Technical Insights from QQ Music’s Android Team on Adapting to Android 9 Pie

QQ Music, a popular music streaming service for nearly a decade, has continuously sought breakthroughs in its Android application.

The platform group leader, Abao, emphasizes that creativity, development, and platform support are three key factors for app improvement. Consequently, the team closely follows Google’s Android technology developments and integrates new system features into QQ Music to provide users with the latest experiences.

Shawn, an engineer on the team, was responsible for adapting QQ Music to Android 9 Pie. Starting from the first releases of Android 9, he and his colleagues tracked system behavior changes and new features, beginning the adaptation work in the DP2 version.

Support for full‑screen displays and native system notification styles allowed QQ Music users to immediately feel the platform’s evolution.

The team also noted improvements in Android Studio, such as a more powerful Memory Profiler that simplifies memory analysis, and real‑time monitoring of JNI‑level memory allocations, which streamlined memory‑optimization efforts.

To comply with Android 9 Pie’s background‑process execution limits, QQ Music re‑engineered its dual‑process architecture (foreground and background playback processes). By reorganizing data transmission and API calls between the two processes, the app not only met the new restrictions but also avoided unnecessary wake‑ups and retain‑alive actions, achieving up to a 50% reduction in memory usage in certain scenarios.

The team has been actively adopting Kotlin for new features. As a result, the average lines of code have decreased by about 25%, and the incidence of null‑pointer and similar exceptions has dropped by roughly 50%.

Overall, Android is evolving toward more robust, secure system behavior and lower power consumption. The QQ Music Android team has witnessed and leveraged these advancements, progressing alongside Android to deliver a better listening experience.

If you have an interesting Android development story to share, you are invited to apply through the provided link.