Wouldn't that be up to the device manufacturer and in the case of the app themselves, the app devs? Samsung has TouchWiz and LG has (I think it's called) Home.

Wouldn't that be up to the device manufacturer and in the case of the app themselves, the app devs? Samsung has TouchWiz and LG has (I think it's called) Home. There are 3rd party launchers available to download that will use a smaller footprint. I had an older HTC phone that was great for dev testing perf on lower end devices. It had a terrible memory leak that caused the phone to run slower overall, and you had to make numerous tweaks to fix it. One of them was to replace the default launcher. It made an immediate difference. Although I do concede that Google's apps are terrible for lower end devices.