One of the Achilles heels of Android, in addition to updates, is the audio latency, that’s why there are hardly any real-time audio apps for professionals, but luckily that started to change a few years ago.
In the last four years Google took very seriously reduce audio latency in the Android ecosystem, and today the company is analyzing just how much this essential feature for audio professionals has improved.
Android audio latency improvements
Google is analyzing the suitability of its mobile operating system for real-time audio apps to encourage developers to release their apps on Android, which have yet to launch their most popular iOS audio apps on Android. The company has achieved reduce audio latency eight times during those four years.
It all started in 2017 with Android 8.0 when Google added the high performance API Audio after several months of direct collaboration with OEM manufacturers. In 2018, he launched Oboe, a C ++ wrapper that provides an API very similar to AAudio which calls AAudio when available or OpenSL ES if not. In 2019, the Pixel 3a becomes the first mobile to offer 10ms audio latency (maximum latency that the human ear does not detect). In 2021, the Oboe library exceeds 4 billion downloads.
In 2017 the audio latency was 109ms on average, but that year we were able to find mobiles with 222ms and mobiles with 36ms latency. Four years later, in 2021, the average latency is 28 ms on the most popular mobile devices and none are high-end, so expect the high-end to offer lower latencies.
All these figures are from the round trip audio latency, and that involves audio input, audio processing, and audio output. If there is no audio input and the sound events depend only on the touch of the screen then we would have to subtract the 5 ms of audio input latency and add the 20 ms of the average of the screen. touch, 15 ms more delay.
Google’s work to improve audio latency is still far from over. Despite significant reductions, a maximum latency of 20ms is still required for Android professional audio applications, being the 10 ms long-term goal.
Vía | Android Developers
