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That’s a gross misrepresentation, and far from the whole truth. (Besides, ref counting is also a garbage collection algorithm)

A huge chunk of the OS runs native stuff. Add to it that android is less strict at putting apps/processes to sleep, it’s become a much less black and white question.

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You are missing the point here – garbage collected languages (the "allocate it and forget about it" style, not refcounting like Objective-C) require much more memory to perform at the same level as a language where memory is explicitly allocated and deallocated.

Yes, I’m fairly familiar with garbage collectors and these are called tracing GCs. My point is that a big chunk of the system doesn’t use these, so you can’t just put the blame on one thing.

Would one percent be responsible for a system’s bad performance if that is “slow”?

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