Poor choice of words on my part. It's not "poor code" but "inadequate code". The Android graphics API is, overall, inadequate for avoiding GCs at all costs. Java on the other hand, is not necessarily inadequate. The issues with GC and the Bitmap class are a good example: Bitmaps aren't designed to work at the lowest & fastest level but at the highest and easiest level.

Nothing beats primitives and buffers - the performance gap between the two methods is huge, that's true, but it's not a showstopper.

I don't recall gcs in other processes hurting my apps performances though. With that said, if I'm going to write a game, I'll make sure none of the threads in my process will trigger a GC past the loading/splash screen. This means no instanciations of any additional iterators, collections, Strings... The overhead of allocations is almost as bad for the framerate as the GC anyway.