Dave Burke, vice president of engineering for Android, was interviewed today during the Android Show and shared a lot of interesting things, especially regarding quality and performance.
In terms of Android releases, Burke considers quality to be the “number one feature” given how much we use our phones:
If you think about how much we depend on our devices and how much we use them [in] One day, it’s really important that the device runs really, really well. Really, really reliably. Highest performance, highest fidelity.
The Android team has a “pledge” internally to “ensure that each release was of higher quality than the previous release, which we do by a set of extended metrics that we measure in the lab and the field.”
We are holding ourselves to that. It’s hard, I can tell you, because you’re only as good as your weakest metric. So you have to pursue everything, but it’s really forcing us to move the bar higher and higher.
Burke explains how the team is doing this:
Even internally, we’re actually looking at changing some of our developer practices in 2024[ing] leave and work for a year[ing] When released for too long, we break it into pieces internally to keep the branch green as we go.
From the details we have today, this appears to be just an internal change and not anything that impacts the annual cycle.
On Android 14, Burke highlighted expressiveness (Zen AI wallpapers, lockscreen clocks and shortcuts) and performance as big tentpoles. Burke said the team “may not have talked enough” about the performance. (Frankly, Google should have discussed this on stage at I/O in May.)
We’ve done a lot of work to reduce the CPU activity of background apps, and the result is that there are now 30% fewer cold starts on Android 14. Cold start is when you have to literally read code pages from Flash and put them into memory before executing them. A 30% reduction is pretty dramatic, and as a user you feel it.
This involved increasing the number of cached processes, but doing so increased CPU usage and, therefore, battery drain. Android 14 does a better job of freezing processes properly.
Burke also mentioned how functions related to larger screens, such as the ephemeral taskbar, were originally part of Android 14, but moved to Android 13 (QPR2) as Google decided to be more competitive in this area and wanted to expand on foldables. Worked to support.
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