android startup image

Question

My app takes a lot of time to load at the start, the screen is blank meanwhile. Is there a way to display an image when the app starts and later display the layouts once its done loading?

Answer 1

The approach differs a bit if you have multiple Activities within your app, but if you are only talking about a single Activity then the Activity itself won't show anything until the onResume() is called. Prior to that, the only thing that will be displayed is the background image of the Application/Activity. Setting a background image for your Activity can greatly increase the perceived startup speed, since they will display immediately. Romain Guy discusses background images a bit here: http://www.curious-creature.org/2009/03/04/speed-up-your-android-ui/.

If your app has a lot of startup crunching to do then you should do that work on a separate thread and let the onCreate(), onStart(), onResume() proceed quickly. Those methods should try to do as little as possible so the Activity appears to the user as soon as possible. If you want a loading or splash screen to be visible while it loads there different approaches. For the sake of starting simple, let's say you just want to have a loading screen with no animation, just an image. One way to do this would be to set the Activities background image to the loading screen image via XML. In the onCreate() start a thread with your loading processes, so it doesn't have to wait for it to finish in order to continue starting the Activity. In the XML layout, set the root ViewGroup for your layout to have a visibility of gone. This way your views won't appear and it will just show the background loading image. It will also allow these views to be inflated and setup.

Then, when the processes are finished, set the visibility of the ViewGroup to visible to have it appear to the user and if you want, you can change the background image too.

If you don't want to go the splash screen route, still make sure no long running methods are happening in the start up methods, get those onto another thread. You can show your Activity right away and just put up a loading animation if need be.

Obviously there are a ton of approaches and it all depends on what you really need. Hope that helps in someway.

Answer 2

I want to update this question to this year, because I had the same problem and I found it in google.

In values directory, if you do not have it, create a file of styles like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
    <style name="AppBaseTheme" parent="android:Theme.Holo.NoActionBar.Fullscreen">
        <item name="android:windowBackground">@color/your_color</item>
    </style>
</resources>

Now go to AndroidManifest.xml, and add the style to your activity launcher:

<activity
    android:name=".Main"
    android:theme="@style/AppBaseTheme" >
    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />

        <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
    </intent-filter>
</activity>

Answer 3

I would ask myself - WHY does it take a long time to load? Did you profile it? Can you improve that? You should focus on that.

Barring that, yes, you could add a splash screen (something that I recommend people to NOT do) - you could either switch between two layouts using a ViewFlipper or FrameLayout, or you could have two separate activities.

Answer 4

Theres a couple of ways to do this, but the easiest, and most straightforward would be to launch your long loading activity from you splash screen activity.

Another technique is to offload the initialization and loading to a separate thread.

Answer 5

You could also do all the time consuming stuff in a background thread and use Viewgroup.addView once your layout is inflated and all resources are loaded.

1. Put some minimum layout in your activity
2. Create a thread in onStart to load your resources and layouts using LayoutInflator
3. Once you are done post a Runnable to the main thread using a Handler to exchange the layout of the activity using addView

Answer 6

You need splash screnn. You can look at my answer thats explains splash screen.