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

Bitmaps


One of the biggest challenges with our application is to handle images in an efficient way because there are a lot of different perspectives that impact the resulting application. This is a particular topic that covers almost everything we discussed in previous chapters:

  • Bitmaps need to be in a layout to be displayed correctly. Hence, what we discussed in Chapter 2, Efficient Debugging, is particularly important here.

  • Bad bitmap handling can lead to memory issues due to leaks or because bitmaps are used badly as variables instead of being read when needed. Hence, Chapter 4, Memory, can be helpful to keep in mind key concepts while saving and reading large images.

  • Too many times, we try to process significant amounts of data coming from images on the main thread; we will use the topics discussed in Chapter 5, Multithreading, to understand how to handle bitmaps efficiently with no impact on user experience.

  • Most of the time, images come from a remote resource. We will discuss how to retrieve...