Abstract: Systems and methods for adaptive thread control in a portable computing device (PCD) are provided. During operation a plurality of parallelized tasks for an application on the PCD are created. The application is executed with at least one processor of the PCD processing at least one main thread of the application. A determination is made whether a portion of the application being executed includes one or more of the parallelized tasks. A determination is made whether to perform the parallelized tasks in parallel. Based on the determination whether to perform the parallelized tasks in parallel, the parallelized tasks are executed with the at least one main thread of the application if the determination is not to perform the parallelized tasks in parallel, or if the determination is to perform the parallelized tasks in parallel, at least one worker thread is activated to execute the parallelized task in parallel with the main thread.