Book Image

Mastering Android Application Development

By : Antonio Pachon
Book Image

Mastering Android Application Development

By: Antonio Pachon

Overview of this book

There are millions of Android apps out there for people to download – how do you make sure yours has the edge? It’s not always about innovation and ideas – the most successful apps are those that are able to satisfy customer demands – they’re the ones that look the best, the fastest, and the easiest and most intuitive to use. This book shows you how to create Android applications that do precisely that – it has been designed help you consider and answer those questions throughout the development process, so you can create applications that stand out against the crowd. Learn how to create exemplary UIs that contribute to a satisfying user experience through the lens of Material Design, and explore how to harness the range of features within the Android SDK to help you. Dive deeper into complex programming concepts and discover how to leverage concurrency and navigate memory management and image handling. You’ll also find further guidance on testing and debugging so you can guarantee that your application is reliable and robust for users. Beyond this you’ll find out how to extend your app and add greater functionality, including notifications, location services, adverts and app billing (essential if you want to properly monetize your creation!). To make sure you have confidence at every stage in the process, the book also shows you how to release your app to the Play store – to make sure your maximising your efforts to create a popular Android application!
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Android Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Memory management


Every Java developer has heard of the garbage collector (GC); this is a mechanism that automatically frees the resources in memory for us. On some occasions, we can prevent the garbage collector from freeing some resources; if the resources keep growing, we will inevitably see OutOfMemoryError.

If this happens, we need to locate the leak and then stop it. In this section, we will take a look at how to locate the source of the problem and a series of good practices to prevent this from happening.

This is not something to look into only when an error has occurred; our app might have leaks, not big enough to be detected with a quick test, that can lead to an error in a device with a smaller memory heap. Therefore, it's good to do a quick check on the memory levels before releasing an app.

Detecting and locating leaks

Android Studio provides a quick way to check the memory status. At the bottom window, you will find a tab called Memory next to logcat and the ADB logs.

If you click...