ART was first introduced as an alternative runtime environment in Android 4.4 (KitKat) and completely replaced Dalvik in the subsequent major release of Android 5.0 (Lollipop).
In order to explore the relationships between Dalvik and ART, let's take a look at this diagram:
As you can see, both Dalvik and ART share the same logic at the beginning and operate with the same DEX and APK files to maintain backward compatibility. The major differences are in how the files are actually processed and executed. Instead of interpreting DEX bytecode, ART translates it to machine code instructions in order to achieve better performance results. This way, instead of generating ODEX files at install time, ART compiles apps using the dex2oat tool to generate ELF files (already covered in the previous chapters) containing native code. Originally, they also contained DEX code, but on modern Android systems...
