We’re excited to welcome Google’s Android Performance Lead Engineer, Shai Barack, for a deep technical session on how Android evolves under real-world performance pressure.

At the heart of Android’s application framework sits a work queue originally written almost 20 years ago - back when phones had a single CPU and coarse-grained locking was “good enough”. In this talk, we’ll explore how that legacy code was rethought and rewritten using modern concurrent, lock-free programming techniques, and what it takes to ship such changes in Android 17.

This is a true under-the-hood talk: state-of-the-art concurrency algorithms, performance debugging with Perfetto, and even reading disassembled code. If you care about performance, correctness, and how Android really works, don’t miss this one. And don't worry, you don’t need to be an expert — if you’re curious how Android works under the hood, this talk will level you up.

Abstract:
At the heart of Android’s application framework is a work queue. The work queue was written 20 years ago, when phones had one CPU and solving concurrency problems with a giant lock was acceptable. In this talk I’ll review how we rewrote this legacy code to use modern concurrent, lock-free programming techniques. We’ll look at state-of-the-art algorithms, troubleshoot lock contention and priority inversion problems with Perfetto, and even read disassembled code in Compiler Explorer. Buckle up!

About Shai Barack:
An OS nerd at heart, he's been at Google, working on operating systems for the past 14 years. He currently leads the Android Platform Performance team.