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

Summary


In the research to improve the performance of an Android application, memory is central and takes a leading role in the perception of our application by the users, despite being the most ignored aspect by developers during the development process. Every developer should spend some time checking the memory management of the application they are working on: there are many chances for memory leaks. That is why we focused on how Android garbage collection works, what the main causes of memory leaks are, and what a memory churn is.

We defined a lot of best practices to help maintain good memory management, introducing helpful design patterns and analyzing the best choices while developing things taken for granted that can actually affect memory and performance. Then, we looked at the main causes for the worst leaks in Android: those related to main components such as activities and services. As a conclusion for the practices, we introduced APIs both to use and not to use, then, other APIs...