Android is the opposite of barebones. It comes loaded with crap, much of it is using "stop the world" garbage collection while also producing lots of garbage. Building on Java is Android's original sin. You could still build an NDK app, talk to OpenGL, and hit 60Hz on low-end devices, years ago, but that's not how most stuff is developed. There are layers upon layers of crap between applications and the hardware, to the point where apparently people have come to believe that you need special OS interfaces to do smooth animation.