Android 4.4 KitKat is among the headlines day after day. There is plenty of features worth talking about but what creates the most buzz on all tech sites is the supposed memory optimization that comes with the latest version of Android.Google's head of Android, Sundar Pichai promises that KitKat can run comfortably on devices with 512 MB RAM. If this is true it will be Google's answer to fragmentation i.e. It may finally have the weapon to kill the lagginess of gingerbread.
This has been made possible with. " Project Svelte" the immediate successor of Project Butter that was running since Jelly Bean (4.1) with a similar purpose. Though it was far less concerned with the performance of truly low end devices.
In Android 4.4 Google has decoupled the Android core from so-called Google Experience, and it allows them to be lighter. Android's memory foot- print has been slimmed down by removing unessential background services, again not only the memory consumption of features that you can not help living without has been reduced, but the wide array of Google services such as YouTube, Chrome have also undergone a similar treatment and should now prove just as powerful but more snappy.
If this is not enough, the core system process will now protect system memory from apps far more conveniently, especially if those apps consume large amount of RAM. And last but not the least, Android will now launch multiple services sequently, instead of launching at a same time with the aim of trimming peak memory demands, thus improving stability.
This is a complex method and it is worth mentioning the fact that Google won't be approaching this issue on its own, instead its enlisting the help of manufacturers and developers both. To be able to do so Google has provided a number of tools that will help the next generation of devices to take advantages of optimization such as zRAM swapping, kernel samepage marging and the ability to tune the cache of the Dalvik JIT code. Other tools include a new API that's going to allow devs to make their apps really flexible, by letting them tweak or completely disable high memory features, depending on the specific device, and its relative memory.
Additionally devs will be able to take advantage of the new procstats and meminfo tools, along with a more widely supported Render Script Compute (GPU acceleration), which has been reconfigured and seen some performance gains with Android 4.4 KitKat.
According to the head Android engineer, Hiroshi Lokheimer, Google's OEM partners have already gotten a heads up about the changes.
Lokheimer said, "we have briefed all of our manufacturing partners on this and they are all very excited about it", They all want to ship the latest thing. It is not like they wanted to ship Gingerbread but they had to because that is what fit. This means KitKat may very well put an end to the Gingerbread menace.
Android has already passed the 1 billion users milestone and Google is now certainly gearing for the next 1 billion users or so a Google blogspot by Pichai will lead us to believe.
This above all, is the alleged Google dream - Android every where. It's hard to say whether that isn't ultimately a bad thing, but one thing can be surely - we're getting ever closer to having adequate smartphone experience at a fraction of the cost from just two years ago. And to be honest it is awesome.
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