This Android Update Could Make Your Phone Faster Than Ever

an android phone displays the android mascot – Zohaib Ahmed/SlashGear

Android phones have gotten pretty fast over the last few years, to the point where faster processors don’t really bring about the noticeable speed improvements they used to. So now, the goalposts have shifted over to software — sometimes in places people don’t directly interact with.

Case in point: the latest improvement arrives in the form of something called Automatic Feedback-Directed Optimization (AutoFDO). AutoFDO is a kernel-level optimization, which is a pretty big deal, considering the kernel is the deepest layer of the operating system. It handles how your phone’s processor talks to apps, hardware, and everything in between. The last time we saw a performance enhancement that went this deep was perhaps the 2018 switch to a modern code translator for the Pixel 3.

As for what it actually does, the simplest explanation is that AutoFDO uses real-world data to make heavily used code faster. Android is written in code that your phone’s processor can’t directly understand, so a tool called the compiler has to translate it into something the hardware can actually run. Doing this can be pretty resource-intensive, though, so the compiler takes shortcuts. It makes tiny guesses, thousands of them, about how to optimize the code along the way. This is done by picking which functions matter most, or which paths are likely to be taken.

The problem is that these decisions are based on general rules and not on how people actually use their phones. AutoFDO changes this up by feeding the compiler real usage data. While there are a lot of great Android apps people don’t know about, this data was actually collected from lab tests where Google ran the 100 most popular apps on Pixel devices.

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