Latest Android Runtime (ART) update led to apps starting 30% faster

[wffurr]

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2023/08/latest-art... has a lot more details.

[ncr100]

But they don't talk about what they did to improve the speed of ART.

They talk about how they modularized. That's about it. Kind of not really worth reading. Seems more like a, "yay we managed to modularize some things" self congratulation, rather than getting something useful to the community.

[butz]

Build a simple Android app, e.g. single activity from default examples, using most recent SDK and all recommended technologies. When compiled it will be 1MB+ in size and take about a second to startup. Take my old Android app from 10 years ago - it starts instantly, dashboard is immediately visible on cold start. Google should simplify Android SDK and move styling framework (Material design) onto device. Apps will be smaller, performance better.

[cubefox]

> up to 30% on some devices

(emphasis mine)

[solarkraft]

I mean: Thanks.

But such updates randomly appearing kind of confirms my idea that Android is generally incredibly inefficient and Google only sometimes cares, to the point of it almost feeling accidental.

Switching to iOS revealed to me how non-shitty a mobile OS can be.

[cubefox]

Android 12+ only...

[positr0n]

I can't believe a 30% performance improvement has been sitting there.. for 12 Android versions??

[dmitrygr]

My man…if only you knew

6 years ago an intern in chromeOS using Gem5 found an optimization in how Android’s ART emits code that would help all in-order arm cores(a-5x) to the tune of 10%. A simple fix. He prototyped it. It worked. Fix was a dozen lines. It never shipped…

[jshier]

This naturally happens when engineering orgs are feature rather than result or quality oriented. As another random example, Apple shipped autolayout in iOS 7 with greater than quadratic performance as the number of constraints increased. It wasn't until iOS 12 that they made it simply linear, a well known optimization of linear algebra systems (autolayout is largely a simultaneous equation solver).

[wffurr]

You can read the article and the linked Android developer blog post if you want to get a glimpse of why this is so complicated.

[Projectiboga]

Just startup. 1.5 seconds down to ~1 seconds. The actual improvement is that chunk can get security fixes directly rather than from the device manufactures. This is big for LG phone owners as LG exited the phone business and has stoped updates.