7.4. Clean Up for Release

If you're like most developers, your path to completing your application was not linear. You tried some things, kept some, stopped using others, put in diagnostics when things didn't work quite right, named some things that you later wished you'd named differently, and so forth. Now is the time to clean all that up. Once your application is out in the real world, you'll have to support this version, and it would be good for you if the code were as clean as possible:

• Turn off debug and logging code. You don't really want your deployed application eating up precious mobile phone storage by generating logfiles, and the user won't be able to understand your debug messages anyway. If you haven't already, create a boolean to switch them off and leave them off for now. And remove android:debuggable=true from the AndroidManifest.xml file (see the earlier example) to make sure debug is turned off.

• Clean up your code wherever possible. Make the naming consistent, reorder methods in some reasonable way, and try to improve readability. Even if you're the next person to look at it, you won't remember what you did six months from now.

• Remove any test data that you included—particularly anything that's private or proprietary (like your name and address in a Contacts database).

• Delete any extraneous files from the project: old logfiles, source files that you no longer include in the application, etc.