Annotation In a virtual sea of Android apps, the key to survival in the form of user engagement, referrals and purchases is simple: performance and perceived speed. But building a high performance app isn't easy in a fast-paced and rapidly changing environment where new devices, platforms and development tools are announced almost daily. This practical guide provides tools and tips that will help you take app performance to a new level.
Build fast and efficient Android apps that run as reliably as clockwork in a multi-device world About This Book Wide coverage of various topics that help in developing optimal applications Explore the concepts of Advanced Native Coding in depth A must-have for professional-standard Android developers for whom performance failures and the sloppy use of resources are simply unacceptable Who This Book Is For This book is aimed at developers with an advanced knowledge of Android and who want to test their skills and learn new techniques to increase the performance of their applications. We assume they are comfortable working with the entire Android SDK, and have been doing it for a few years. They need to be familiar with frameworks such as NDK to use native code, which is crucial for app performance What You Will Learn Create Android applications that squeeze the most from the limited resource capacity of devices Swap code that isn't performing Efficient memory management by identifying problems such as leaks Reap the benefits of multithreaded and asynchronous programming Maximize the security and encryption mechanisms natively provided by Android Perform efficient network operations and techniques to retrieve data from servers Master the NDK to write native code that can perform faster operations In Detail 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. Style and approach The book follows a tutorial-based approach to take the reader from the basic fundamentals of debugging to advanced performance-improvement concepts.
Optimize the performance of your mobile websites and webapps to the extreme. With this hands-on book, veteran mobile and web developer Maximiliano Firtman demonstrates which aspects of your site or app slow down the user’s experience, and what you can do to achieve lightning-fast performance. There’s much at stake: if you want to boost your app’s conversion rate, then tackling performance issues is the best way to start. Learn tools and techniques for working with responsive web design, images, the network layer, and many other ingredients—plus the metrics to check your progress. Ideal for web developers and web designers with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and HTTP experience, this is your guide to superior mobile web performance. You’ll dive into: Emulators, simulators, and other tools for measuring performance Basic web performance concepts, including metrics, charts, and goals How to get real data from mobile browsers on your real networks APIs and specs for measuring, tracking and improving web performance Insights and tricks for optimizing the first view experience Ways to optimize post-loading experiences and future visits Responsive web design and its performance challenges Tips for extreme performance to achieve best conversion rates How to work with web views inside native apps
Now that more people spend more time interacting with mobile apps than with their desktop counterparts, you need to think about your iOS app's performance the moment you write your first line of code. This practical hands-on guide shows you how. Through specific and concise tips for designing and optimizing your apps, author Gaurav Vaish provides solutions to many common performance scenarios, including reusable code that you can put to work right away.
Multithreading is essential if you want to create an Android app with a great user experience, but how do you know which techniques can help solve your problem? This practical book describes many asynchronous mechanisms available in the Android SDK, and provides guidelines for selecting the ones most appropriate for the app you’re building. Author Anders Goransson demonstrates the advantages and disadvantages of each technique, with sample code and detailed explanations for using it efficiently. The first part of the book describes the building blocks of asynchronous processing, and the second part covers Android libraries and constructs for developing fast, responsive, and well-structured apps. Understand multithreading basics in Java and on the Android platform Learn how threads communicate within and between processes Use strategies to reduce the risk of memory leaks Manage the lifecycle of a basic thread Run tasks sequentially in the background with HandlerThread Use Java’s Executor Framework to control or cancel threads Handle background task execution with AsyncTask and IntentService Access content providers with AsyncQueryHandler Use loaders to update the UI with new data
Android Programming Unleashed is the most comprehensive and technically sophisticated guide to best-practice Android development with today's powerful new versions of Android: 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and 4.0.3 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Offering the exceptional breadth and depth developers have come to expect from the Unleashed series, it covers everything programmers need to know to develop robust, high-performance Android apps that deliver a superior user experience. Leading developer trainer Bintu Harwani begins with basic UI controls, then progresses to more advanced topics, finally covering how to develop feature rich Android applications that can access Internet-based services and store data. He illuminates each important SDK component through complete, self-contained code examples that show developers the most effective ways to build production-ready code. Coverage includes: understanding the modern Android platform from the developer's standpoint... using widgets, containers, resources, selection widgets, dialogs, and fragments... supporting actions and persistence... incorporating menus, ActionBars, content providers, and databases... integrating media and animations... using web, map, and other services... supporting communication via messaging, contacts, and emails... publishing Android apps, and much more.
Android on x86: an Introduction to Optimizing for Intel® Architecture serves two main purposes. First, it makes the case for adapting your applications onto Intel’s x86 architecture, including discussions of the business potential, the changing landscape of the Android marketplace, and the unique challenges and opportunities that arise from x86 devices. The fundamental idea is that extending your applications to support x86 or creating new ones is not difficult, but it is imperative to know all of the technicalities. This book is dedicated to providing you with an awareness of these nuances and an understanding of how to tackle them. Second, and most importantly, this book provides a one-stop detailed resource for best practices and procedures associated with the installation issues, hardware optimization issues, software requirements, programming tasks, and performance optimizations that emerge when developers consider the x86 Android devices. Optimization discussions dive into native code, hardware acceleration, and advanced profiling of multimedia applications. The authors have collected this information so that you can use the book as a guide for the specific requirements of each application project. This book is not dedicated solely to code; instead it is filled with the information you need in order to take advantage of x86 architecture. It will guide you through installing the Android SDK for Intel Architecture, help you understand the differences and similarities between processor architectures available in Android devices, teach you to create and port applications, debug existing x86 applications, offer solutions for NDK and C++ optimizations, and introduce the Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager. This book provides the most useful information to help you get the job done quickly while utilizing best practices.
