Android has traditionally been very stingy with memory. Like really stingy. It depended on the device but back in those days you could not assume your app could use more than 16MB of RAM. That was the default heap size limit. High-res devices often had the limit set to 24MB.
Only starting with Android 3.x apps could request more (largeHeap setting in the manifest).
By contrast, iPhones around that time had 2GB of RAM but an app could use almost all of it.
When using garbage collection there is a trade-off between memory usage and performance. If you run the garbage collector a lot, memory usage is low but performance is crap (because it’s spending a lot of CPU cycles on the GC), if you rarely run it the performance is good but memory usage goes up by a lot (because memory isn’t released often enough). You have to pick a point between those two extremes.
Turns out that if you want to have similar performance as a non-GC language you use about 3 times as much RAM compared to the non-GC language.
You’d have to rewrite about 17 years worth of Android software for that. They chose a garbage collector based programming language/VM, can’t replace that with something more efficient without basically rewriting all software. Looks like Apple made the right choice here by going with a reference counting scheme.
It's not like there is any sort of ecoconomic loss from kicking Israel out.
The event’s main sponsor is an Israeli company.
No, it’s not as simple as that. A large part of Android is written in C++ and not Java or Kotlin. Think of things like the web browser. Also things like more demanding games will be written in C++ so they won’t be affected by this at all.
It’s mostly the simpler Java/Kotlin based apps, which will be a majority of the apps on the Play Store. They don’t necessarily need the performance, but they will be more wasteful with memory than comparable iOS apps.