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

APK optimizations


When everything is done, the code is developed and tested, and users are waiting for an update of our application, we use it to build an APK file to distribute through the Google Play Store or anywhere else. However, due to multiple factors, the resulting APK file is forever getting bigger: new feature implementations, new, different configurations to support, new Android versions, more libraries used in the application, and so on. This way, we are forcing our users to use more bandwidth to update it and more storage to save it. In addition, there is a limit to the APK size that can be uploaded and distributed via the store. So, are we sure that we are doing well? What can we do to reduce the file size? Let's try to give an answer to these questions in the following pages from different points of view.

Removing unused code

High-level languages consider reusability of the code to improve development times and reduce debugging. It is also helpful to minimize the APK file size...