Android 14 has been out for two weeks now and yet we continue to discover its secrets and some of them are being revealed by the Android developers themselves. A more important change has been made than it seems and it improves the performance of our smartphones.
Android 14 // Source: Frandroid
In early October, Google released Android 14 as part of its Made by Google conference. Currently only Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro are sold with the new version and we can see all the changes made there. However, some of these are not necessarily seen, especially those that improve performance.
Android 14: What Google didn’t talk about
During the Android Show conference, Dave Burke, VP of Engineering at Android, was interviewed. He returned to the changes that were not discussed during the Made by Google presentation. According to him, if customization is an important element, improving performance is equally important.
Dave Burke, VP of Engineering at Android // Source: Android Developers
Dave Burke explained that his teams have “put a lot of effort into reducing the CPU activity of background applications.” All with a supporting number: 30% fewer cold boots on Android 14. Cold boots are those of applications that have not been cached: they then have to read the code pages in both RAM and memory before running them. 30%, this applies to high-end models with 12 GB RAM, with 8 GB RAM it is 20% less. Android developers say they have found the right balance between the number of cached processes and the economics of CPU usage. This also means that applications start a little faster.
Optimizations down to the smallest corners of the system
As a reminder, caching applications allows you to “freeze” them in a way to prevent them from consuming too many CPU resources. Android 14 brings optimizations to prevent applications from “waking up” for nothing and then putting a strain on the CPU and inevitably the battery. The system has created a queue of these wake-up calls or merged some of them.
Also remember that Android 14 brings code optimizations, reducing its size by an average of 9.3% without affecting performance. Enough to save a little storage space but also use fewer resources from your smartphone when using applications.