Milliseconds matter: an undergraduate thesis measures the impact of code choices on Android
Victor Hugo Alves de Carvalho defended in 2015 at FCTE/UnB an empirical undergraduate thesis comparing programming techniques on Android and measuring the effect of each on app performance and responsiveness.
Brasília, 2015
When an app freezes for two seconds, the user responds with a single gesture: closes it, uninstalls it, leaves a poor review. It is that chain of cause and effect that the undergraduate thesis defended by Victor Hugo Alves de Carvalho in 2015 at FCTE/UnB places under the microscope, advised by Prof. Fabiana Freitas Mendes .
The work builds on a defining fact of that decade: Android had become the dominant platform, and the ease of programming for it attracted both small teams and technology-driven companies. The trade-off — rarely discussed — is the cost of keeping apps fast across an enormous matrix of devices, versions, and usage scenarios. Without clear instruments to choose between implementation alternatives, much of the optimization work becomes folklore.
The thesis attacks the problem from within: it picks common Android programming techniques and empirically measures the impact of each on application performance. The result is a body of evidence that can serve as a practical reference for anyone deciding between code variations without endless debates. It is a typical contribution to software quality — quantitative evidence to underpin decisions that ultimately shape user experience.
The full text — written in Portuguese — is available at the UnB Undergraduate Theses Digital Library.
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