6 ms·

Those are some nice technical details and it’s right to correct them when someone gets them wrong. They ultimately, however, don’t matter†. If scrolling on one

by ugh 15y ago

Those are some nice technical details and it’s right to correct them when someone gets them wrong. They ultimately, however, don’t matter†. If scrolling on one device makes me want to throw the device at the wall while on another device I don’t even notice that I’m scrolling, then that’s a problem. I’m looking forward to trying out an Android 4.0 device to see whether I still want to throw it at the wall. That’s the only thing that matters to me. (Lagging is only part of the problem and occasional lagging really isn’t a problem. What always annoyed me much more was the delayed reaction. I swipe, nothing happens, the page scrolls. That’s extremely annoying.) — † They obviously do matter. Different implementations lead to different results. But only talking about the implementation and ignoring the results misses the point.

babebridou 15y ago
I've had the chance to enjoy dual-core android phones (Atrix, 2.2) & tablets (Xoom, 3.1). The difference compared to single-cores is gigantic, everything is super smooth, on the level of the iPhone/iPad as far as responsiveness goes for apps and home screen. I have to say that if the goal is to have a superb OS given a powerful enough phone, the goal has been met, with one (critical!) exception: Android's Webview unfortunately requires a rewrite from scratch. It just doesn't work as soon as the webview is more than a static page. Css Animations don't play anywhere near fast enough, there are furious hardware acceleration glitches whenever the touch keyboard pops up, touch events are slow as hell, etc. The article only touches the surface of the problems with the Webview component. At this point we don't care about scrolling. since one pretty much has to hack a custom Webview component just to avoid all the hardware glitches, display artifacts, buggy input handling, terrifying variations of performance from device to device...
- tseabrooks 15y ago
  I own a Toshiba Thrive for various reasons... and it's UI is a laggy steamy POS. Maybe it's manufacturer specific.
- seclorum 15y ago
  > OS given a powerful enough phone, the goal has been met, with one (critical!) exception Two exceptions: Audio latency. It is impossible to write certain classes of table applications for Android right now, because no priority was given to having a low-latency audio subsystem. Its at least as big a mess as display acceleration.
  - babebridou 15y ago
    You're 100% right. For more information on this issue: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3434 http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3434
    - sofal 15y ago
      Any Android users out there that want to see Android succeed should star the issue linked in the parent comment. There are a significant number of excellent music/audio apps for musicians and tinkerers for iOS that are not possible on Android because of the above issue. For example, search YouTube for "EveryDay Looper".
- loupgaroublond 15y ago
  I have also played with and had dual core android phones and the scrolling experience is nothing like iOS by any means. One of Steve Jobs skills is that he had an innate feel for good scrolling well beyond the feel of the average person. It might feel the same to you. You might be perfectly happy with an android. Still, android has a challenge to make the OS feel as snappy on a wider range of CPUs and platforms than iOS and the lack of of consistency, even on dual core machines is like night and day.
divtxt 15y ago
It blows my mind that people can't understand that scrolling "feels right" is a show-stopper feature for a touch interface. Meanwhile, at Apple, they would have got it right in version 0.1, and Steve Jobs would treated that as prototype quality and made the team do 10 better variations.
- mrich 15y ago
  Apple makes compromises, too. On the original iPad scrolling can be really laggy (probably only after installing a couple of apps, so you won't notice it in the store). Meanwhile, the current generation of dual core Android phones have hardly any lag issues anymore.
  - mgkimsal 15y ago
    Somewhat agreed. It can be laggy, but on mine it rarely is (but it does happen). However, it's never consistently choppy when scrolling. So... laggy sometimes, but still smooth scrolling. Every Android device I've tried (just tried a couple tablets at a Best Buy this week) have been consistently laggy (response times to swipes) and choppy scrolling.
    - Synaesthesia 15y ago
      Actually the first time I used an iPad I was blown away by the smoothness of scrolling in web pages, and it still holds up really well today IMO
      - mrich 15y ago
        Yes, because the scrolling is very well supported by hardware. But you will notice the slowness when you are zooming in/out of pages (the font smoothing takes about half a second). But Apple got it right compared to Android, and you are right that even today the iPad holds up well, considering its hardware (reminds me of the C64 which was able to smoothscroll because of hardware support, while the PC didn't manage it at that time)
  - deleted 15y ago
justincormack 15y ago
Currently reading this on Galaxy Nexus. No need to throw at wall in my view. Feels much like the iphone 3gs i had before...
- TillE 15y ago
  Meanwhile, I have a phone with nearly identical specs to the iPhone 3GS (a Motorola Milestone), and it "feels" slower than my first-gen iPod touch, which manages to do beautifully smooth scrolling with really wimpy hardware. I don't know the technical details (though I'd assume hardware acceleration is a big deal), but evidently Apple can achieve a good user experience while consuming far less resources. It's taken Android years, and I probably have to buy a new device.
- w0utert 15y ago
  So you're basically saying a brand-new phone with 3 times the specs feels much like an almost 3-year old iPhone? Amazing!
  - rieter 15y ago
    It has a much higher resolution than iPhone 3GS. In fact, it has six times more pixels.
    - foobarbazetc 15y ago
      That's irrelevant, since the GPU does all the heavy lifting.
      - ars 15y ago
        Clearly you didn't read the article.
        foobarbazetc 15y ago
        Yes, I did. It's full of excuses for sub-par up front planning on the part of the Android team (much like the reliance on SD storage early on -- LOL at that bit of idiocy. I still see emails from people complaining that the on disk size of an app is a whole 3 megabytes. Mean while, in iOS land, Infinity Blade 2 is 800 Mb). I also develop some of the biggest apps on both platforms and know more about their internals than I'd like. I'm replying to this: "It has a much higher resolution than iPhone 3GS. In fact, it has six times more pixels." That has zero to do with the article. There's nothing in my answer that's incorrect. Sure, your Galaxy Nexus can now sort of scroll reasonably smoothly (the one on my desk is okay, but still lags). But that's because of the GPU which is something like 6x faster than the GPU in a 3GS. And the fast dual core CPU helps, too. That doesn't mean that Android hasn't come a long way in ICS. But it'll never catch up to iOS in terms of rendering performance/latency. It's an impossibility due to the underlying architecture.
rbanffy 15y ago
You must realize nothing Google does to Android can fix a crappy phone. But, since Android is open-source, the manufacturer itself can change it and fix their problem. If they are nice enough, they may even submit the patch back to Google so similarly poor designs can benefit from it.
nodata 15y ago
Samsung Galaxy S2: no scrolling problems at all* * I have up-to-date firmware. Maybe that helps.

