Google Android 17 will improve phone smoothness: threads no longer "queue and wait," and app frame drops decrease by 4%

Tech media Android Authority published a blog post today (February 18) reporting that in Android 17, Google plans to introduce the DeliQueue system, which optimizes the MessageQueue’s memory locking mechanism to reduce mutual waiting times among software threads.

IT House quotes the blog post, explaining that during daily use of Android phones, users often encounter issues such as unresponsive scrolling or operation lag, usually caused by the system dropping frames to handle tasks.

The root cause of this phenomenon lies in system threads needing to queue to access the core component MessageQueue when handling UI display. Once a thread locks the queue, other threads are forced to idle, preventing critical processing tasks from completing promptly.

To address this issue, Google plans to overhaul MessageQueue at the system core in Android 17, introducing a lock-free data structure called DeliQueue.

The new system abandons the previous “one thread per service” locking model, allowing more precise control over specific memory locations. This means threads no longer need to wait long periods for locks to be released and can handle tasks more flexibly and in parallel.

To illustrate this mechanism more intuitively, Google uses the example of “queueing at a deli”: just as customers can take a number and their order isn’t strictly limited to the queue order, DeliQueue allows threads to be scheduled flexibly based on actual resource availability, thereby avoiding performance congestion caused by waiting.

Google reports that the new system reduces dropped frame rates by 4% in applications, with an even greater reduction of 7.7% in system interfaces and launchers. Google is currently testing the DeliQueue system internally and has fixed two known vulnerabilities.