[7] For Jelly Bean, work was made on optimizing the operating system's visual performance and responsiveness through a series of changes referred to as "Project Butter": graphical output is now triple buffered, vsync is used across all drawing operations, and the CPU is brought to full power when touch input is detected—preventing the lag associated with inputs made while the processor is in a low-power state.

This allows the addition of certain forms of functionality without having to distribute an upgrade to the operating system itself, addressing the infamous "fragmentation" problems experienced by the Android ecosystem.

Google announced an intent to release 4.1 updates for existing Nexus devices and the Motorola Xoom tablet by mid-July.

[7][12][13] In late 2012, following the official release of Jelly Bean, a number of third-party Android OEMs began to prepare and distribute updates to 4.1 for their existing smartphones and tablets, including devices from Acer, HTC, LG, Motorola, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba.

A pane of quick settings toggles (a feature often seen in OEM Android skins) was also added to the notification area— accessible by either swiping down with two fingers on phones, swiping down from the top-right edge of the screen on tablets, or pressing a button on the top-right corner of the notifications pane.

[8][17][20] To promote consistency between device classes, Android tablets now use an expanded version of the interface layout and home screen used by phones by default, with centered navigation keys and a status bar across the top.

Small tablets on Android are optimized primarily for use in a portrait (vertical) orientation, giving apps expanded versions of the layouts used by phones.

On large tablets, navigation buttons were previously placed in the bottom-left of a bar along the bottom of the screen, with the clock and notification area in the bottom-right.

[25] Android 4.3 consisted of further low-level changes, including Bluetooth low energy and AVRCP support, SELinux, OpenGL ES 3.0, new digital rights management (DRM) APIs, the ability for apps to read notifications, a VP8 encoder, and other improvements.