With more than 3 billion monthly active users, Android is the most famous and most-selling Operating System around the globe. It is believed that the android’s play store consists of more than 3 billion applications as of August 2020. Even with such stats, Android has faced a fair share of negative publicity, all due to myths revolving around its performance. As a professional Android app development company, we’d like to debunk some of these Myths for you today.
For Myth Busting, we’re going to use some real-life examples, some tools, and support facts to test these myths. Currently, there seem to be a lot of myths taking their turn when it comes to Android Performance. A lot of scripts are developed that claims to enhance the performance, battery life, and many other things. Some of them actually work, but some just create a placebo effect and may cause damage in the long run.
So, let’s take a closer look at some of the most common optimizations and check if they really work or simply a myth.
Swap
Swap is just absurd as even Android does not have a separate partition for swap. What is Swap you ask? Swap’s main feature is that it creates and connects the paging file, resulting in free storage space. It moves the data in memory that is not needed or is inactive by swapping and retrieves it back when required again.
However, this swapping doesn’t make any difference and may result in causing severe lagging. Moving this much amount of data continuously to and from memory results in increasing system lag issues considerably. Some developers claim that swap is making their system run faster, but it’s not the Swap, it’s the Android’s in-built lowmemorykiller that’s acting and killing the high priority tasks that aren’t active anymore.
Kotlin is Slower than Java Applications
It is presumed that Kotlin-based applications are slower and bigger than Java-based applications. Google converted its Drive application from Java to Kotlin, which included writing 16,000 lines of codes across 170 files. On its first startup, a speed check was performed and the result was 2238 ms, 2ms higher than the application made in java. 2ms is nothing and it didn’t create a subsequent amount of change in the speed.
In fact, Google officials claim that they haven’t seen any performance difference. Although, they did achieve the task with 25% fewer coding lines. Instead of slowing the application, coding in Kotlin gave Google a cleaner code base which is easy to maintain.
Setters and Getters are Expensive
A lot of developers prefer using public fields instead of setters and getters for enhancing performance. Usually, the syntax code with getters and setters look like this, using getom as our getter:
Public class egClass {
Public int om;
Public int getom() { return om;}
}
egClass tc = new egClass();
Using the Jetpack benchmark library, we verified this code on a live device with the latest Android version.
Results: The getter version performs the same as the version of the public field. There is no difference in performance here. The code here executed after AOT or JIT compilation is the same. If you aren’t using Kotlin, you don’t have to break encapsulation practices. It is good to keep your data hidden instead of making them public just for performance.
Object Allocation is Expensive, Using Pools is Better
It’s been more than a decade since the inception of Android, according to research, Object Allocation in Android versions has improved significantly. Android relies on Object and Garbage Collection. Even the garbage collection of Android has improved on each release. As of today, the Garbage collection in Android has less to no impact on the applications’ smoothness.
So to enhance the applications’ performance, you conclude that the less garbage you create the less garbage collection will have to work. Therefore, rather than creating more objects, you start to create a pool of frequently used codes and then access objects from there.
It won’t show any difference between standard object allocation and pool allocation. Although Pool allocation might degrade the performance when it comes to garbage collection.
The myth here is whether to use Object Allocation or Pool as a solution. Both solutions don’t make any difference in performance, therefore, it totally depends on your project’s requirement, but keep the disadvantages of the Pool solution in mind:
● Higher memory footprint
● Require systematic pool implementation
● Objects that live longer in a Pool increases the risk factors.
Even after some disadvantages, the Pool solution can prove to be beneficial in large object allocation.
Wrapping Up
We’ve tried to bust down some common myths related to Android Performance. But we’ve also measured that some aren’t completely fake. Therefore, it is important to first test the technique before including them in your complex customization. There are numerous tools also available that can help you in understanding and deciding which approach works best for your application.
At Android Developers, a leading Android app development company, our developers like to follow an agile methodology and keep on benchmarking and measuring the credibility of the code before selecting them for optimization. Hence, our experienced team is able to offer a comprehensive range of Android Application Development services. Kotlin application development services, Application Migration, Android Application Maintenance, and Support are a few of the services that we offer. You can also hire android app developers as per your project requirement.
FAQs
Q1. How can I increase my Android Applications Performance?
There are several ways to improve an Application’s performance, writing cleaner code is one. However, if your application is complex it is better to seek a professional’s help or hire an android application developer.
Q2. Which tool is best for Android Application Development?
Whenever a conversation about Android Development starts, Android Studio is the first tool that comes to everyone’s mind. And without a doubt, it is the best tool for android application development. Several other notable tools are:
● Stetho
● Gradle
● AIDE
● LeakCanary
Q3. How do you monitor Android Application’s Performance?
We use several different tools that let us monitor the application’s performance during and after development:
● Raygun
● Pingdom
● New Relic
● Datadog
● AppDynamics, etc.
