Android 4 Major Components

• Application

• Activity

• Fragment

• Service

Application

• Root of an app
• Root of Context
• Available across the whole app lifecycle
• Home of "singleton" objects

Service

• Task to be done without UI
• Providing support to UI
  
• Off load to background * 
  • Android 8+ Background Limit
  • Scheduler Service
• Providing Support to other App or System
  • Encryption?!
  • Video/Audio Streaming

Activity

• The most important component on Android
• The "screen"
• Root of the UI hierarchy
• Context with UI capability
• The basic component for an application
• The host of fragment
• Has Lifecycle
• Only run on Main Thread

Fragment

• A "Reusable" UI  component?
• A "fragment" of the activity?
• A group of widgets?
• Only run Main Thread
• Has its own lifecycle?!!!!
• The source of the crashes?!!

Common issues in Android architecture

God-like Activity/Fragment

• Rendering UI
• Handling UI components
• Navigation
• Calling API
• Calling Database/Storage
• Initiate Navigation
• Handling Lifecycle callbacks
• Handling Permissions
• Handling input from other UI
• ......

Activity/Fragment Responsibility

Complications - Context

• Almost everything you do need a context
  • Render UI
  • Loading Image
  • Loading Text
  • Navigation
  • Access Network
  • Access System Resource/Service
• Context Leaking
  • Activity is a Context, but leaking Resource/Memory
  • Application is a Context, but cannot handle UI
• Context has lifecycle
  • Context might not be available
  • Context might be disposed
• Lifecycle is the source of crashes!

Complications - Lifecycle

• Theading

  • Accessing Network/Storage on MainThread crashes the app

  • Accessing UI from background thread crashes the app

• Lifecycle

  • Accessing UI before it is created crashes the app

  • Accessing UI after it is disposed crashes the app

  • UI recreation due to configuration change

  • Accessing a disposed context crashes the app

Reality is complicated

1. User clicks search button
2. UI trigger click callback (MainThread)
3. Calling API (Worker Thread)
4. Update the UI to render loading indicator (MainThread)
5. The API returned or timeout (Worker Thread)
6. Update the UI with result or error (Main Thread)
7. Save result to Database (Worker Thread)

• What if user get a phone call after 4 before 5?
• What if it is upload a big file, which is expected to take longer time to finish?
• What if user clicks button again before 6 (If we didn't disable the button)
• What if user rotated phone after 4 before 5

Solutions from Google

An concrete example

1. No reusable UI component (with logic)
2. Fragment
3. Fragment lifecycle management is error-proning
4. LifecyleOwner, LifeCycle, LifecycleObserver
   • Initialized, Created, Started, Resumed, Destroyed
5. Fragment can survive without a view!
6. Fragment.getViewLifecycleOwner
7. Calling getViewLifecycleOwner before view is created crashes the app (??!!!)
8. Fragment might have more than one ViewLifecycleOwner (????!!!!!!!!)
9. Fragment.getViewLifecycleOwnerLiveData
10. viewLifecycleOwnerLiveData.observe { owner.lifecycle.observe { } }

Google

don't know

how to do

Android Architecture

right

To G or not to G

that is the question

Clean Achitecture

Clean Architecture

• It is a PHILOSOPHY
• It is A way to abstract software
• It is NOT a library
• It is a PRACTICE / GUIDELINE
• It ADAPTS to different domain/environment

Our Clean Architecture