by ugh 15y ago

babebridou 15y ago

I've had the chance to enjoy dual-core android phones (Atrix, 2.2) & tablets (Xoom, 3.1). The difference compared to single-cores is gigantic, everything is super smooth, on the level of the iPhone/iPad as far as responsiveness goes for apps and home screen. I have to say that if the goal is to have a superb OS given a powerful enough phone, the goal has been met, with one (critical!) exception: Android's Webview unfortunately requires a rewrite from scratch. It just doesn't work as soon as the webview is more than a static page. Css Animations don't play anywhere near fast enough, there are furious hardware acceleration glitches whenever the touch keyboard pops up, touch events are slow as hell, etc. The article only touches the surface of the problems with the Webview component. At this point we don't care about scrolling. since one pretty much has to hack a custom Webview component just to avoid all the hardware glitches, display artifacts, buggy input handling, terrifying variations of performance from device to device...

tseabrooks 15y ago
I own a Toshiba Thrive for various reasons... and it's UI is a laggy steamy POS. Maybe it's manufacturer specific.
seclorum 15y ago
> OS given a powerful enough phone, the goal has been met, with one (critical!) exception Two exceptions: Audio latency. It is impossible to write certain classes of table applications for Android right now, because no priority was given to having a low-latency audio subsystem. Its at least as big a mess as display acceleration.
- babebridou 15y ago
  You're 100% right. For more information on this issue: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3434 http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3434
  - sofal 15y ago
    Any Android users out there that want to see Android succeed should star the issue linked in the parent comment. There are a significant number of excellent music/audio apps for musicians and tinkerers for iOS that are not possible on Android because of the above issue. For example, search YouTube for "EveryDay Looper".
loupgaroublond 15y ago
I have also played with and had dual core android phones and the scrolling experience is nothing like iOS by any means. One of Steve Jobs skills is that he had an innate feel for good scrolling well beyond the feel of the average person. It might feel the same to you. You might be perfectly happy with an android. Still, android has a challenge to make the OS feel as snappy on a wider range of CPUs and platforms than iOS and the lack of of consistency, even on dual core machines is like night and day.

