Programming Android with Kotlin

Chapter 12. Trimming Down Resource Consumption with Performance Optimizations

In the previous chapter, you became familiar with ways to examine what’s going on “under the hood” using popular Android profiling tools. This final chapter highlights a medley of performance optimization considerations. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, so it is helpful to become aware of potential performance pitfalls (and solutions). However, performance issues can sometimes be the result of many compounding problems that individually may not seem noteworthy.

Performance considerations allow you to examine concerns that may impact your application’s ability to scale. If you can use any of these strategies as “low-hanging fruit” in your code base, it’s well worth going for the biggest win with the smallest amount of effort. Not every section of this chapter will be suitable for every project you work on, but they are still useful considerations to be aware of when writing any Android application. These topics range from view system performance optimizations to network data format, caching, and more.

We are aware that the View system is to be replaced by Jetpack Compose: however, the View system is not going anywhere for years, even with Jetpack. The first half of this chapter is dedicated to view topics every project could benefit from: potential optimizations for the Android View system. The way you set up view hierarchies can end up having a substantial impact on performance if you are not careful. ...