It's not bogged down by the same performance. There may be times where idiomatic Scala code generates more garbage than similar Java code and thus has more of a

It's not bogged down by the same performance. There may be times where idiomatic Scala code generates more garbage than similar Java code and thus has more of an impact on Dalvik performance but these are straight forward to work around and well understood. For the vast majority of apps this isn't a problem. Scala does suffer a similar size issue where the Scala standard library is a few megs and you don't really want to ship that around with your app. You can use ProGuard to strip out the parts of the Scala standard library you aren't using. This is baked into build tools (like jberkel's excellent android-plugin for sbt) so it's usually seamless. FWIW, I've got a couple Android apps on the Play store written in Scala.