Efficient Android Threading

Preface

Efficient Android Threading explores how to achieve robust and reliable multithreaded Android applications. We’ll look at the asynchronous mechanisms that are available in the Android SDK and determine appropriate implementations to achieve fast, responsive, and well-structured applications.

Let’s face it: multithreading is required to create applications with a great user experience, but it also increases the complexity of the application and the likelihood of runtime errors. The complexity partly comes from the built-in difficulty of execution on multiple threads and from applications that aren’t utilizing the Android platform efficiently.

This book aims to guide application developers to selecting an asynchronous mechanism based on an understanding of its advantages and difficulties. By using the right asynchronous mechanism at the right time, much of the complexity is transferred from the application to the platform, making the application code more maintainable and less error prone. As a rule of thumb, asynchronous execution should not induce more complexity to the code than necessary, which is achieved through a wise choice from the palette of asynchronous mechanisms in Android.

Although a high-level asynchronous mechanism can be very convenient to use, it still needs to be understood—not only used—or the application may suffer from equally difficult runtime errors, performance degradation, or memory leaks. Therefore, this book not only contains practical guidelines and ...