Android uses virtual machine for running the application software on it which is pre-written .Do you know android has officially replaced the Dalvik Virtual Machine(DVM) by Android Runtime (ART) from android 5.0 lollipop . This is because; there are some major performance improvements that ART brings which were lacking in Dalvik. So today I am going to give short pros and cons of using ART over DVM.
Advantages
- ART uses Ahead of Time (AOT) approach, which compiles apps when they are installed, resulting in faster load times and lower processor usage.
- Improves battery performances as power utilized to interpreted byte codes line by line is saved.
- It's extremely fast and smooth. Apps are very fast running and responsive.
Disadvantages
- It consumes much more internal storage space since it stores compiled apps in addition to the apks. For low storage device, this can be a huge disadvantage.
- Cache is built during the first boot, so the boot time is considerably more in case of ART then DVM.
- As bytes codes are converted to native machine codes on installation itself, installation takes more time.