The
mere mention of Android 4.4 KitKat is getting dangerously close to
inflicting a sense of deja vu, as day after day the new Google OS has
been making headlines and going through the press like little else. And
while there is a number of new features worth talking about, and even
dissecting, the supposed memory optimizations that come with Android 4.4
are what's really buzzing. And it's no wonder, seeing as Google's head
of Android, Sundar Pichai, promises that KitKat “can run comfortably on
the 512MB of RAM devices that are popular in much of the world”. This is
pretty important for the platform, as it means that Google may finally
have the answer to what's referred to as 'fragmentation', or in other
words: it may finally have the weapon to kill off the Gingerbread man.
All fine and dandy, but how?
Simple:
with Project Svelte, the immediate successor of Project Butter that
came with Jelly Bean with a similar aim, though far less concerned with
the performance of truly low-end devices. But exactly what is Project Svelte? Well, for starters, Google has decoupled the Android core from the so-called Google Experience,
and it's made both of these lighter. Android's memory footprint has
been slimmed down by removing unessential background services and,
simultaneously, the memory consumption of features that you can't really
live without has been reduced. Moreover, the wide array of Google
services, such as YouTube and Chrome, have also undergone a similar
treatment, and should now prove just as powerful, but more slender.
Further still, core system processes will now protect system memory from
apps far more jealously, especially if those consume large amounts of
RAM. And last, but not least, Android will now launch multiple services
sequentially, instead of at once, with the aim of trimming peak memory
demands, thus improving stability. Still on the topic of
optimizations, it's worth pointing out that Google won't be approaching
this rather complex issue on its own, isntead, it's enlisting the help
of manufacturers and developers both. To do so, Google has introduced a
number of tools that will help the next gen of devices take advantage of
optimizations such as zRAM swapping, kernel samepage merging and the
ability to tune the cache of the Dalvik JIT code. Other tools include a
new API that will allow developers to make their apps really flexible,
by letting them tweak or completely disable high memory features,
depending on the specific device, and it's relative memory.
Additionally, devs will be able to take advantage of the new procstats
and meminfo tools, along with a more widely supported RenderScript
Compute (GPU accelaration), which has also seen some performance gains
with Android 4.4 KitKat. According to the head Android engineer, Hiroshi
Lockheimer, Google's OEM partners have already gotten a heads-up about
the changes:
This means that...
KitKat may very well put an end to the Gingerbread menace
Having
passed the 1 billion users milestone, Google is now obviously gearing
for “the next 1 billion users”, or so a Google blogpost by Pichai would
lead us to believe. Seeing as the high-end is becoming increasingly
saturated, and Google is already accounting for giant piece of it, it's
only natural that the company focuses its engineering efforts on solving
a long-standing problem: most entry-level devices can't properly run
anything past Android 2.3 Gingerbread, a 3-year old OS. That's a pretty
significant problem for Google, developers and OEMs all, with the former
two looking to extend the reach of their latest services, and the
latter simply trying to build more compelling products. According to Google's latest numbers, a little over 26% of all Android devices are still stuck on Gingerbread. That's over a quarter of a billion. Yikes! Of
course, whether Google actually manages to put an end to the Ginger man
still remains to be seen, but we suspect that low-end devices touting
the latest and greatest Android are still months away. Moreover, it'll
be a few more years for existing devices to completely die out, as these
are quite unlikely to receive a leapfrog update to KitKat. And yet we
don't particularly see this as any less of an achievement (provided it
delivers), and at least one key industry player is already gunning for the increasingly important lower end market.
This,
above all, is the alleged Google dream – Android everywhere. It's hard
to say whether that isn't ultimately a bad thing, but one thing is for
certain – we're getting ever closer to having adequate and full-fledged
smartphone experience at a fraction of the cost from just two years ago.
And that's awesome.
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