Back in 2008 when Android phones were first released, there was a blog post[1] about Dalvik's (lack of) performance and I decided to try it on my Sony Ericsson K800i[2], which was released in 2006 and ran Java ME apps (and miraculously even had an "app store" even though Apple wouldn't invent it until 2008).

The microbenchmark in the blog post ran in 922 milliseconds on the Google G1 (a.k.a. HTC Dream), or 520 without the assignment in the loop. On my K800i the corresponding numbers were 190–220 ms and 135–165 ms – although I had to scale the size of the buffer down from 1228800 to 1100000 elements due to lack of memory, but scaling the results up by that factor the K800i was still 3–4 times as fast as the G1.

Hardware-wise the G1 should have been much faster. It had an ARM11 at 528 MHz and the K800i had (I think) an ARM9 at somewhere around or below 200 MHz.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20091123074004/http://occipital.c...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_K800i

Every feature phone on the planet used to run Java ME without any problem. Dalvik may have had some optimisations, but to claim Java would have run "crazy slow" is unlikely to be the reason Google chose the implement their own VM.

Dalvik has nothing to do with Android's popularity. Android's popularity is caused by.

1. Price - you can buy an unlocked Android device for $50.

2. It is free to manufacturers

3. No alternative for phone manufacturers at first. By the time Windows Phone git good enough, it was too late.

No, Android became popular due to the Google loving hipsters that believed in FOSS and AOSP, and OEMs that just love getting an OS for free with almost no strings attached.

Every other commercial Java vendor in this planet doesn't have any issue using standard Java tools, compiling with Java licenses and deliver JVMs able to run in embedded devices with soft and hard real time constraints.

Google for all their might is a special snowflake not able to do what the rest of the Java world is capable of.