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There was an article posted here a while back comparing Android's screen painting to IOS. Basically, Android behaves like every other OS's screen painting API,

There was an article posted here a while back comparing Android's screen painting to IOS. Basically, Android behaves like every other OS's screen painting API, where when the screen needs to scroll, the whole thing must be re-rendered, but iOS renders the whole screen and uses a view camera to pan the screen beneath, hence fast scrolling. (Please forgive my poor use of terminology. I'm sure someone else can do a much better job of explaining this.)

tadfisher 15y ago
You're pretty much right. Apple renders their entire UI to OpenGL textures, and uses their nice GPU and scene manipulation to get the incredibly smooth feel. Android, up until Honeycomb, renders the UI in software, which ties up the UI thread with redraw events as well as input detection. You'll see the limitations of Apple's model in mobile Safari: scrolling too fast gets you to unrendered sections of the page, which must be rendered and filled in software; as well as pinch zooming, where you get a blurry zoomed texture for a moment or two while the software re-renders the page and updates the texture.