Joe Maring / Android Authority
TL;DR Google is introducing a new system in Android 17 to reduce time software threads spend waiting for each other to complete.
By revising how access to memory is temporarily locked, DeliQueue lets threads run with fewer interruptions.
That could result in a 4% reduction in apps dropping frames, or as high as 7.7% across the Android system UI.
You may not even be consciously thinking about it, but chances are you notice that something’s up when your Android phone isn’t running as smoothly as it could be. Everything still gets done — you swipe around, navigating the system UI, jumping in and out of apps — but sometimes scarifies need to be made for Android to keep up with you, and that can mean dropping frames. You might see it as stuttering, or scrolling that’s not quite as smooth as at other times. But with Android 17, Google’s introducing some changes that could make this phenomenon quite a bit less pronounced.
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Over on its Android Developer Blog, Google shares a rather technical dive into changes coming to MessageQueue in Android 17. “What the heck is MessageQueue,” you ask? It’s a core part of the system Android apps use to display their UI.
The problem is, so far software threads have been able to temporarily lock the queue as they work with it, and that can lead to situations where one thread has to wait longer than it should for another to release the lock. If that takes too long, important processes don’t get completed in time, leading to user-facing consequences like dropped frames.
Google’s been aware of this limitation for some time, and the solution was clear, if not a little overwhelming: transition MessageQueue to a lock-free data structure. Basically, rather than locking out the entire queue, Android 17 implements a new system called DeliQueue that supports much more granular restrictions on specific locations in memory.
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