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

Walkthrough


Before starting the discussion about how to improve and profile our code, it's really important to understand how Android devices handle memory. Then, in the following pages we will analyze differences between the runtimes that Android uses, we will learn more about garbage collection, understand memory leaks and memory churns, and how Java handles object references.

How memory works

Have you ever thought about how a restaurant works? Let's think about it for a while: when new groups of customers get into the restaurant there's a waiter ready to search for a place to allocate them. But the restaurant is a limited space. So, there is a need to free tables when possible: that's why, when a group has finished eating, another waiter cleans and prepares the table for other groups to use. The first waiter has to find the table with the right number of seats for every new group. Then, the second waiter's task should be fast and shouldn't hinder or block the others' tasks. Another important...