5 Crucial Tips for Better Android App Development

Share About Android-Every mobile application has its pros and cons. However, when an android application consumes a lot of battery and acquires a lot of memory space with a slow interface, it stands nowhere in the Google Play/App Store. These properties make way for the negative reviews from all the users and hence leads it into the list of bad and unresponsive applications, no matter if the design and idea are impressive. Product efficiency, battery consumption and memory utilization are the major concerns to determine the success of anandroid app development project. This is the reason why every Android application must be responsive, well-optimized and should run smoothly for the Android system to ensure its safety. We aren’t mentioning about the advantages of efficient coding as it is but obvious that the code needs to be framed well enough to stand any performance test. However, in order to run the application, even the most brilliant codes take time. With this blog, we shall guide you with helpful tips to minimize the time for an app to run with better android app development.

1. To Discharge Operations Onto Threads

For a normal app, all the operations run on the main UI thread by default in the foreground. Hence, with this, the smooth working of an app may be affected which in turn shall lead to the crash of the application, hangs, freezes or even other system errors. In order to strengthen the receptiveness of an application, one must always transfer the long-running operations, including the network based tasks and complex calculations, from the UI thread to a discrete background thread. This can be done by looking into the details at a class level. With the help of AsyncTask class or Intent Service class, the background work can be organized.

2. How To Keep The Application Responsive

An Android app development expert can easily carry out the above mentioned procedure to off-load the heavy operations from the main thread to a separate one. This shall easily save the users from the "Application Not Responding" (ANR) command. In order to initiate a background worker thread, one needs to extend AsyncTask and carry out doInBackground() method. Apart from the above mentioned process, one can easily create a HandlerThread class individually. However, one must keep a note of the fact that in case "background" priority for the thread is not specified, it may make the application extremely slow for the default thread priority is exactly like that of UI thread.

3. Best way to introduce queries on distinct threads

The data display may not be accomplished in an instance. However, with the help of effective android app development, one can easily secure it by the use of CursorLoader objects. This allows the interaction of Activity with a user with the query being processed in the background.

Through this object, an application can create a separate background thread for every query related to ContentProvider and can ultimately return the results to Activity where the query was called for, after the dismissal of the query.

4. Device battery life optimization

The applications that suck out the battery life of a device are always shunned by the users in anger and they can’t be blamed for that. The chief threats that are posed to battery life include:

• Consistent reminders for updates 

• Transfer of Data via EDGE and 3G 

• Analysis of textual data, regex without JIT

The above threats can be dealt with by:

• Letting your app to skip the steps and tasks in no connection area. The updates should be done only when connected with 3G or WiFi without any roaming. 

• Select the compressed data format like binary formats that join text and binary data into a single request. 

• The analysis should be well-organized and stream parsers must be chosen over tree parsers.

5. Optimization of Apps running in foreground

• The lowest level must always be selecting for the designing of wakelocks. 

• Utilize specific timeouts in order to take care of the battery costs because of the potential bugs that may have gone unchecked. 

• Keep the android enabled with the screen ON. 

• Along with Garbage Collection (GC), an android app development expert must recycle the Java objects manually. For instance, Matcher.reset (newString) for regex; StringBuilder.setLength(0); XmlPullParserFactory and BitmapFactory. 

• The mind synchronization issues are better off when they are driven by the main thread. 

• In ListView, the recycling strategies are to be used greatly.

Although the above mentioned tips may appear to be a practically small for the development, better results may pop up unexpectedly only after you consider these tips as a part of your daily coding. Through these, the process of Android App Developmnt can be comparatively simplified.

About the Author: The author is an expert software engines and holds good knowledge in the field of android app development. Through his blogs, the author aims to help people simplify their issues related to android apps development.

by DARREN NOGGLE