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The latest iteration of Android is called Android Lollipop and with it came a lot of great improvements and features. One of these great improvements is the significantly greater app performance. More specifically, the UI and apps on Android could now run at a buttery smooth 60 FPS. This was surely no easy feat to achieve and the difference is definitely noticeable. But apparently Google has no intentions of stopping there, they want to take things a step further. The surprising part is, they don’t plan on doing this using Java.
The team behind the Dart programming language plans on using their own language, in the future, to create Android apps that run at an astonishing 120 FPS. The team broke this crazy news to the world at their recent Dart Developer Summit where they showed project “Sky.” What this project aims to do is let Android developers create apps that run at 120 FPS, which would call for some extreme responsiveness and rendering speeds. Just to give you an idea of how difficult this would be to pull off, most Android apps still have a hard time running at 60 FPS on Android Lollipop today. Having an Android app run at a consistent 120 FPS would require an insane rendering speed of about a frame every 8ms. This isn’t even taking into consideration the fact that there is not a single smartphone display currently on the market that could support something running at 120 FPS.
Despite all of this, there is definitely a strong possibility that project Sky could yield some greatly improved Android apps in the future, performance-wise. The Dart team solidified this notion with an app that they developed using the Dart language and showed off at their developer summit. Said app was rendering frames at a vastly quicker speed than the teams end goal of 8ms. The simple app that they showed off was rendering frames at a speed of 1.2ms, meaning that the demo app was running at much faster speeds than 120 FPS.
Project Sky is a great idea that has a lot of potential. With an ultimate goal of easily creating Android apps that run at 120 FPS and ending UI stuttering, it’s an idea a lot of people can get behind. Still though, there are a lot of questions that need to be answered here. But for now, you can just sit back and enjoy the thought of your favorite Android app running at 120 FPS.