One aspect of CoreAudio that, IMO, contributes to low latency: CoreAudio provides the buffers to process to the AudioUnit. Not the other way around. This permit

One aspect of CoreAudio that, IMO, contributes to low latency: CoreAudio provides the buffers to process to the AudioUnit. Not the other way around. This permits CoreAudio to chain AudioUnits while minimizing buffer use. In the ideal case where all AudioUnits support the same audio stream format they are all provided the same buffers to process. Which can get close to zero-copy, zero-allocation audio rendering. I don't know enough about android to say that this is the key aspect tho. Perhaps the low level API of android is the same? I didn't find an easy reference in a quick search.