How to Prevent Android Apps to lagging? This post is all about making a better Android app (no more lags!) and designing a user experience that runs smoothly. We’ll look at ways to make an Android application perform better. First and foremost, we must address one major issue:
- Why does the Android App take so long to load?
- What causes a latency in an Android app?
We’ll start with the theme that’s causing your app’s poor performance:
The Android Evil Tax: Garbage Collector!
The Android App’s poor performance is mostly due to frequent GC execution. In a nutshell, when the GC is operating, the actual app is not functioning.
So, when the Android App runs, it allocates many objects based on your code, and when those objects are no longer referred to, the system calls GC when there is memory pressure to deallocate those objects, so if object allocation and deallocation happen frequently, the GC runs frequently to release memory, so the more the GC runs, the less time your app runs. As a result, the app looks to be slow. As a result, the user of the programme has a bad experience.
How Can I Make Sure My User Interface and Transitions Are Smooth?
The Android App refreshes its UI every 16ms for seamless UI rendering (assuming 60FPS -> 1000ms/60 = 16.67ms16ms). As a result, if the GC is active at that time, the app is unable to refresh the UI, causing a few frames to be missed, giving the appearance that the app is slow. The true reason for this is that the GC was running or that work on the main thread was being done too rapidly, preventing the app from rendering its UI smoothly.
Another reason might be that the programme is doing too much on the main thread, and if any method/task takes longer than 16–18ms, the app will be unable to refresh the UI, resulting in a lag.
Geek4Geeks Tip: The system tries to update the UI every 16–18 milliseconds.
What if the task on our main thread takes more than 16 milliseconds? Assume our task takes 26 milliseconds. The user interface is being refreshed by the system, but it is not yet ready. Nothing will be updated as a consequence. As a result, rather than 16ms, the UI was refreshed after 32ms. There is a frame that is missing.
Even if one frame is missing, there will be no smooth motion. For the user, it will be slow. These are the factors that contribute to the Android App’s bad performance.
What Can You Do to Get Better?
To make the most of it, we must focus on the following:
- Cut down on the amount of time it takes for the GC to run.
- Don’t do much on the main thread.
- In Android, use alternate threads and threads.
The following are some suggestions for improving performance.
- ArrayMap and SparseArray should be used. This article will show why and when you should use ArrayMap and SparseArray in your Android apps.
- Don’t allocate an object too early; instead, just allocate it when it’s required. Make use of the lazy initialization technique.
- An object should not be allocated if it is not required.
- Work that is too heavy for the main thread should be avoided. Make a backdrop thread for it.
- Use the concept of object pools to prevent memory churn. Click here to learn more about the bitmap pool.
- Avoid using Auto-Boxing since Integer, Boolean, and other memory-intensive classes like Integer consume more memory; instead, use int wherever possible instead of Integer.
- Use static final for constants.
- Avoid utilising internal getters/setters wherever feasible (direct field access is 3x faster)
- In inner classes, contexts should not be leaked.
- Static inner classes should be preferred over non-static inner classes.
- Use LRU cache for the bitmap to avoid redundant bitmap decoding; this reduces GC calls.
- Use StrictMode in Android Development to find things you did by accident, such as an accidental disc or network access, or a database query on the application’s main thread.
- Use GPU Rendering Profiles: It shows how long it takes to render the frames of a UI window in contrast to the 16ms benchmark in real time.
Finally, don’t assign an excessive amount of items.