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

Chapter 5. Multithreading

When the mobile phone market started falling and the smartphones one boomed, it was clear that users needed a large computing capacity on a mobile device. The growing demand for calculation and the availability of suitable hardware has led to multicore CPUs on the devices, allowing parallel execution of multiple tasks. Android engineers knew this before it happened. Moreover, that is why we have many options to execute different tasks at the same time, with great flexibility and a lot of different components to choose to apply to our multithreading strategy. However, are we doing well? To answer this question, we will see all the threading facets, from the basics of threading Java framework inherited by the Android platform to all of the classes Android provides for this aim. We will also see how Android handles its processes and how we can correctly choose the right component to use in different situations, because not all of them are interchangeable.

It might seem...