OKLayoutInflater

OkCredit's Android team was hitting a wall: complex XML layouts were causing frozen frames and ANRs. AndroidX's AsyncLayoutInflater wasn't cutting it.

The OkCredit engineering team built OkLayoutInflater, an open-source library that supercharges Android layout inflation using Kotlin coroutines. They tackled the limitations of AndroidX's single-threaded approach and achieved dramatic performance gains.

Key Takeaways

• Replaced single-threaded inflation with coroutines for parallel processing across CPU cores
• Added lifecycle awareness to prevent crashes from inflation callbacks after screen closes
• Reduced frozen frames by 23% overall and 30% on critical screens
• Cut RecyclerView load times significantly by inflating items asynchronously
• Works seamlessly with MVI architecture by caching render calls until inflation completes

The team shares systrace comparisons showing exactly how parallel inflation transforms scrolling performance, plus their clever workaround for view access timing issues.