Disadvantages in Multidexing the android application - android

Recently I have read about the Dalvik 65K method limit. I have understood that the method invocation list can only invoke first 65536 method references.
To tackle this, we have a number of solutions. One of which being multidexing where we split the .dex files to number of classes [classes.dex, classes1.dex ...] by using Android's support library.
What I have failed to understand is: What drawback does an Android application suffer due to this multidexing and why should we put lots of effort in minimising the number of referenced methods?
Basically in my understanding, to reduce the method count, I have to reduce modularisation, which makes my code a bit less readable, leaving apart the number of hours burned in stripping down the code of third-party libraries. Is reducing the method count worth it?

You are overthinking about multidex, instead you should observe and identify if there is any performance issue with your app by profiling your application.
Multidexing hardly increases any size of code, major size and performance issues are with animation/image/audio/video resources, they are the ones who increase size and reduce performance.
Including many third party libraries will eventually pass 64k limit and almost all applications today are multidexed, Users demand multifeatured apps today, that requires integration with many third party libraries.
Only when you are doing animation/game programming, where speed matters the most, more method calls might be harmful, but this has nothing to do with multidexing, even poorly written small non multidexing app will perform bad on any device.
Startup time will affect with multidexing, but it can certainly be improved by changing your app logic to delay loading of other costly library and resources.
Is reducing the method count worth it??
NO
Ideally you should use more methods and modularize your code, because testing and changing mobile apps is huge challenge after it is published. Debugging and removing bugs are more costly then multidex size and its impact on performance. Due to tiny screens, different brands, different UI, users get more angry on apps on phone compared to computers. Keeping up to users demand will become easier if code is divided into multiple individual tested libraries.

The main drawback is a larger dex/apk size. Dex files have pools of constants that are shared among all the classes in that dex file. When classes are split across multiple dex files, these shared constants have to be duplicated in each dex file they are used in.

Multidexing itself is non-performing term, if application is multidex it means there is burden over android internal process which executes application.
Every android application runs inside a single process(task), when its multidexed, it means the process is divided into parts which going to create performance issues with small android processor, no matter how you write code.
I am agree with aakash kava that almost all applications are multidexed because now a days android processors are very good in performance and android RAM is excellent, But it does't ,mean we should ignore multidexing.

Generally spoken the disadvantages of multidex are: Increased APK size, possibly slower app startup and increased memory footprint.
The reason for that is that some data (e.g. StringData) can not be shared and therefore need to be partially stored in multiple DEX files at the same time. StringData consists of string literals loaded from code as well as class, method and field names and commonly account for up to 20% of the total DEX file.
But the actual disadvantages (beside APK size) highly depend on the Android version you are running the app on.
Google optimized the Android Runtime (ART) to remove these drawbacks. Android O (API 26) introduced the VDEX container to store pre-validated DEX files. With Android P Google further optimized the precompiler (codename CompactDex) and added an shared data section to the VDEX container to deduplicate the data used in multiple DEX files. So there are little to none disadvantage when running multidex apps on Android P runtime.
Sources: What's new in Android Runtime (Google I/O '18)

Related

64K limit not making sense in Android

this is not a technical question.
I'm asking this because I don't understand how can this (64k limit) be avoided.
Aren't a "fancy" app always over 64k methods when it keeps adding functions and features from time to time? Or is that means those 'fancy' apps are always multidex-ed?
64K indeed doesn't make any sense in the modern era with apps coming with large amount of features, advanced and complex architectures, large libraries(try the full suite of Google Play Services), and the said libraries doing code generation for us like what an DI library like Dagger can do, the Dalvik executable has the 64K limit because thats what its designed for the limit is on the number of methods that can be referenced not defined, so we opt for multidexing, by default I would say all debug flavours of an app should have multidexing because without proguard truncating and compressing and removing everything unnecessary out we will eventually hit the 64K limit, but quite often when generating the release variant we would and can quite possibly stay under the 64K limit.
So for your question any app that crosses the 64K limit even after proguard has to be multidexed regardless of whether its fancy or not.

