"We updated our findings with the recent improvements in Android M (Marshmallow), and recently released a solution for Android’s USB audio and MIDI challenges, opening a market of 1.1 billion devices for pro audio application creators."
Those are two separate things:
1. Updated analysis on the latency with regards to Marshmallow.
2. Superpowered USB Audio and MIDI SDK opens a market of 1.1 billion devices.
A brief skim of the article they link regarding Marshmallow [1] provides this quote:
> As readers may recall, 10ms round-trip audio latency is the threshold that must be met by Android to be considered truly 'pro audio'.
This wasn't possible before Marshmallow (per aforementioned article), and therefore pro-quality audio apps are still only truly possible on 10% of Android devices. So the market is opened up for 100 million devices.
I'm not saying it's not a huge number of devices. But it's not as huge as the blog states.
I'm one of the authors of the article, and the CTO of Superpowered. I apologize if the article was confusing.
Marshmallow improves audio latency here and there on some devices, but even Android N has the fundamental audio stack problems we mention in the articles.
There is no Android version delivering <= 10 ms round-trip audio latency.
Audio can be handled by built-in hardware or external (USB) hardware.
External:
Android is not able to deliver glitch-free low latency audio on USB devices. We introduced a solution for this last month, that's one of the links on the top of the article. It opens up a market of 1.1 billion devices (meaning, Android 4.4.4 and up) for USB audio on Android.
Built-in:
The current article introduces a demo solution for the built-in audio hardware.
It's open to more of them the 10% that currently have it. Whether the OEM provides a build of Android Marshmallow or not plays a roll for most consumers. Quite a few consumers have the option to unlock their device and bypass the OEM to get Android Marshmallow on their device (Cyanogen et al).
Those are two separate things:
1. Updated analysis on the latency with regards to Marshmallow.
2. Superpowered USB Audio and MIDI SDK opens a market of 1.1 billion devices.