Best Coding Practices for Android Development

Developing Android applications isn’t easy. There are a variety of tools that help greatly like Eclipse and Android Studio, but the majority of your code still needs to be written manually. Building an application is one thing, but optimizing it is a totally different story. Lets see, some best practices that should be followed to ease the development and debugging process, and now is as good a time as ever to get to know them a bit better.Androiddev (2)

If your journey with Android programming has just begun, this blog should definitely go onto your todo list.

Naming Convention

To create a convention for coding .Follow the standard convention like

  • Class Naming.
  • File Naming.
  • Variable Naming.
  • Code commenting.
  • Code intending.

Background jobs

AsyncTask and services are used for doing background tasks.AsyncTask allows to run instructions in the background and to synchronize again with the main thread . .AsyncTask should be used for only short running tasks.

Security and Privacy of Applications

  • Use internal storage rather then external for storing applications files
  • Use content providers wherever possible
  • Need to Use appropriate permissions for accessing different functionalities of device

Don’t Creating Unnecessary Objects

Garbage collector with pre-thread allocation pools for temporary objects can make a allocation as cheaper, but allocating memory is always more expensive than not allocating memory. Avoid creating short-term temporary objects as much as possible. Few more objects created mean less-frequent garbage collection, which has a direct impact on user experience.

If you are new to Android – Begin Here

Try using Static Objects

If you do not need to access an object’s fields, make your method static. Invocations will be about 15%-20% faster. This one also good practice, because you able to tell from the method signature that calling the method can’t change the object’s state.

Don’t Using Floating-Point

In Rule of thumb,Floating-point is about 2x slower than integer on Android-powered devices.

Beware of using Libraries

Ensure the External libraries you use in application only requires needed permissions and are not causing performance degradation.

Use Proper Input types for EditTexts

It’s important that you specify the input type for each text field in your app so the system displays the appropriate soft input method.

Example for Phone textbox..

<EditText

android:id=”@+id/phone”

android:layout_width=”fill_parent”

android:layout_height=”wrap_content”

android:hint=”@string/phone_hint”

android:inputType=”phone” />

Learn the Activity lifecycle.

You should have clear understanding of the Activity lifecycle when each functions are called.

You can read more about it here.

Conclusion

Mobile development is still a new frontier for developers and plenty of clients are looking for an Android developer to turn their idea into a tangible product. Whether you’re just starting out or are a seasoned pro, you should consider these and other best practices. And above all else, consider your users’ best interests when designing your code and interface. This will lead to a more efficient product and happier clients as you continue to develop apps in the future.