ART will sound strange to you at first, but if we tell you that promises a smoother, faster and more efficient experience on Android, with even an improvement in battery life, and that the same Google team has been working on for more than 2 years, surely there are three initials that will begin to sound better than it seems at first.
ART comes to replace Dalvik, the virtual machine that uses the platform for Android mobile devices. It is the goal of the Android team due to how the operating system has matured, and that they are starting to give more attention to components that do not perform as well and that need significant improvement.
One of the pieces Oldest of the puzzle that means Android es responsible software for all applications to work which is called Dalvik.
What is ART?
ART takes care of handle the execution of an application in a different way to which Dalvik performs. To make it easier for you to understand, the applications are partially compiled by the developers, resulting in a code that must go through an "interpreter" on each of the user's devices and each time it is started.
The process itself is not particularly efficient, but the mechanism makes it easier for applications that can work on a wide variety of hardware and architectures. ART is responsible for changing this process of pre-compiling the code into a language when the applications are first installed, turning them into native applications of the system. This process is called an "Ahead-of-Time" (AOT) compilation.
By eliminating the need to create a new virtual machine or run code, the time it takes to start an application is greatly reduced and running it is an incredibly faster process.
At the moment it is in a first phase of experimental approach, since Google advises that switching to ART could cause certain applications not work and it will cause instability in the system.
The real benefit of ART
As has been estimated with some benchmarks, the time to run an application would be cut in halfEven processor-intensive tasks would be able to finish it more quickly, allowing the system to go to sleep more from time to time and for longer.
Applications would benefit from smoother animations and instant responses on touch and other sensors. With the near-standard use of quad-core chips, in many situations only several of them would work, which would substantially improve performance and battery life in certain scenarios and hardware.
ART and KItKat make a very good couple
In general ART appears as a project with an incredible goal, improve what we already have in our hands with Android in every way, performance, fluidity and battery life. Almost, you can not demand more, so we will see how they are introducing ART in our systems from Android 4.4 KitKat, since it will not be an easy task at first.
We will go reporting everything that happens about ART and how Google will activate it in the system, so that our smartphones or tablets fly even more.
More information - Notable in Android 4.4 KitKat: Compatibility with low-power sensors and functions to count steps