Google buys Flexycore, creator of a “10x speed boost” app for Android
French site L'Expansion is
reporting that Google has completed a year-long acquisition of the
company Flexycore. Flexycore's most prominent product is "droidbooster,"
an app that claimed to make an Android device run "ten times faster."
While that claim might strain the bounds of belief, the company was
reputable enough to have a profile on the ARM partner site, and its
founder is the former head of R&D for Texas Instruments.
The supposed 10x speed boost came from generating heavily optimized
ARM binaries from Android's normal Dalvik code. Droidbooster also
claimed to increase battery life, presumably because a sped-up device
would spend less time processing and more time in a low-power state.
While Flexycore's website is down, its YouTube account still works,
which means we can watch a demo!
One thing you'll notice from the video is that it is extremely old. It shows the droidbooster tech running on a Froyo-equipped Nexus One. Indeed, FlexyCore doesn't seem to have done anything
on the Internet for the last two years. The company actively promoted
its product, releasing 11 videos in a one-year span, and then just
stopped. The lack of recent activity makes it unclear if Flexycore has
continued development outside the public eye.
The most pressing question is this: does a speed boost that worked in
2010 on Android 2.2 still function today? FlexyCore was obviously
working on something significant—Google felt the company was worth
purchasing for $23.1 million.
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