I can only guess, but I'd say it's a combination of factors. First, the JIT on my quad-core i7 can be pretty intense. I'm more willing to pay the overhead than

I can only guess, but I'd say it's a combination of factors. First, the JIT on my quad-core i7 can be pretty intense. I'm more willing to pay the overhead than I am on a device that has a tiny battery and gets hot in my pocket. So the JIT on my desktop is going to be better than the one on my phone. Second, Java is mostly a server language these days. The types of programs that run on servers are going to be more amenable to profile-guided optimizations than UI heavy event handling code that constitutes a large part of phone apps. And on desktops and servers, it just doesn't matter that much. Particularly on a server, startup time is pretty much irrelevant. So the downsides to JITs are minimized due to the nature of the workload.