> Apps you download from the store are compiled to bytecode that is then compiled to native code at installation time. This is only true in Android 5 and 6. S

> Apps you download from the store are compiled to bytecode that is then compiled to native code at installation time. This is only true in Android 5 and 6. Starting with Android 7, due to amount of time it took to compile in tiny ARM CPUs, limited optimisation levels, and Java's dynamic abilities, there was a full reboot of this process. Which is an Assembly hand written interpreter, intended to allow for quick startup in case the JIT cache is empty, a JIT compiler, and an AOT compiler that only compiles the hot paths that the JIT already had a look into, and during idle times while charging so that it can have the CPU all for itself when doing optimisations. Additionally several other measures were taken to optmise this process, via Play Store Services, devices can share PGO data gathered by the JIT so that each device doesn't have to start from scratch, thus the interpreter step can be skipped when metadata is available. To further improve this process, developers can do training runs, and ship the metadata themselves on the APKs. Also during the compilation to native code, depending on code access patterns, the executable code gets remapped so that there is an optimal alignment for the instruction cache when reading from the executable code cache. Google certainly offers clang as part of the NDK, and game development is one of the few officially supported scenarios to run native code on Android.