Things have improved quite a bit recently. Daniel Solano Gomez is the pioneer here, and Alex Yakushev made it a lot simpler by creating the lein-droid plugin fo

Things have improved quite a bit recently. Daniel Solano Gomez is the pioneer here, and Alex Yakushev made it a lot simpler by creating the lein-droid plugin for leiningen last summer. It will impose a few seconds of load time no matter what, so it is best for long-running apps where loading time isn't as important. The cost in runtime speed, memory consumption, and APK size are also present, but aren't a big issue in my experience. The same Clojure optimization rules apply. I think things will get better and better once more people use Clojure to write Android apps. It will be a signal to the core devs that it's an important platform. Currently, you must use a fork of 1.5 that includes a few necessary modifications.