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

Application.mk


The Application.mk file is also an existing file in our sample project. It describes the native modules required by the app, and is generally located under the yourProject/jni folder. As with the Android.mk file, there are a few variables that we can include here and will increase the functionality of this file:

  • APP_OPTIM: This is a very useful variable that can be used to decide the optimization level when the application modules are being built. It can be defined as release or debug.

    Basically, when the modules are compiled in the release mode, they are very efficient and provide little information for debugging. The debug mode, on the other hand, contains a bunch of useful information for debugging but is not very efficient for being distributed. The default mode is release.

    Some of the optimization that takes place in the release mode is the naming of variables. They can be renamed and shortened (here you can think of the same optimization taking place when applying ProGuard...