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

Debugging NDK


Debugging source code developed with NDK is not as straightforward as debugging code that has been developed with the standard Android Java DK, but there are tools available for this platform. Android Studio provides, since version 1.3, some built-in tools to debug applications with JNI.

In order to prepare an application to be debugged, we need to modify our build.gradle script. As an example, take the HelloWorldJNI we have written previously. Open the build.gradle file of the app module and add the following lines:

buildTypes {
        release {
            minifyEnabled false
            {…}
            ndk {
                debuggable = true
            }

        }
        debug {
            debuggable = true
            jniDebuggable = true
        }
    }

A new configuration for debugging needs to be created. In order to achieve it, navigate to Edit Configurations, and select New Android Native in the drop-down menu:

When the configuration is released in the Android Native...