Being a good citizen

Being a good citizen means optimizing your app to improve performance and battery life, offering support for multiple languages and regions, and including accessibility support for users with disabilities.

Performance and battery life

App performance and battery life are major factors in the user experience of an app. Creating an app that loads quickly, and has a minimal impact on system resources and battery life helps ensure a positive experience for your users.

Planning for performance

As you develop your app, pay close attention to areas where you can optimize performance. Pre-linking libraries and resources, using QML efficiently, optimizing your lists, and using assets efficiently are just a few of the ways that you can improve the responsiveness and performance of your app.

When it comes to measuring performance, there are tools in the Momentics IDE that can help you do just that. The Application Profiler and the Cascades Profiler let you examine the overall performance of apps, no matter how large or complex, without following the source code one line at a time. You can use these tools to pinpoint areas of your code that could run more efficiently.

Extending battery life

If you plan to include features such as animations, sensors, location polling, or the Push Service in your app, following the best practices for the implementation of these features can have a big impact on the battery life for the device.

Internationalization support

Providing support for multiple languages and regions is another way that you can offer the best experience to your users.

Internationalization in your app

Internationalization involves developing an app so that it can be adapted to various languages and regions without changes to your code. The BlackBerry 10 OS offers internationalization APIs that you can use to include support for formatting numbers, currency, dates and times, calendars, and measurements in multiple locales.

Localization support

Cascades supports string localization using the standard Qt mechanism for translation. You can specify text to be translated, and use translation files to translate the text depending on the locale of the device. When you create a new project, a translation folder is created automatically in your project folder to hold the translation files.


Creating an app that can be used effectively by people with disabilities or impairments is another way you can be a good citizen. One of the most important things to keep in mind is that one size doesn't fit all.

The Momentics IDE has some tools that you can use to help make your app more accessible. In the QML Editor, you can specify whether you want warnings to be displayed if controls in your app do not have accessibility properties attached to them.

What's next?

Explore the more detailed documentation and samples. You have all the information you need to get started building your app.

Last modified: 2015-03-31


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