Demystifying Low Latency Audio on Android

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" summary

Android historically ships high audio latency (400+ ms on old devices) but modern flagships hit ~15–20 ms; professional-grade round-trip is <10 ms professional-grade. Native paths (NDK, JNI) beat JVM APIs (AudioRecord/AudioTrack) by avoiding bytecode and scheduling overhead. Oboe is the recommended C++ library (API 16+, picks OpenSL ES or AAudio automatically, works around OEM bugs, manages sample-rate and buffer-length probing) and simplifies native streams though it is not thread-safe. Expect Bluetooth to add large overheads (tests show ~200–300 ms with AAC).

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" chapters (18)

1. 0:00Introduction to low latency audio
2. 1:53High performance audio needs
3. 3:17OpenSL ES and AAudio overview
4. 4:19Understanding audio latency
5. 6:03Audio path in Android
6. 9:53Types of audio latency
7. 11:42Minimizing latency on Android
8. 13:03Latency comparison with iOS
9. 14:50History of Android latency issues
10. 17:22Root causes of Android latency
11. 20:35Sample rate and buffer length issues
12. 25:07Bluetooth audio latency challenges
13. 26:32Java vs native audio processing
14. 27:33Introducing Oboe library
15. 30:20Setting up Oboe in projects
16. 31:45Oboe pros and cons
17. 33:10Oboe resources and next steps
18. 34:41Q&A session