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


With the threading concepts in mind, let's go through the code to understand how Google has improved the multithreading framework inherited from Java and which API the Android platform provides to the developer to deal with the main problem of separation between UI thread and worker threads. We will also see what problems may derive from this and which solutions Android introduced during its development.

We will then deal with advanced techniques to manage main components and the AIDL and messenger for inter-process communications.

Threads

The standard Java threads are the base for the other frameworks we will see in the following pages. They wrap threads or runnables to achieve some platform requirements like the communication with the UI thread. They are still the lightweight solution for brief background operations that don't need to be notified to the UI thread.

Tip

As a general rule to observe, when using threads, avoid the synchronization inside loops because acquiring and...