Courses / Android Internals: A Primer

Android Internals: A Primer

A free, four-lesson tour of what happens between tapping an icon and your first frame — Zygote, ActivityThread, Choreographer, and why any of it matters when you are debugging a jank report at 2am.

4 lessons ·69 min ·Free ·beginner
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Syllabus

  1. 01 Zygote and the fork that starts everythingWhy every Android process is a copy of one warm JVM, and what that costs you. 12 min
  2. 02 ActivityThread: the loop you never wroteThe main thread is a message queue. Everything else follows from that. 15 min
  3. 03 Choreographer and the 16ms budgetWhere frames are scheduled, and where they are dropped. 18 min
  4. 04 Reading a cold start traceOne real trace, start to finish. 23 min