A performance comparison between Java and C on the Nexus 5
I've been an Android user since my first smartphone. I've heard several times iPhone users complain that Android equivalents of their iOS apps felt sluggish; though they couldn't pinpoint it exactly. If these numbers are true, it might well be true. Objective-C might not suffer from such a significant slowdown.<p>I think it is one of the things Apple gets right; they know what matters. As an outsider to the iOS/Mac ecosystem I've often felt that Apple makes trade-offs in productivity to achieve a better experience for the end user. While these tests aren't indicative of typical app performance (most apps aren't doing math in a loop), an order of magnitude performance difference is enough to show up on many apps.<p>I wonder if Google made a mistake by not choosing native code for Android apps. We have heard forever about Java (and other run-times) getting close to C in performance, but outside of  specific test cases native code still runs circles around everything else out there.