What a day this has been at the Google I/O!

I have run around and talked to numerous extremely interesting people, including Googlers who have hinted (nothing is official until it's announced tomorrow and, of course, they could be trying to trick us) and pretty much unofficially confirmed some very interesting details about Android 2.2, also known as Froyo.

Performance

First up, I have confirmed that JIT will definitely be included. As we already broke earlier, simple benchmarks show a 450% improvement in speed over Android 2.1 Eclair, due to JIT.

But this is just the beginning. JIT can't help performance everywhere and in some situations has no effect at all, such as I/O operations or while running native code. JIT won't help much during boot either.

This is why the Android team has spent a significant amount of time analyzing and optimizing every little bit of reported slowdowns and inefficiencies they could find.

With Froyo, there was finally enough time to take a breather and organize proper analysis, set up profiling, and enable reporting of every little unexpected lag that the phones experience.

In order to accomplish this, a whole swarm of Google developers have been running around sporting dev or even nightly builds of Froyo on their Nexus Ones in the last month or maybe even few months.

Frankly, I am shocked that so little information leaked out when so many people had Froyo installed - not even a glimpse. Google, you are either the new Apple security-wise or your employees really respect you (I think both are true).

I found out that a lot of problems and slowdowns were identified using the system described above and fixed.

For example, one such bug was Android writing the same large XML file during bootup, 30 times rather than 1. I/O operations are expensive, so this significantly slowed down the boot time. Once the bug was identified, fixing it was a matter of a few minutes (set a flag if a file has already been written and check it).

You can think of Froyo as a release focused on slimming Android down and making it fit and more robust. Froyo is supposed to be healthier than ice-cream, isn't it? Maybe there's a hidden meaning there.

We've seen the leaked from 4chan "Auto-update" screenshots before but nobody has been able to confirm their validity. From what I've been hearing while running around today, this is indeed true - we will finally have auto-updating apps.

But that is not all we will have. Auto-updating apps without having an ability to mass update all apps needing updating wouldn't make much sense - if Google were to work on one feature, it would have worked on the other too.

So I can unofficially confirm, based on what I managed to scope out today, that the mass update feature is indeed going to be present as well.

I believe this is going to make a lot of people who have been requesting a single button to update all apps happy.

Surprises

Another thing that was relayed pretty clearly and with an air of mystery, is that there will be surprises that nobody has even said anything about. I couldn't find out anything further here, but this is going to make tomorrow's keynote that much more special and the wait that much more unbearable.

Other Stuff

I am not going to mention WiFi tethering as we already confirmed it and backed it up with some exclusive screenshots, after TechCrunch broke the story.

I am also not going to talk about Flash 10.1 support here - clearly, we already know we will be getting Flash, and it will be awesome (though this last part remains to be seen after testing in the wild).

Conclusion

We're bringing you as much information as we were able to gather but take everything with a grain of salt, people - as always, until everything is confirmed, nothing is confirmed.

7 hours until the keynote!