Mobile Applications Development with Android: Technologies and Algorithms presents advanced techniques for mobile app development, and addresses recent developments in mobile technologies and wireless networks. The book covers advanced algorithms, embedded systems, novel mobile app architecture, and mobile cloud computing paradigms. Divided into three sections, the book explores three major dimensions in the current mobile app development domain. The first section describes mobile app design and development skills, including a quick start on using Java to run an Android application on a real phone. It also introduces 2D graphics and UI design, as well as multimedia in Android mobile apps. The second part of the book delves into advanced mobile app optimization, including an overview of mobile embedded systems and architecture. Data storage in Android, mobile optimization by dynamic programming, and mobile optimization by loop scheduling are also covered. The last section of the book looks at emerging technologies, including mobile cloud computing, advanced techniques using Big Data, and mobile Big Data storage. About the Authors Meikang Qiu is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Pace University, and an adjunct professor at Columbia University. He is an IEEE/ACM Senior Member, as well as Chair of the IEEE STC (Special Technical Community) on Smart Computing. He is an Associate Editor of a dozen of journals including IEEE Transactions on Computers and IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing. He has published 320+ peer-reviewed journal/conference papers and won 10+ Best Paper Awards. Wenyun Dai is pursuing his PhD at Pace University. His research interests include high performance computing, mobile data privacy, resource management optimization, cloud computing, and mobile networking. His paper about mobile app privacy has been published in IEEE Transactions on Computers. Keke Gai is pursuing his PhD at Pace University. He has published over 60 peer-reviewed journal or conference papers, and has received three IEEE Best Paper Awards. His research interests include cloud computing, cyber security, combinatorial optimization, business process modeling, enterprise architecture, and Internet computing. .
While there is a lot of appreciation for backend and distributed systems challenges, there tends to be less empathy for why mobile development is hard when done at scale. This book collects challenges engineers face when building iOS and Android apps at scale, and common ways to tackle these. By scale, we mean having numbers of users in the millions and being built by large engineering teams. For mobile engineers, this book is a blueprint for modern app engineering approaches. For non-mobile engineers and managers, it is a resource with which to build empathy and appreciation for the complexity of world-class mobile engineering. The book covers iOS and Android mobile app challenges on these dimensions: Challenges due to the unique nature of mobile applications compared to the web, and to the backend. App complexity challenges. How do you deal with increasingly complicated navigation patterns? What about non-deterministic event combinations? How do you localize across several languages, and how do you scale your automated and manual tests? Challenges due to large engineering teams. The larger the mobile team, the more challenging it becomes to ensure a consistent architecture. If your company builds multiple apps, how do you balance not rewriting everything from scratch while moving at a fast pace, over waiting on "centralized" teams? Cross-platform approaches. The tooling to build mobile apps keeps changing. New languages, frameworks, and approaches that all promise to address the pain points of mobile engineering keep appearing. But which approach should you choose? Flutter, React Native, Cordova? Native apps? Reuse business logic written in Kotlin, C#, C++ or other languages? What engineering approaches do "world-class" mobile engineering teams choose in non-functional aspects like code quality, compliance, privacy, compliance, or with experimentation, performance, or app size?
Google Android dominates the mobile market, and by targeting Android, your apps can run on most of the phones and tablets in the world. This new fourth edition of the #1 book for learning Android covers all modern Android versions from Android 4.1 through Android 5.0. Freshly added material covers new Android features such as Fragments and Google Play Services. Android is a platform you can't afford not to learn, and this book gets you started. Android is a software toolkit for mobile phones and tablets, created by Google. It's inside more than a billion devices, making Android the number one platform for application developers. Your own app could be running on all those devices! Getting started developing with Android is easy. You don't even need access to an Android phone, just a computer where you can install the Android SDK and the emulator that comes with it. Within minutes, Hello, Android gets you creating your first working application: Android's version of "Hello, World." From there, you'll build up a more substantial example: an Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe game. By gradually adding features to the game, you'll learn about many aspects of Android programming, such as creating animated user interfaces, playing music and sound effects, building location-based services (including GPS and cell-tower triangulation), and accessing web services. You'll also learn how to publish your applications to the Google Play Store. This fourth edition of the bestselling Android classic has been revised for Android 4.1-4.3 (Jelly Bean), 4.4 (KitKat), and Android 5.0 (Lollipop). Topics have been streamlined and simplified based on reader feedback, and every page and example has been reviewed and updated for compatibility with the latest versions of Android. If you'd rather be coding than reading about coding, this book is for you.
