Matt’s Tidbits #90 — All about dashboards (and another milestone!)

Last time, I shared some tools for automating common actions to help you focus better. This week, I have a few tidbits to share about dashboards.

Back in 2019, in my 2nd tidbit, I mentioned a handy tool — the Android distribution dashboard. Since then, Google has made some changes, and some of the helpful data that shows you installation percentages for different versions of Android is no longer there!

To clarify — the dashboard page is still there: https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards

But, Google has moved the information around usage of different versions of Android into Android Studio itself. To see this, simply create a new Project, and when you see this screen:

Click the “Help me choose” button:

Voilà! Now you can see this information again. What I like about this is that you now have easy access to this data when setting up your project.

However, I think there are still some areas for improvement (so if anyone reading this works for Google, please take it into consideration!):

• It would be nice to still have a webpage where this information could be found, so then one does not have to install Android Studio to see it.
• My top wish for the longest time (and I’m sure I’m not alone in this) is to see this install data broken out by region. Lots of the apps I have developed are only for use in the US, so I’d like to see the distribution of Android versions for just one country. As a coworker also pointed out, it would be additionally nice if there was a way to filter out the old instances of Android that are likely running as embedded tablets in exercise machines, etc.

Speaking of dashboards, I was looking at my blog’s dashboards on Medium and dev.to recently and realized Matt’s Tidbits had its 2 year anniversary back in January! 🥳

Here’s a quick view of the stats from the past year (and a comparison to the previous year):

• # of posts: 36 (down from 52, but hey — pandemic)
• # of “reads”: 3769 (up 297% from 1268!!!)
• Most read tidbit (939 reads!): #72 — Migrating from RxJava 2 -> 3

Thank you to all of my readers for your continued support!

For the coming year, I have some more posts on RxJava that I’m planning to write, and it looks like my next project will be using React Native, so expect to see posts about what I learn on my journey into the unknown! ;-) Are there specific topics you’d like me to write about? Let me know in the comments below!

Interested in joining the awesome Digital Products team here at Accenture? We’re hiring!