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

Getting started – setting up NDK in our system


Android Studio supports, from version 1.3 RC1, the Native Development Kit. Although still limited, it is still functional and will provide most of its users enough features and stability to carry on using it.

To set up NDK, we first need to download it into our system. At the time of writing this book, the latest version of NDK can be downloaded from http://developer.android.com/ndk/downloads/index.html. If a prospective reader cannot find NDK in this location, we encourage them to search Google for the location of its latest version.

When NDK has been downloaded, uncompress the ZIP file and move it to a location of your choice. The folder will contain something similar to the following:

Each package here contains some different data files:

  • The build folder contains all the tools and packages that are necessary to actually build with the NDK toolset.

  • The ndk-build is the script we will call to use NDK.

  • platforms include the required tools that we...