Disable emoji2 in textview in AppCompat 1.4.0 and later for performance purposes

user_8623184 0
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I updated my app dependencies from appcompat 1.3.1 to appcompat 1.4.1, where one of the key changes is:

Updatable emoji support is enabled by default via the androidx.emoji2 library

It seemed to me that the smoothness of RecyclerView in my app got worse, and Profiler confirmed this. I have 4 TextViews in the ViewHolder whose setText method has always been one of the slowest actions in onBind. But after the update, the situation has become disastrous:

onBind now takes 11ms on average, 7.3ms of which is summed up by androidx.emoji2.viewsintegration.EmojiInputFilter.filter() and androidx.emoji2.viewshelper.EmojiTransformationMethod.getTransormation() for 4 textview. I don't need emoji support like most developers, I need the app to run smoothly. Is there any way to disable emoji2 without downgrading to 1.3.1?

Below is a screenshot from the profiler for one TextView. The parent setText() method took 3.76ms. Timing for filter() method provided in "Summary" tab (on the right) and in popup for getTransormation().

enter image description here

android-appcompat android-recyclerview android performance
2 Answers

I found an answer on emoji2 page: https://developer.android.com/jetpack/androidx/releases/emoji2. Paragraph "Configuring automatic initialization".

So to disable emoji2 we should add this code to <application> tag in AndroidManifest.xml

 <provider
     android:name="androidx.startup.InitializationProvider"
     android:authorities="${applicationId}.androidx-startup"
     android:exported="false"
     tools:node="merge">
     <meta-data android:name="androidx.emoji2.text.EmojiCompatInitializer"
               tools:node="remove" />
 </provider>

The improvement in performance is obvious: enter image description here onBind now takes 6.5ms at all instead of 11ms.

user_86231840

You can use app:emojiCompatEnabled="false" on your TextView if you don't want emoji support. I found it via https://youtu.be/QVj2tQm8r58?t=495 but I couldn't find any official documentation for this attribute.

user_120490580
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