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Android still hasn't matched iOS in the responsiveness front, owing to some fundamental architectural choices made early in Android's development (chief being t

Android still hasn't matched iOS in the responsiveness front, owing to some fundamental architectural choices made early in Android's development (chief being the overuse of managed code, and the costs that come with it). This is entirely a software problem, having little to do with hardware, yet the article makes a hardware argument that is simply not supported. It's also worth giving some perspective on those rampant "cheap" devices: The most common Android handset in use in the US of A is the Galaxy S3. Other very powerful devices fill the top echelon of deployments. Any notion that assumes that it's legions of bottom tier devices just isn't accurate. And the great thing about GPU shaders is that they're eminently scalable. Again, assuming that this notion that Android will chase iOS is true, these things are the most easily toggled, and having better effects on top tier devices that scale back on lower devices is trivial. All of this (the submission I mean, and related articles) is just conjecture. Apple did what Apple felt was right for iOS to improve the operating system. Framing everything in an Android context is just speculation.

akmiller 13y ago
Android still hasn't matched iOS in the responsiveness front Guessing you don't use Android or at least haven't in awhile? I've been Android user now since the release of 4.0 and it seems much more responsive now than my wife's iPhone 5 in almost every category from web browsing to gaming. I was very aware of the lag pre-4.0 and that was the main reason I never switched (was an iPhone user before that). Now it's as smooth as can be.
- corresation 13y ago
  I use both Android and iOS for a considerable part of my day. On the Android side I roll with a Galaxy S3, Nexus 4 and Nexus 7. It has gotten much better, most certainly, via things like concurrent and partial garbage collections (and the improvements in the integer-units in the CPUs, simply brute forcing through these UI thread impediments), and other core improvements, but it's still most certainly behind iOS (where UI priority was a core architectural concern from day one). Aside from a still not silky smooth experience, Android still has an endemic problem with completely non-responsive interactions -- you click or do something and everything just stops with absolutely no hints or feedback....and then three seconds later a result appears.
  - akmiller 13y ago
    I honestly don't see that at all on my nexus 4. Maybe it's just the limited apps that I use. I do see more performance related issues on my Nexus 7 though.
- snogglethorpe 13y ago
  I agree that modern Android phones (mine [Sharp 200SH] has 4.1.2, dual core CPU, 1GB RAM) are pretty smooth, and seem more or less the same as modern iOS devices on that front. [Apple sometimes seems to go to extra lengths to put in little animations etc (e.g. the screen rotation), but I'd classify most of them as frills.] ... with one glaring exception: on my Android phone, at least, pressing the home button very often takes a good 1-2 seconds (sometimes more!) to take you to the home screen, with no visual feedback that it's doing anything. A second with no feedback is an eternity in GUI time. iPhones (and iPads), on the other hand, respond pretty much instantaneously to the home button. I'm pretty used to this behavior, so I know to just wait, but it's still pretty annoying (one hits the home button quite frequently in typical usage).... Even if there's some property of the Android software that makes it challenging to do the switch itself quickly for some reason, couldn't they have at least provided a little visual feedback that it's doing something...?!
roc 13y ago
> "The most common Android handset in use in the US of A " has very little to say about what the bulk of Android devices are, given that something like 80% of Android activations are outside the USA. Further, the discussion isn't just about cheap/underpowered hardware, but even adequate hardware that suffers for lack of effort/support. Hardware superior to Nexus builds routinely perform worse than Nexus builds. This is a consideration larger than what Android or the hardware in a given device can do. > "Apple did what Apple felt was right for iOS to improve the operating system." This I very much agree with. I think it's fine to say plenty of Android device makers will continue to release devices with much less thought to performance than Apple, or even Google, and these devices won't look or perform like iOS7, or even stock jelly bean on a Nexus device. But I doubt very much that anyone at Apple spent any real time planning UI performance/feature tuning as a competitive advantage. This situation is very much like Apple tweaking the UI performance of the very first iPhone until animations could match the speed of touch-response. And they did this solely so that "dragging" an object appeared more 'real' -- to reinforce the concept with visuals and visual performance. And they did that without regard to what hardware competitors might ship, or even what priorities competitors might have -- as there really were no competitors for the device they were building, when they were building it. This blur and transparency is no different. It's there to reinforce the UI concept. This is more a story about Apple continuing to devote non-trivial time and effort tuning hardware -- and giving up general performance and battery life -- in the pursuit of a level of UI polish they are internally satisfied with.

