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

Debugging tools


We have seen different techniques to create our multithreaded application and when to use them. The right structure to use depends on a lot of various factors; it's up to the developer to treasure what we said and apply the appropriate framework in each case. However, our primary goal is to provide a fluid UI to the user, avoiding the Application Not Responding dialog, lags, and any obstacle to the correct execution of the UI thread. For this, Android provides some tools that we are about to see in the following pages.

StrictMode

We already dealt with this tool in Chapter 4, Memory, while talking about memory leaks. However, this tool can also help us find and notify threading problems.

To use it we need to know what we are searching for and how to be informed that a threading problem is occurring. For this, we need to set ThreadPolicy to the StrictMode class, using a ThreadPolicy.Builder class. This way we can be notified of the following occurring problems:

  • detectCustomSlowCalls...