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


The networking aspects of an application are the most challenging to face. Looking at the networking strategy of an application, you can find something that can be optimized from this point of view. For this purpose, we dealt with the UrlConnection API on Android to better understand what we can do with that, analyzing how we can use different network protocols, set different types of request methods, add extra parameters to requests such as headers and cookies, and handle compression in communications. Then, we went through an overview of the connection types available on the platform to know which speeds our application can reach in networking transmissions.

Then, the patterns discussed in the Best practices section are really useful when it comes to improving networking performance. The general principles to follow are:

  • Change what to transmit depending on the connectivity speed to speed up application.

  • Prefetch data to speed up navigation and reduce remote requests. It is even better...