High Performance Android Apps

Foreword

For the majority of Android Developers out there, the concept of performance is the last thing on their minds. Most app development is a mad sprint towards getting features in, making the UI look perfect, and figuring out a viable monetization strategy. But, application performance is a lot like the plumbing in your house; When it’s working great, no one notices, or thinks about it... but when something’s wrong, suddenly everyone is in trouble. You see, users notice bad performance before any of the other features in your app. Before your social widgets, awesome image filters, or how one of your supported languages is Klingon. And guess what, users unhappy with performance, give bad reviews at a higher percentage than any other problems in your app. This is why we say that #PERFMATTERS. It’s easy to lose sight of performance as you’re developing your app, but frankly, it’s involved with everything you do; when users feel bad performance, they complain about bad performance, they uninstall your app, and then vengefully give you a bad review! When you think of it this way, performance sounds more like a feature that you should focus on, rather than a burden you have to put up with. But in all honesty, improving performance is a really tough thing to do. It’s not enough to understand your algorithm, you need to understand how Android is responding to it, and then how the hardware is responding to Android. The truth is, that one line of code can trash the performance of ...