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

Best practices


We will explain some useful approaches to achieve the previously set goals directly within the code to limit as much as possible the reasons why applications lag, exploring how to reduce overdrawing of our views, how to flatten our layouts, and how to improve the user experience—in particular, common situations and how to properly develop our own custom views and layouts to build high-performance UIs.

Provided layout overview

Every time the Activity.setContentView(int layoutRes) method is called or a view is inflated using the LayoutInflater object, the related layout XML file is loaded and parsed and every capitalized XML node corresponds to a View object that must be instantiated by the system, and that will be part of the UI hierarchy for all the Activity or Fragment life cycle. This affects memory allocation during the application usage. Let's go through the key concepts of the Android platform UI system.

As mentioned, every capitalized XML node in a layout resource will...