Well, I guess I think there are kind of two levels of nativity. Operating System native, i.e. uses API's from the OS directly. But then I think there's also ha

Well, I guess I think there are kind of two levels of nativity. Operating System native, i.e. uses API's from the OS directly. But then I think there's also hardware native, which means the IR that the code gets compiled into executes directly on the hardware. Both Java and C are compiled into a binary IR (Intermediate Representation), C is executed directly on the CPU (provided it's in the proper format: ELF, etc...), whereas Java is run in a compatibility layer, the JVM, which interprets the IR into native machine instructions. I don't think Java is hardware native,but it can be OS native, making use of features or APIs that are OS dependent. I feel like Android itself is native, it's compiled into direct machine code by each vendor, but I don't feel that the applications that run on it are hardware native, but they are native to Android, in that Dalvik and Hotspot bytecode are incompatible with each other's respective VM. I guess I'm just a pedantic dickweed :|