Images for Billions #4

When your Android app is doing the work of fetching images over a network, you can leave your users waiting if connections are slow. Two tips to keep things feeling speedy:

First, prioritize text data requests before images. This lets your user navigate past loading images that they don’t need anyway.

Next, display placeholder colors while fetching images. The palette support library lets you select a placeholder color block based on the requested image’s color balance, and set that as the background in an ImageView, so the look of your app stays consistent while loading images.

This is the fourth of five weekly posts we’re sharing on how to optimize images on Android and Web for billions of users. Check out our full lists of resources at g.co/dev/billions.

G+ Images post #1: https://goo.gl/6jZiVA
G+ Images post #2: https://goo.gl/uNn7hj
G+ Images post #3: https://goo.gl/IH3wQF

Pallet support library: https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/support-library/features.html#v7-palette

Here’s an example of using placeholder colors to show images are loading: