ART v Dalvik

[Yesevil]

Hi,

Was just wondering if anyone can advise, briefly, on the pros and cons of switching to ART instead of Dalvik.

Will switching to Dalvik improve my battery life, as mentioned on another topic?
What will happen to my apps that aren't compatible with Dalvik?

Thanks in advance

 

[jj14x]

Hi,

Was just wondering if anyone can advise, briefly, on the pros and cons of switching to ART instead of Dalvik.

Will switching to Dalvik improve my battery life, as mentioned on another topic?
What will happen to my apps that aren't compatible with Dalvik?

Thanks in advance

ART is supposed to give you better battery life. Dalvik is the current default, but it looks like Android L will switch over to ART.
Apps that aren't compatible with ART will just not work if you switch to ART.

Read more about using ART on 4.4 here and here

On Android L, the battery gains are supposedly much better (but that may be because of use of ART and other optimizations)

 

[exninja]

I just made the switch last night. I noticed 1% less drop in battery on my way to work hardly scientific tho. It could have also been a result of wiping my cache partition last night.

 

[Hook]

I tried it out but really didn't notice much difference, in part because the N5 is so freaking fast to begin with, and went back to Dalvik. Also, with the number of reboots I do with ROM flashing and testing, I found the slower boot up annoying since it really didn't result in much speed benefit.

Since some ROM devs aren't supporting it until it becomes official, I'm happy to wait until it becomes official as well.

 

[Crashdamage]

Been running ART since the option became available on both of our phones (N4, N5) and a tablet (N7). Seems a little faster. Perfectly stable, no problems with app compatibility.

 

[sherlock5545]

The only difference I noticed is apps being a bit faster and the navigation keys being more responsive on ART. However, there are apps still having some issues with the new runtime. As Android L is very close to official release, I'd rather wait and stay on Dalvik for now. Also, note that ART increases the size of all apps so you'll end up having less storage.