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

Best practices


Now that we know what can happen in memory while our application is active, let's examine what we can do to avoid memory leaks and memory churns and optimize our memory management in order to reach our performance target, not just in memory usage, but in garbage collection attendance, because, as we know, it stops any other operation from working.

In the following pages, we will go through a lot of hints and tips using a bottom-up strategy: starting from low-level shrewdness in Java code to highest-level Android practices.

Data types

We weren't joking: we are really talking about Java primitive types, as they are the foundation of all the applications and it's really important to know how to deal with them, even though it may be obvious. It's not, and we will soon understand why.

Java provides primitive types that need to be saved in memory when used: the system allocates an amount of memory related to the amount requested for that particular type. The following are Java primitive...