Android is about to receive a significant speed boost

Amjad Ali August 24, 2024

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Google has just announced that it’s going to be giving developers on Android the option to switch between 4 KB and 16 KB page sizes. In layman terms, this means you will see an improvement in performance across the board by up to 10 percent when apps switch to 16 KB.

Page sizes, in simple words, refer to the units of memory that a CPU manages at a time. Hardware has traditionally stuck to 4 KB page sizes, and thus so has the software support for it. With newer processors coming out that support 16 KB page sizes, Google wants to help developers begin the transition.

Google will also be working to bring 16 KB supported development tools and emulators to people making apps for Android. All in all, Google says the average user should see improvements in video quality, game performance and in how smoothly apps operate.

Your Pixel 8 is about to get better…in some time. | Image credit — PhoneArena

Now, this all sounds quite exciting, but we’ll have to temper our expectations for now. Yes, this is something that is guaranteed to make our phones feel faster, but it’s not going to happen overnight. It’s not going to happen for some time, in fact.

Developers are going to have to transition their apps to support 16 KB page sizes. In addition, they’re going to have to learn to use the new tools and emulators coming out. Not to mention the fact that there is still hardware out there that simply doesn’t support 16 KB page sizes. So there might be apps that remain on 4 KB page sizes just so the developers don’t have to work more to ensure compatibility.

But whichever apps do transition to 16 KB page sizes will truly feel like an upgrade. And as 16 KB page support becomes more common, more of the best phones out today will start shipping with hardware capable of taking advantage of the larger page sizes.

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