I am merely rebutting your point about how more stuff can make things perform faster. Multi-tasking comes to mind. In a simple program, a task may be run in a procedural manner without interruption. Say for example, network access. The network stack must wait for the reply to arrive, but since the program is simple, it really is waiting for it doing nothing, wasting time that can be used to perform other computations. So the code will get bigger, but the performance is increased by reducing time wasted waiting for resources. By size alone, it is more bloated, but it is increasing performance. And as I said, I haven't looked at AOSP source code so my comment is not directed towards that point as I have no knowledge about low level android stuff.