[vvanders]

That's not technically correct(which is always the best kind of correct :) ), HWUI has been multithreaded for quite a long while now. That doesn't prevent apps from doing bad things but it's been possible to do smooth animation on Android since the days of project butter.

[ricardobeat]

My low-end Android device disagrees. Eight cores @ 2.3ghz and _everything_ stutters, on a barebones OS with nothing installed.

Pixel phones fare a lot better, but I suspect it's just a result of their sheer processing power.

[incrudible]

> barebones OS

Android is the opposite of barebones. It comes loaded with crap, much of it is using "stop the world" garbage collection while also producing lots of garbage. Building on Java is Android's original sin. You could still build an NDK app, talk to OpenGL, and hit 60Hz on low-end devices, years ago, but that's not how most stuff is developed. There are layers upon layers of crap between applications and the hardware, to the point where apparently people have come to believe that you need special OS interfaces to do smooth animation.

[halpmeh]

How do you animate on the HWUI thread?