akmiller 13y ago

Android still hasn't matched iOS in the responsiveness front Guessing you don't use Android or at least haven't in awhile? I've been Android user now since the release of 4.0 and it seems much more responsive now than my wife's iPhone 5 in almost every category from web browsing to gaming. I was very aware of the lag pre-4.0 and that was the main reason I never switched (was an iPhone user before that). Now it's as smooth as can be.

corresation 13y ago
I use both Android and iOS for a considerable part of my day. On the Android side I roll with a Galaxy S3, Nexus 4 and Nexus 7. It has gotten much better, most certainly, via things like concurrent and partial garbage collections (and the improvements in the integer-units in the CPUs, simply brute forcing through these UI thread impediments), and other core improvements, but it's still most certainly behind iOS (where UI priority was a core architectural concern from day one). Aside from a still not silky smooth experience, Android still has an endemic problem with completely non-responsive interactions -- you click or do something and everything just stops with absolutely no hints or feedback....and then three seconds later a result appears.
- akmiller 13y ago
  I honestly don't see that at all on my nexus 4. Maybe it's just the limited apps that I use. I do see more performance related issues on my Nexus 7 though.
snogglethorpe 13y ago
I agree that modern Android phones (mine [Sharp 200SH] has 4.1.2, dual core CPU, 1GB RAM) are pretty smooth, and seem more or less the same as modern iOS devices on that front. [Apple sometimes seems to go to extra lengths to put in little animations etc (e.g. the screen rotation), but I'd classify most of them as frills.] ... with one glaring exception: on my Android phone, at least, pressing the home button very often takes a good 1-2 seconds (sometimes more!) to take you to the home screen, with no visual feedback that it's doing anything. A second with no feedback is an eternity in GUI time. iPhones (and iPads), on the other hand, respond pretty much instantaneously to the home button. I'm pretty used to this behavior, so I know to just wait, but it's still pretty annoying (one hits the home button quite frequently in typical usage).... Even if there's some property of the Android software that makes it challenging to do the switch itself quickly for some reason, couldn't they have at least provided a little visual feedback that it's doing something...?!

roc 13y ago

> "The most common Android handset in use in the US of A " has very little to say about what the bulk of Android devices are, given that something like 80% of Android activations are outside the USA. Further, the discussion isn't just about cheap/underpowered hardware, but even adequate hardware that suffers for lack of effort/support. Hardware superior to Nexus builds routinely perform worse than Nexus builds. This is a consideration larger than what Android or the hardware in a given device can do. > "Apple did what Apple felt was right for iOS to improve the operating system." This I very much agree with. I think it's fine to say plenty of Android device makers will continue to release devices with much less thought to performance than Apple, or even Google, and these devices won't look or perform like iOS7, or even stock jelly bean on a Nexus device. But I doubt very much that anyone at Apple spent any real time planning UI performance/feature tuning as a competitive advantage. This situation is very much like Apple tweaking the UI performance of the very first iPhone until animations could match the speed of touch-response. And they did this solely so that "dragging" an object appeared more 'real' -- to reinforce the concept with visuals and visual performance. And they did that without regard to what hardware competitors might ship, or even what priorities competitors might have -- as there really were no competitors for the device they were building, when they were building it. This blur and transparency is no different. It's there to reinforce the UI concept. This is more a story about Apple continuing to devote non-trivial time and effort tuning hardware -- and giving up general performance and battery life -- in the pursuit of a level of UI polish they are internally satisfied with.