Overview of Android Performance Patterns

Word count: 589Reading time: 3 min

 2015/04/19

Series Catalog:

On January 6, 2015, Google officially released a series of short videos about Android performance optimization titled Android Performance Patterns. This series is available on YouTube.

Android Performance Patterns Overview

Official Introduction:

Android Performance Patterns is a collection of videos focused entirely on helping developers write faster, more performant Android Applications. On one side, it’s about peeling back the layers of the Android System, and exposing how things are working under the hood. On the other side, it’s about teaching you how the tools work, and what to look for in order to extract the right perf out of your app.

But at the end of the day, Android Performance Patterns is all about giving you the right resources at the right time to help make the fastest, smoothest, most awesome experience for your users. And that’s the whole point, right?

In short, it’s a series of videos explaining Android performance. These videos are very short, typically between 3 to 5 minutes. The speakers talk very fast, which was quite a challenge for non-native listeners before subtitles were available. The good news is that these videos now have full subtitles.

While the videos are short, they are packed with information. A single sentence mentioned by the speaker might require hours of research to understand the underlying principle or how to use a specific debugging tool. This means the series doesn’t directly teach you “how to optimize your app” step-by-step; rather, it tells you what you need to know about Android performance so that you know which tools to use, what steps to take, and what goals to aim for.

Since I have been researching Android performance optimization topics recently, I watched these videos several times as soon as they came out. I immediately had the idea of translating/adapting this series into a blog series. After re-watching them, I realized that a mere translation wouldn’t be very meaningful. Every knowledge point mentioned can be expanded into a full blog post (or even several). Thus, this series of articles was born.

In each article, I will first list the knowledge points covered in the video and then explain them one by one. Some debugging tools might be detailed in separate posts due to their complexity.

Another person who inspired me to write this series is Hu Kai. His blog http://hukai.me/android-performance-patterns was among the first to translate this content into Chinese. His beautiful layout and high-quality translation helped the content spread widely. He is also the initiator of the android-training-course-in-chinese project on GitHub. I highly respect his passion for sharing. If you are not an Android developer or are not interested in technical details, you can simply read his overview for a quick understanding.

Below are some resources related to the Android Performance Patterns series:

YouTube Playlist: Android Performance Patterns
Google+ Community (Legacy): Android Performance Patterns

OK, let us start!!!

About Me && Blog

Below is my personal intro and related links. I look forward to exchanging ideas with fellow professionals. “When three walk together, one can always be my teacher!”