The application may be doing too much work on its main thread

taken from : Android UI : Fixing skipped frames

Anyone who begins developing android application sees this message on
logcat “Choreographer(abc): Skipped xx frames! The application may be
doing too much work on its main thread.” So what does it actually
means, why should you be concerned and how to solve it.

What this means is that your code is taking long to process and frames
are being skipped because of it, It maybe because of some heavy
processing that you are doing at the heart of your application or DB
access or any other thing which causes the thread to stop for a while.

Here is a more detailed explanation:

Choreographer lets apps to connect themselves to the vsync, and
properly time things to improve performance.

Android view animations internally uses Choreographer for the same
purpose: to properly time the animations and possibly improve
performance.

Since Choreographer is told about every vsync events, I can tell if
one of the Runnables passed along by the Choreographer.post* apis
doesnt finish in one frame’s time, causing frames to be skipped.

In my understanding Choreographer can only detect the frame skipping.
It has no way of telling why this happens.

The message “The application may be doing too much work on its main
thread.” could be misleading.

source :
Meaning of Choreographer messages in Logcat

Why you should be concerned

When this message pops up on android
emulator and the number of frames skipped are fairly small (<100) then
you can take a safe bet of the emulator being slow – which happens
almost all the times. But if the number of frames skipped and large
and in the order of 300+ then there can be some serious trouble with
your code. Android devices come in a vast array of hardware unlike ios
and windows devices. The RAM and CPU varies and if you want a
reasonable performance and user experience on all the devices then you
need to fix this thing. When frames are skipped the UI is slow and
laggy, which is not a desirable user experience.

How to fix it

Fixing this requires identifying nodes where there is or
possibly can happen long duration of processing. The best way is to do
all the processing no matter how small or big in a thread separate
from main UI thread. So be it accessing data form SQLite Database or
doing some hardcore maths or simply sorting an array – Do it in a
different thread

Now there is a catch here, You will create a new Thread for doing
these operations and when you run your application, it will crash
saying “Only the original thread that created a view hierarchy can
touch its views“. You need to know this fact that UI in android can be
changed by the main thread or the UI thread only. Any other thread
which attempts to do so, fails and crashes with this error. What you
need to do is create a new Runnable inside runOnUiThread and inside
this runnable you should do all the operations involving the UI. Find
an example here.

So we have Thread and Runnable for processing data out of main Thread,
what else? There is AsyncTask in android which enables doing long time
processes on the UI thread. This is the most useful when you
applications are data driven or web api driven or use complex UI’s
like those build using Canvas. The power of AsyncTask is that is
allows doing things in background and once you are done doing the
processing, you can simply do the required actions on UI without
causing any lagging effect. This is possible because the AsyncTask
derives itself from Activity’s UI thread – all the operations you do
on UI via AsyncTask are done is a different thread from the main UI
thread, No hindrance to user interaction.

So this is what you need to know for making smooth android
applications and as far I know every beginner gets this message on his
console.