Android audio latency: the 10 ms problem

I’ve seen people post a few times about Android audio latency, and thought folks might like this explainer that I stumbled across, which talks about the problems that even native Android apps have:

http://superpowered.com/androidaudiopathlatency/

To date, the Google Nexus 9 performs best in Android round-trip audio latency measurement tests.

The best result is 35 ms using a USB sound card or a special audio dongle directly connecting the headphone connector’s mic input and output, to disable the built-in microphone array’s noise canceling/feedback destroying feature which adds about ~13 ms of additional latency.

So, using the same model as above, let’s decompose the 35 ms best-case round-trip audio latency of Google Nexus 9: