Android Development Tips for Faster and Better Performance

One of the trickiest as well as the most alarming problems that are faced while micro-optimization of Android app is that the app is designed to run on various types of hardware. Various versions of these applications run on various processors, which again run at different speeds. There are two fundamental rules of development that improve the performance of the applications:

• Avoid doing things that are not needed to be done
• Avoiding allocation of memory whenever possible

Evolution and improvement of mobile platforms generally involve improvement of responsiveness along with betterment of performance of the applications. Android, in this regard, is no exception. Android based smartphones or tablets are getting faster with every passing day. Yet, at times, applications still run in a resource-constrained environment. Hence, there is ardent need of developing a superior environment, for betterment of the performance. Here are some tips to do so.

Start with Better Coding Practices

This is the very first step to improve performance. The developers need to be good steward and use their common sense with logic along with algorithms that are tried and tested, and using design patterns that are standard and widely used, rather than using something that is not tried previously.

Keeping Blocking Operations at bay from the Main User Interface Thread

This is yet another step that is imperative for improving the performance. It is essential to keep the application as agile as possible, with a systematic use of a thread, a AsyncTask, IntentService, or a custom backend service to do all the ‘nasty jobs’. It will also be sensible to use loaders for simplifying the state management of the long loading data, like cursors. There is simply no point in making the application freeze or lag behind in terms of performance as and when some processing is being carried.

In case any operation takes too much time or absorb too much resource, it is better to get rid of that operation and carry out asynchronous performance, so as to ensure that the application in question remains responsive and the users are able to carry out their usual business. This is also applicable to operations like reading or writing to the disk, accessing the content provider whenever needed, dealing with database and internet, along with carrying out parsing or other similar types of tasks that are time consuming.

Using the Latest Android Software Development Kit versions, APIs and carrying out the best practices

This is yet another very important step. Applications are to be kept absolutely up-to-the-date, the latest features of Android platform need to be used. With the evolution of Android platforms, some features are dropped while some are added or replaced with better versions. The Core APIs goes through bug fixing exercises and face improvement of performance. Hence, new APIs such as loaders are to be introduced to help the developers come up with applications that are more stable as well as responsive.

Checking Out Strict Mode

Android API called StrictMode can be used to facilitate tracking down the violations that are made in coding practices. This API helps in identification of memory leakage. It also helps detect whether the application in question is trying to perform blocking operations that are lengthy. If so, that needs to be offloaded to the threads to improve as well as quicken the application.

Disabling or Minimizing Diagnostics and Debugging Before Publication

In case the development of the Android application takes more than usual to develop, that indicates the presence of some debugging or logging code in the application. These features take toll on the performance of the application, slowing it down. Hence, it is imperative that these features are either minimized or are completely disabled before the application is published for public use. You can get in touch with a custom android development company who can help you develop apps that are stable, scalable and secure.

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