Replacing Dalvik, the process virtual machine originally used by Android, ART performs the translation of the application's bytecode into native instructions that are later executed by the device's runtime environment.

[2] Android 2.2 "Froyo" brought trace-based just-in-time (JIT) compilation into Dalvik, optimizing the execution of applications by continually profiling applications each time they run and dynamically compiling frequently executed short segments of their bytecode into native machine code.

[2][5][6] Android 4.4 "KitKat" introduced a technology preview of ART as an alternative runtime environment to Dalvik, which remained the default virtual machine.

Google Play cloud profiles allow apps to be optimized on installation, which helps avoid the initial performance issues present on Android 7.0 to 8.1.

[14] ART was updated with a new garbage collector (GC) utilizing the Linux userfaultfd system call in Android 13.