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

WhatsApp – the eternal showcase of "no-gos"


WhatsApp can showcase some of the flags an application can present. A bug was reported in 2011, stating that communications within WhatsApp were not encrypted. A device connected to the same Wi-Fi network could access the communications between other devices. It took almost a year to get this bug fixed, a bug that was not especially complex to solve.

Later that year, a problem that allowed an attacker to impersonate a user and take control over his account was also reported. In January 2012, a hacker published a website that made it possible to change the status of any device with WhatsApp installed, if the phone number was known. The only measure taken by WhatsApp to fix this bug was to block the IP address of the website (as any reader can imagine, this is far from being an effective measure).

A big problem present for many years in WhatsApp is that the messages are stored in a local database. This was done in the external storage, which is the...