[Zigurd]

You are reading a lot into it.

Yes, Android's designers had a very different mentality from the traditional RTOS-for-a-handset designers. But that does not mean they had a "data center' mindset. Indeed one of the most common error or people who do have a "data center mindset" is that they load up on libraries that do various useful things for their Android development and then blow out the method and heap limits.

Understanding Android requires a unique design and implementation mentality that is neither RTOS oriented, nor "small *nix in a phone" oriented, nor server Java oriented. It's a clever multi-processing managed language runtime with aggressive memory recovery that's capable of running many managed runtime processes, none of which can hog memory globally.

Without having been designed for real time audio from the beginning, retrofitting that capability was hard to do. Apple made a lot of hay out of lack of real time audio processing. But only in one domain of apps. These are the kinds of trade-offs that get products out the door.