Android Development : Some of the best practices

Hi! After a modest number of projects I’ve decided to share with you some of the things that experience made me learn, I mean the hard way.

Here is the selection:

• Think twice before adding any third party library, it’s really a serious commitment
• Don’t use a database unless you really need to
• You can think about realm it’s really awesome!
• Hitting the 65k method count mark is gonna happen fast, I mean really fast! And Multidexing can save you
• RxJava is the best alternative to AsyncTasks and so much more
• Retrofit is the best networking library there is
• Don’t write your own HTTP client, use Volley or OkHttp libraries
• Shorten your code with RetroLambda
• Combine RxJava with Retrofit and RetroLambda for maximum awesomeness!
• I use event Bus and it’s great, but I don’t use it too much because the codebase would get really messy
• Package by Feature, not layers
• Move everything off the application thread, that’s can save you from ANR
• lint your views to help you optimize the layouts and layout hierarchies so you can identify redundant views that could perhaps be removed
• Use Gradle and its recommended project structure
• Put passwords and sensitive data in gradle.properties
• Use styles to avoid duplicate attributes in layout XMLs
• Do not make a deep hierarchy of ViewGroups
• Monitor power source and battery more data updates while charging? Suspend updates when battery is low?
• You can think about JobScheduler
• onLowMemory() it will be called when the whole System runs low on memory, not your App, so you can’t exactly avoid OOMs with it.
• Drain battery is 30% (image, animation, …), and 70% (Analytics, ads, maps, gps)
• Monitor connectivity and type of connection (more data updates while on wifi?)
• Use the Account Manager to suggest login usernames and email addresses
• Give your methods a clear name for what they are going to do
• The launch screen is a user’s first experience of your application
• Do not show the launch screen if you don’t have to
• Tests are great for performance: Write slow (but correct) implementation then verify optimizations don’t break anything with tests
• Keep your colors.xml short and DRY, just define the palette
• Also keep dimens.xml DRY, define generic constants
• In reality perfExternal is rarely used as an application on the external storage is stopped once the device is connected to a computer and mounted as USB storage
• Use StringBuffer or Stringbuilder classes when there is a lot of modifications to string of characters
• To avoid Memory Leaks :

1. Don’t reference View inside AsyncCallback

2. Don’t reference View from static object

3. Avoid putting views inside collection that’s don’t have clear memory pattern, you can use WeakHasMap

• FlatBuffers is an efficient cross platform serialization library, so use it
• Serializable it’s simple to implement, but in term of performance it’s really bad :(

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