makers assess their ROI when considering potential work to speed up their site.

That wraps up the second day here at Google IO – see you tomorrow