How to fix Slow Rendering (Android vitals)

Question

I have an app that is listed as in the bottom 25% in the new Google Play Console - Android vitals section for Slow Rendering. I am concerned of this because of such articles that seem to say Google Play may penalize your app in the Play Store rankings if you fall in the bottom 25%.

However, it seems impossible to improve this metric for my app. It plays music and has a SeekBar and TextView which is updated every 250ms as any music player would. I made the minimum basic program to demonstrate:

public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity {

    int count;
    SeekBar seekBar;
    TextView textView;

    Runnable runnable =
            new Runnable() {
                @Override
                public void run() {
                    textView.setText(Integer.toString(count));
                    seekBar.setProgress(count);
                    ++count;
                    seekBar.postDelayed(runnable, 250);
                }
            };

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);

        seekBar = (SeekBar) findViewById(R.id.seek);
        textView = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.text);
        seekBar.post(runnable);
    }
}

Full project here: https://github.com/svenoaks/SlowRendering.git

When I run this program on hardware similar to the Nexus devices, I get these results for a
adb shell dumpsys gfxinfo com.example.xyz.slowrendering command:

Stats since: 19222191084749ns
Total frames rendered: 308
Janky frames: 290 (94.16%)
90th percentile: 32ms
95th percentile: 36ms
99th percentile: 44ms
Number Missed Vsync: 2
Number High input latency: 0
Number Slow UI thread: 139
Number Slow bitmap uploads: 0
Number Slow issue draw commands: 283

This would mean almost all my frames taking >16ms to render, I guess due to the periodic nature of the updating. All other music player apps I have tested also have this Slow Rendering problem as far as I can see. I fear Google's algorithm ruining my app ranking, is there any way I can improve my score?

How to fix Slow Rendering (Android vitals)

2 Answers