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

Going deeper into the code


When we make developments in a particular technology, we generally program in a high-level language (such as C, C++, or Java) and later compile our code and resources into a file that will be executed in an independent platform. The process of compiling varies between technologies (Java has a different process than C++, since Java will run in a JVM). With more or less difficulty, code that has already been compiled can be "reversed" and accessed from the compiled code, which was generally unreadable, to something more user-friendly.

The following diagram shows how we develop applications in Android:

Here is the explanation for the above:

  1. Initially, we develop our application making use of the Android SDK and external libraries. Eventually, we also use NDK, which follows a different process of development and compiling.

  2. When our application is ready and we want to compile it, it will be compiled to be executed in the Android virtual machine. This will be compiled in...