Dart for Android aims to bring faster and smoother apps with 120FPS

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Published 4 May 2015

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A team inside Google is using Dart — the company’s own Web development language — to create apps for Android. Apps created using Dart will focus on speed with a target FPS of 120 frames per second.

Dart was primarily created by the Chrome javascript team over at Google with speed and high performance in mind. Right now, the Android version of Dart is being called “Sky” and is in an open source experimental stage, though it shows a lot of promise.

Dart aims to bump the current smoothness goal of most apps — 60 FPS — to 120FPS. Most Android apps struggle to even deliver a consistent 60FPS, so its unimaginable for them to deliver a consistent 120FPS without any jank. To solve this issue, Dart — which is “jank-free by design” — separates the main UI thread from APIs. This makes sure that even if the app slows down for some reason, the UI will remain unaffected.

Sky or Dart is platform agnostic meaning apps written in the language can run on Android, iOS, Windows Phone or just about any other OS that has Dart’s VM.

In addition, Dart allows developers to serve the logic through HTTP, which means they don’t need to edit their code or push an update for making any changes to the app. The downside to this is that without an active Internet connection, Dart based apps will simply not work.

Don’t expect Google to bring over Sky and Dart VM to Android anytime soon though. The company just replaced Dalvik with its new Android RunTime in Lollipop that provides significant speed improvements compared to its predecessor. So, it is unlikely that it will introduce a new VM to Android so soon.

[Via Ars Technica]