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Articles

Six long pieces, each built around a measurement rather than an opinion. Code is C++ unless stated, the devices are named by class rather than model, and every table says how it was produced.

• packaging2026-10-01

  Packaging: APK, AAB and the size budget that actually matters

  Split by ABI, split by density, drop the formats nobody uses, and stop compressing what you already compressed. A worked example, from 410 MB to 197 MB.

  11 min read

• memory2026-09-10

  Memory on mobile: budgets, allocators and the OOM killer

  A 4 GB phone does not give your game 4 GB. Where the numbers come from, how to measure a real budget, and why the low-memory killer is not the thing that kills you.

  12 min read

• power2026-08-06

  Power and thermal budget: designing for a phone that gets hot

  Sustained performance is a battery and heat problem before it is a GPU problem. How to find your device's real budget and spend it deliberately.

  10 min read

• profiling2026-07-09

  Profiling one frame: where 16.6 ms actually goes

  A frame budget broken into CPU, GPU and presentation, measured with Perfetto and a Vulkan timestamp query, on a phone that costs less than a monitor.

  13 min read

• audio2026-06-18

  Low-latency audio: AAudio, Oboe and the numbers behind the knob

  Buffer size, performance mode and sample rate interact in ways the documentation does not spell out. Measurements on five phones, and the settings we ship.

  9 min read

• vulkan2026-05-07

  NDK and Vulkan: from an empty folder to the first frame

  No engine, no framework: a CMake project, a native activity, a swapchain and a clear colour. Every step, with the errors you will hit and what they mean.

  14 min read

How these are written

Each article starts with a scene we can run, a device we can hold and a number we can repeat. Where a result depends on a vendor driver or a price tier, the text says so. Where we could not reproduce something, we write that too: a claim we cannot measure does not go in.

The code in the articles is small enough to paste into a project, and it is published under CC0: use it, change it, ship it, no attribution needed. The prose is ours and stays ours.