Improving UI responsiveness in Android by restructured rendering

Mobile operating systems, such as Android, are increasingly used across diverse applications, where ensuring high responsiveness to user interactions is critical, particularly in mission-critical and real-time scenarios. Mobile operating systems typically process user interaction events and UI rendering on the same thread, commonly referred to as the main thread of a mobile application. As a result, user interaction handling can face significant delays when blocked by overloaded UI rendering tasks, compromising responsiveness. Existing mobile operating systems lack effective mechanisms to mitigate this issue. This paper addresses the problem by restructuring the UI rendering workflow to improve responsiveness in the presence of heavy rendering workloads. Specifically, two techniques are proposed that are tailored to whether the event handling results require screen display. Experimental results demonstrate improvements in both average-case and worst-case response times of event handling, enhancing the UI responsiveness. Although the implementation focuses on Android, the proposed approaches are adaptable to other mobile operating systems with similar rendering architectures, such as iOS and HarmonyOS.