Introduction

This is an annotated edition of Android Performance Case Study Follow-up by Romain Guy. The first-person case narrative below belongs to the original author.

Technical review — 2026-10-13: The 2015 Falcon Pro 3 / Moto X 2014 case is retained. Android Device Monitor, which hosted Tracer for OpenGL ES and Hierarchy Viewer, was deprecated in Android Studio 3.1 and removed in 3.2. The old workflow is historical; an Android 12+ Perfetto workflow is added below. The original website could not be reopened during this review; the technical corrections use the linked official documentation and versioned source.

Case study

Two years ago, I published Android Performance Case Study to help Android developers understand the tools and techniques needed to identify, track, and optimize performance bottlenecks.

That article used the Twitter client Falcon Pro as a case study. Its developer, Joaquim Vergès, was kind enough to let me use his app as an example and quickly addressed the issues I found. Fast forward to recently: Joaquim was building Falcon Pro 3 from scratch. Before its release, he contacted me about a scrolling performance issue. Once again, I had to analyze it without access to the source code.

In the original Chinese post, I translated Dan Lew’s fifth and final Android tips round-up, which he published in May 2014. As in the earlier parts, I added explanations and notes of my own rather than translating word for word. I hope a few of these tools save you some trouble. Technical corrections and version updates are noted below.

Technical review — 2026-10-13: Old Support Library links now point to AndroidX. Storage, thumbnail generation, and app languages have version-specific updates. The side effects of clearing app data and yielding a database transaction are explained in their entries.

In the original Chinese post, I translated Dan Lew’s fourth Android tips round-up, which he published in May 2014. These are small tools worth sharing, and I added my own notes where I had something to contribute. The version updates are noted below.

Technical review — 2026-10-13: Most of these View/XML APIs remain usable, but the explanations of configuration changes, clipping, and atomic files needed correction. The Gradle Daemon has been enabled by default since 3.0. AtomicFile behavior is illustrated using Android 4.4.4 and Android 16 source versions below.

In the original Chinese post, I translated Dan Lew’s third Android tips round-up, which he published in April 2014. As with the earlier parts, I added my own notes and explanations where I thought they would help. Some of these are tools I use myself; if a few are new to you, I hope they come in handy. The API corrections and version limits are noted below.

Technical review — 2026-10-13: Platform android.app.Fragment was deprecated in API 28; the Fragment entries below use AndroidX. LocalBroadcastManager and Otto are no longer maintained. Other tips remain useful within the API and behavior limits stated below.