Our engineers discovered USB barcode scanners were causing Android apps to freeze due to a garbage collection issue. Instead of just patching our own apps, we dug deep, found the root cause, and contributed the fix upstream to Android 16.
The result? 40% improvement in our P90 latency + a fix that benefits the entire Android ecosystem.
This is why we contribute to open source - when we make platforms better, everyone wins. 🚀
Block Engineering Blog
Ending Android USB Freezes
We investigated a main thread stall with perfetto and simpleperf, found that AOSP's USB stack can block garbage collection, and upstreamed a fix