Clarification on What happens after installing MultiDex

After I installed MultiDex I noticed,first ever launch of the app takes extra 4-5 seconds. However after a few researches, I noticed that the app size inside the phone settings(app manager) went from 7 MB to 19 MB and if I clear data, app goes back to 7 MB. But every time that I launch the app for the first time, app size increases to more than double.
Now my question is, what happens that makes the app size increase so much?
So far I have found a few topics on slackoverflow about MultiDex but none talks about what really happen with the code, and what kind of data MultiDex saves/caches.
Multi-Dexing is enabled in your gradle and extended in your Application class.
This is used when you use over 64,000 methods.
https://developer.android.com/studio/build/multidex
I would say probably 90% of the time if you are hitting multi dex needs, you have likely not properly managed your dependencies. I'm NOT saying every time. However, typically the issue is people bring in entire Google dependencies instead of just the ones you need. For example the Google Play Services. If you include this, it will instantly force you into multi-dexing. However, this does come with a performance hit. You now have multiple dex files to load. There is some pre-dexing of course for things that will not change such as 3rd party dependencies to help your speed a bit on building and deploying. However, having multiple lookup tables comes with it's speed consequences. For example, if you included.
com.google.android.gms
has about 44,000 methods alone in it, You should specify which one you want like
com.google.android.gms:play-services-location:16.0.0
for example.
So before you go down the road of using Multi-Dex, ensure you have properly cleaned up your unused dependencies, and that you are properly managing your transitive dependency tree. Also don't forget to use ProGuard or the new D8 minification process as that may also help you, although may require you to run in Debug as well if you have that heavy of dependencies.
If you have done all that and you still need to use Multi-Dex (and I have run into this at larger companies that force tons of bloat libraries on you) then you go for it.
Now as for what is happening, well Dex stands for Dalvik Executable. It is the process of packaging the code into Dalvik bytes for execution. This is limited to 65,536 methods. They say 64k in the documentation, but everywhere I've read shows 65k+. Many of Google's libraries already contain 17k methods which puts you 1/4 of the way there right out the gate.
I believe the issue has something to do with the header allocation of 2 bytes per method signature and the lookup table. they are limited on number of unique IDs they can create. So it requires you to create multiple dex files with multiple lookup tables for the method signatures. So the short answer is, it makes multiple Dalvik Executable files to ensure unique method signatures are properly found and executed on the Dalvic Virtual Machine.
Other important things to note, is that prior to Android API 21, the Virtual Machine only supports 1 dex file. Therefore you need to do multi-dex install on your application onCreate to get the rest brought in properly. However, if you are using proguard, your additional dex files could have been removed so you may need to address a MultDexProguard file as well.
Now, it's important to realize that Android completely redid their Virtual Machine and no longer relies on Dex for their modern OS virtual machines. So then the next question is "should you still use it"?
Well if you are still needing to support pre-Lollipop, then you are better off leaving your multi-dex in place. Otherwise if you are Lollipop and up. Android uses ART (Android Runtime) and does not have this limitation. Honestly the population that has pre-Lollipop is so small that it is not worth supporting in my personal opinion, but it depends on your product and your needs.
Hope that helps shed some light on things here.
Happy Coding
A single .dex file can have 65,536 methods(references) so if the number of references exceeds 65,536, you go with multidex.
Maybe as your app is storing more than one .dex file it is allocating more space for new .dex files.
Breakdown your APK using APK Analyser to see what is causing the app size to increase
use the following link refer
https://developer.android.com/studio/build/apk-analyzer
if you want to decrease the size of the app this article is helpful
https://medium.com/exploring-code/how-you-can-decrease-application-size-by-60-in-only-5-minutes-47eff3e7874e

How to test android library affect application's performance?

I am building some android application. And of course it use many library included in gradle.
I want to do performance test, which library can affect much my application performance for doing other logic , like encode and decode, or other stuff.
Any idea?
There's an entire section in the Android User Guide called Profile Your App. There's a number of tools you can use to measure the performance of your app, however an extensive performance testing will probably be time consuming. Normally you'd have to identify a problem in your app and pick appropriate profiling techniques to find out what causes it.
To add to #Egor's answer about profiling, you may also want to think about the method count limit when considering library dependencies, in particular on older devices. While not directly related to runtime performance, having to use multidex in your builds will significantly increase your build times and the initial loading time of your app (on Android older than Lollipop).

Including large Android Library Project inside an Android app (resulting APK size)?

I am planning on creating one huge Android library project that will serve as a framework for all our future apps (since a lot of the code will be shared between apps, I don't want to re-include and maintain it in separate apps).
For this I am planning to create one Android project that will serve as a basis or "container" for all main functionality that will be mostly available to the apps. However, some apps will have part of the functionality, while others will have different part of the functionality.
The whole library project will not be fully used by each individual app - only portions of it, related to that specific app.
My question is:
How is this performance-wise and also:
Does including a 2MB library app to a 500kb new Android app increase the resulting app-s APK size to ~2.5MB, considering that the small app will only use a small portion of the whole library? Or does it strip away classes from the library that are not needed from the production APK?
If the size indeed increases to accomodate the whole library's size - how do we overcome this pitfall of the need to reinvent the wheel for each app and maintain shared code across apps.
I'm not sure how Android's/Eclipse apk exporters work.
How is this performance-wise
In terms of stuff like CPU speed, heap consumption, and the like, there should be no effect.
Does including a 2MB library app to a 500kb new Android app increase the resulting app-s APK size to ~2.5MB, considering that the small app will only use a small portion of the whole library? Or does it strip away classes from the library that are not needed from the production APK?
That will depend upon ProGuard. As Jakar notes, ProGuard removes unused classes. It's algorithms for determining "unused" are imperfect, and so sometimes it will retain classes that actually are not needed.
how do we overcome this pitfall of the need to reinvent the wheel for each app and maintain shared code across apps.
I'd start by having more than one library, and only linking an app to the libraries that it needs.

Avoid localized resources overhead

I have an app that is localized in 24 languages.
When I build the app with English-only resources, the app is 1.6MB.
When I build the app with all languages resources, the app is 2.5MB.
Language-dependent resources are a couple of HTML files, and strings.xml.
Since the app is running a background service, it is annoying to get it killed due to memory pressure. It seems to be more frequent when it is 2.5MB than when it is only 1.6MB.
Therefore I want to decrease the app size by avoiding to ship all languages in the APK when only one is really needed.
I'm considering making an APK with almost English only and the possibility for the user to download language files from the app at runtime.
Are there frameworks for doing this in Android, or maybe at least patterns or best practices?
Any suggestion is warmly welcome.
You wouldn't see memory issues due to the size of your APK. This would only effect the ability to install the app on a device if the user doesn't have enough space to install it. I think you probably have a different memory issue that you are incorrectly blaming for your memory issues (did a little deeper to see if you can correct the issue).
You can use Proguard to eliminate resources from your final APK, but I don't think this is a wise approach. Link: http://developer.android.com/tools/help/proguard.html
I also think it is not a good idea to create separate APKs for each language (and in fact, this is against the terms of service for the Play Market).
Bottom line, check your app again, and fix your memory issues - you are likely going down the wrong path trying to blame your problems on your localized resources.

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