If you’re reviewing an Android device (or developing a game) and want to benchmark gaming performance, there’s a new app we suggest you check out: TakoStats. It shows you an overlay with real-time performance statistics and can output all sorts of useful graphs!
The app is in public beta but seems to be nearing a launch soon. You have to unlock the app ($1.99/year or one-time $4.99) in order to collect data for sessions lasting longer than than 5-minutes.
I’m a big fan of how many items you can display in the overlay (the ability to display the layer name might be useful for developers who want to know what particular part of their app is janky), and also how many graphs it produces.
There are a few apps that are similar to TakoStats, like GameBench, PerfDog, and KFMark. I’ve used all of them, and there are two big advantages that TakoStats has over its competition.
- Price. GameBench & PerfDog are the most widely used in the industry (PerfDog is particular popular among Chinese OEMs, its owner WeTest is run by Tencent). Both are considerably more expensive. A free APK for KFMark can be found on the project’s GitHub, but it seems abandoned.
- Usage. All these apps essentially use shell privileges to access framestats/other info. GameBench, PerfDog, & KFMark require you to connect your phone to your PC to run a script (the former two do this automatically, the last one manually).
In contrast, TakoStats uses the Shizuku library (in fact, the devs of TakoStats are also the devs of Shizuku). The Shizuku service can be enabled on-device using wireless debugging. TakoStats also has a very modern interface, complete with Material You colors, a themed app icon, support for new APIs like the Quick Settings Placement API.
My one complaint with TakoStats is there’s currently (AFAIK) no way to export the data so you can graph it yourself. You can export data from PerfDog into a spreadsheet or just take screenshots from the desktop app/web interface on a much larger/wider screen. Same with GameBench.