14 DAY TRIAL // Back in October, when Android 4.4 KitKat was revealed, Google said that the platform was developed to run smooth on devices packed with as low as 512MB of RAM.
Google’s decision to lower the hardware requirements for Android 4.4 KitKat was indeed wise and is likely to drastically decrease the platform’s fragmentation.
The main reason that handset makers did not offer major upgrades for budget-friendly smartphones was the fact that the new Android versions were not working smoothly on devices with only 512MB of RAM, among others.
Well, it looks like Google got rid of this issue thanks to the so-called Project Svelte. In an interview for ReadWrite, Dave Burke, head of engineering for Android at Google, said:
“The goal of Project Svelte was basically to reduce the memory footprint to fit into 512 megs. The way we did it, by the way ... was to take a Nexus 4 and adapt it to run at 512 megs.”
Basically, all engineers working on the project were carrying Nexus 4 units adjusted to run at 512MB of RAM probably to motivate them in getting the job done faster.
“We adapted the resolution to qHD that is 960-by-540 because that is kind of the sweet spot for entry level smartphones,” added Burke. “We reduced it from four CPUs to two CPUs. We reduced the clock frequency and whatnot. And literally a bunch of us just used that as our default phone. It was painful and it was broken to start with.”
So, not only Google’s engineers were “forced” to carry downgraded Nexus 4 devices, but most of them were using them as their default phone.
The idea seemed to have worked wonderfully and the result is Android 4.4 KitKat, which is more functional, smoother and reliable than any previous versions. Or so they say.