The problem with Android isn't Java, but that it has one of most terrible, buggy, undocumented and confusing SDKs I have ever seen. It tries hard to touch every anti-pattern on the planet.

Android could be much more performant, but one would have to replace almost everything regarding UI and layout. Apps built with Dart cannot be much faster unless they do that.

I thought about rewriting/extending the base-class "View.java" to get more performance and less bugs (the default layouting algorithm seems to have exponential runtime! [0]), but the problem is

a) it would break compatibility with many other UI-components and

b) the behaviour and structure of the code is almost impossible to understand and imitate.

Just look at this beast: 8866 LOC without comments in one class [1].

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17493819/is-android-layo...

[1] http://grepcode.com/file/repository.grepcode.com/java/ext/co...