Book Image

Android High Performance Programming

By : Emil Atanasov, Enrique López Mañas, Diego Grancini
Book Image

Android High Performance Programming

By: Emil Atanasov, Enrique López Mañas, Diego Grancini

Overview of this book

Performant applications are one of the key drivers of success in the mobile world. Users may abandon an app if it runs slowly. Learning how to build applications that balance speed and performance with functionality and UX can be a challenge; however, it's now more important than ever to get that balance right. Android High Performance will start you thinking about how to wring the most from any hardware your app is installed on, so you can increase your reach and engagement. The book begins by providing an introduction to state–of-the-art Android techniques and the importance of performance in an Android application. Then, we will explain the Android SDK tools regularly used to debug and profile Android applications. We will also learn about some advanced topics such as building layouts, multithreading, networking, and security. Battery life is one of the biggest bottlenecks in applications; and this book will show typical examples of code that exhausts battery life, how to prevent this, and how to measure battery consumption from an application in every kind of situation to ensure your apps don’t drain more than they should. This book explains techniques for building optimized and efficient systems that do not drain the battery, cause memory leaks, or slow down with time.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Android High Performance Programming
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Native Development Kit or how to develop with native code when needed


Using Native Development Kit (NDK) can mean sometimes the difference between a performing application or an application that just does its job. We will generally use NDK in the following contexts:

  • Use of existing C/C++ libraries: This is an obvious advantage, since you have access to powerful existing software such as OpenCV1, audio encoders, and so on.

  • Performance: For some critical inner loops, the marginal performance advantage of C/C++ over Java, especially before Just-In-Time compilation (JIT) is available in the Android compiler, may be a deciding factor.

  • To do something that the NDK allows that the Java API can't manage: Low-level operations close to the hardware, particularly to impact manufacturer-specific hardware, might only be possible through C/C++.

  • Obfuscation: Compiled code is somehow more difficult to reverse-engineer than Java bytecode. Security by obscurity is, however, not the ideal solution, but it can complement your already existing system.