Multithreaded Rendering on Android with Litho and Infer
Article Summary
Meta's News Feed team solved what many thought impossible: smooth multithreaded rendering on Android at massive scale.
The team combined two open-source tools (Litho for background layout and Infer for static analysis) to move expensive UI computations off the main thread. This required ensuring thread safety across thousands of classes without slowing down developer velocity.
Key Takeaways
- Android's 16.7ms frame budget makes complex UI rendering nearly impossible on one thread
- Litho's immutable architecture enables asynchronous layout computation on background threads
- Infer caught hundreds of concurrency bugs before production through automated static analysis
- Initial threading actually hurt performance due to contention between layout and UI threads
Critical Insight
Meta proved multithreaded Android rendering works at scale by pairing architectural patterns with automated concurrency analysis, both now available as open-source tools.