divtxt 15y ago

It blows my mind that people can't understand that scrolling "feels right" is a show-stopper feature for a touch interface. Meanwhile, at Apple, they would have got it right in version 0.1, and Steve Jobs would treated that as prototype quality and made the team do 10 better variations.

mrich 15y ago
Apple makes compromises, too. On the original iPad scrolling can be really laggy (probably only after installing a couple of apps, so you won't notice it in the store). Meanwhile, the current generation of dual core Android phones have hardly any lag issues anymore.
- mgkimsal 15y ago
  Somewhat agreed. It can be laggy, but on mine it rarely is (but it does happen). However, it's never consistently choppy when scrolling. So... laggy sometimes, but still smooth scrolling. Every Android device I've tried (just tried a couple tablets at a Best Buy this week) have been consistently laggy (response times to swipes) and choppy scrolling.
  - Synaesthesia 15y ago
    Actually the first time I used an iPad I was blown away by the smoothness of scrolling in web pages, and it still holds up really well today IMO
    - mrich 15y ago
      Yes, because the scrolling is very well supported by hardware. But you will notice the slowness when you are zooming in/out of pages (the font smoothing takes about half a second). But Apple got it right compared to Android, and you are right that even today the iPad holds up well, considering its hardware (reminds me of the C64 which was able to smoothscroll because of hardware support, while the PC didn't manage it at that time)
- deleted 15y ago

justincormack 15y ago

Currently reading this on Galaxy Nexus. No need to throw at wall in my view. Feels much like the iphone 3gs i had before...

TillE 15y ago
Meanwhile, I have a phone with nearly identical specs to the iPhone 3GS (a Motorola Milestone), and it "feels" slower than my first-gen iPod touch, which manages to do beautifully smooth scrolling with really wimpy hardware. I don't know the technical details (though I'd assume hardware acceleration is a big deal), but evidently Apple can achieve a good user experience while consuming far less resources. It's taken Android years, and I probably have to buy a new device.
w0utert 15y ago
So you're basically saying a brand-new phone with 3 times the specs feels much like an almost 3-year old iPhone? Amazing!
- rieter 15y ago
  It has a much higher resolution than iPhone 3GS. In fact, it has six times more pixels.
  - foobarbazetc 15y ago
    That's irrelevant, since the GPU does all the heavy lifting.
    - ars 15y ago
      Clearly you didn't read the article.
      - foobarbazetc 15y ago
        Yes, I did. It's full of excuses for sub-par up front planning on the part of the Android team (much like the reliance on SD storage early on -- LOL at that bit of idiocy. I still see emails from people complaining that the on disk size of an app is a whole 3 megabytes. Mean while, in iOS land, Infinity Blade 2 is 800 Mb). I also develop some of the biggest apps on both platforms and know more about their internals than I'd like. I'm replying to this: "It has a much higher resolution than iPhone 3GS. In fact, it has six times more pixels." That has zero to do with the article. There's nothing in my answer that's incorrect. Sure, your Galaxy Nexus can now sort of scroll reasonably smoothly (the one on my desk is okay, but still lags). But that's because of the GPU which is something like 6x faster than the GPU in a 3GS. And the fast dual core CPU helps, too. That doesn't mean that Android hasn't come a long way in ICS. But it'll never catch up to iOS in terms of rendering performance/latency. It's an impossibility due to the underlying architecture.

rbanffy 15y ago

You must realize nothing Google does to Android can fix a crappy phone. But, since Android is open-source, the manufacturer itself can change it and fix their problem. If they are nice enough, they may even submit the patch back to Google so similarly poor designs can benefit from it.

nodata 15y ago

Samsung Galaxy S2: no scrolling problems at all* * I have up-to-date firmware. Maybe that helps.