Android 4.2 has performance optimizations, a refreshed system UI, and great new features for users and developers. This document provides a glimpse of what’s new for developers.
See the Android 4.2 APIs document for a detailed look at the new developer APIs.
Find out more about the new Jelly Bean features for users at www.android.com.
Faster, Smoother, More Responsive
Android 4.2 builds on the performance improvements already included in Jelly Bean —vsync timing, triple buffering, reduced touch latency, and CPU input boost — and adds new optimizations that make Android even faster.
Improvements in the hardware-accelerated 2D renderer make common animations such as scrolling and swiping smoother and faster. In particular, drawing is optimized for layers, clipping and certain shapes (rounded rects, circles and ovals).
A variety of WebView rendering optimizations make scrolling of web pages smoother and free from jitter and lags.
Android’s Renderscript Compute is the first computation platform ported to run directly on a mobile device GPU. It automatically takes advantage of GPU computation resources whenever possible, dramatically improving performance for graphics and image processing. Any app using Renderscript on a supported device can benefit immediately from this GPU integration without recompiling.
Useful Link: Rooting the Android Device
