The scourge of Android is a Gingerbread man—and Google is finally ready to kill it.
Gingerbread is an older version of Android that’s still running on an alarming number of smartphones, which means that their users aren’t getting the latest Google software and developers must keep their apps compatible with the older operating system, or address the smaller, upgraded slice of the Android market.
The biggest aspect of Android 4.4 KitKat is not the new dialer or Caller ID or translucent navigation bars. Nor is it “the Google experience” that is baked heavily into the operating system. The most important aspect of Android 4.4 is Project Svelte.
Project Svelte is an effort by Google to make Android and all of Google’s apps smaller and more efficient so they can run on a wider variety of mobile hardware. That means that Android 4.4 will be able to run on devices with as little as 512MB of RAM, a number that includes many of the low-end devices that currently ship with Android 2.3 Gingerbread, which was released in December 2010.
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