During the 2012 Google I/O, Android 4.1 was officially released and while major firmware versions always offer new features, it was Google's Project Butter than got most people excited.

Project Butter looked to address the not-so-consistent Android frame rates, finally making the Android UI as smooth and silky as butter.

Excessive amounts of butter can put on extra pounds. This also seemed to happen in Android. Dave Burke, Android's engineering head, the man behind project butter, talked about his most recent contribution to Google's mobile OS: Project Svelte.

Project Svelte has a goal to optimize and slim down Android so it could run on both low and high-end devices. This would reduce OEM's dependence on Gingerbread for its low-end hardware. Burke talked about the difficult and complex processes his team went through after testing Android 4.4 KitKat to run on a modified Nexus 4, using a common configuration of low-end hardware with only 512MB RAM, lower CPU clock speed, dual-cores instead of 4 and 960x540 resolution. To understand the device better, Burke and his team used the crippled Nexus 4 units as their primary device.

Project Svelte aims to reduce the footprint or memory usage of the apps running on a Nexus Google Experience device. It aims to reduce the overall footprint of the system. The project aims to fix how apps react and crash on bad memory situation and provide improved measurement and instrumentation on how apps run in Android so developers can see how memory conscious their apps are.

Google used a new developer tool called ProcStats to monitor the RAM usage of apps. Find out which ones are behaving and are eating system resources. After this, Google tweaked its apps, decoupling many of these from the operating system altogether. This trimming ultimately makes Android 4.4 KitKat the best and leanest Android release yet.

Android 4.4 KitKat on the Nexus 5 makes it faster than the LG G2, its sister device packed with the same amount of RAM and powered by the same processor. The future can be optimistic but final judgments must be reserved until the low-end KitKat devices begin to hit the market in 2014.