[davtbaum]

Even though the bytecode is being executed on a VM, the VM itself has been ported to the architecture, which has a native endianness. Byte order in the dex that matches the host OS's will likely result in a performance gain as the VM can cast more efficiently.

[JosephRedfern]

That's true - do you suppose that this flag might be used if an app developer was targeting a specific CPU architecture, then?

I guess it could be argued that if you're that concerned about performance and know your target architecture, that it might be worth going native rather than running on a VM.

[yincrash]

This is just a guess, but I think the odex pass on dalvik switches the endianness to the architecture's native.