Ilios

Native code on Android is tricky. We also ran into this issue where the Chrome WebView didn't resend signals properly: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=483399. Trying to debug errors that 1) is in 3rd party dependencies and 2) depends on the order you load them is is really not fun.

It is hard to describe in a few sentences, but keywords are bit-packing, cache awareness, vectorization and a zero-copy architecture.

Realm uses a custom C++ core that is different from SQLite, and we published a bit about the architecture here http://realm.io/news/introducing-realm/#fast. Both iOS and Android API's are just wrappers around this core.

Christian from Realm here. Actually there is no technical limitation that prevents Realm running on normal java. Our current focus is just on making the best possible mobile developer experience which means that the current API is tightly coupled to the Android API. We do have plans for a pure Java API down the line though.

Anything that will reduce the API hell that is working with SQLite on Android is worth a second look. Better speed is just icing on the cake.