Android doesn't really have that many layers. It often comes off more complex than it really is, mostly from pretty good design work on the Android designers si

Android doesn't really have that many layers. It often comes off more complex than it really is, mostly from pretty good design work on the Android designers side. Calculations: CPU - Dalvik VM doing JIT into ARM ASM Graphics: GPU - OpenGL/Drivers -- (a) Directly running OpenGL calls (native) -- (b) Dalvik VM doing JIT --- Semi-lightweight translation of 2D drawings You don't really lose more than a couple percent on the 'many layers' compared to writing raw assembler, aside from using Android's View framework which is about as performant as most GUI toolkits in most situations.