"The subtle, pervasive lag that has characterized the Android UI since its inception is still there."
You have got to be kidding me. How is it that Android still doesn't map a user's finger movements with nearly 1:1 accuracy on the screen? Pinch, zoom and flick response times on the iPhone have been superior to Android for years, even with significantly less powerful hardware (compare a 3GS response speed to a Nexus S and it's painfully different).
Imagine if your mouse cursor couldn't keep up with your hand movements, or if letters didn't appear on the screen until a moment after you pressed your keyboard. That's what using Android is like for me, someone who has owned an iPhone since 2007. When I use my friends' Android phones, any of them, especially in the browser, it boggles my mind how laggy everything is. When will this actually be addressed?
>Imagine if your mouse cursor couldn't keep up with your hand movements, or if
>letters didn't appear on the screen until a moment after you pressed your keyboard.
<eyes-closed> <imagining/> </eyes-closed>
Even in my imagination, Android installed base is still growing at nearly 2X of that of the iPhone. Apparently, most people don't care for whatever you're saying they should care about. I have experienced the lag you mention, but I have a big, lovely screen on my Galaxy S [which is one of the reasons I upgraded from my iPhone 3GS], so I'm okay with it. My wife (a realtor) has never mentioned lag as an issue.
I don't mean to be rude, but we hear so often that Android fanboys use the silliest things as justifications for the shortcomings of Android [and they do!]. At the same time, Apple fanboys trumpet the silliest of things as justifications for the superiority of iOS [witness the many apologies/rationalizations after the 4S announcement]. You're trumpeting a silly thing.
It’s not a silly thing if I truly care about it. Lag drives me crazy. I hardly ever need more than a few minutes before I want to throw an Android device at the wall.
This reason is personal. Others don’t care about it. That’s certainly true. But I do. Why am I not allowed to bring this up? Why is that silly?
That’s good to hear! I test any Android device I can get my fingers on but I have not yet had an opportunity to test the Galaxy S II. (The stores I was in never had a charged one.)
> Even in my imagination, Android installed base is still growing at nearly 2X of that of the iPhone. Apparently, most people don't care for whatever you're saying they should care about
I remember seeing a chart awhile ago which showed that while Android's market share is getting larger than the iPhone's, it isn't actually taking away any share from the iPhone but instead from RIM, Windows phones, and feature phones. (just did some googling and found the link):
What I think this means is that the people aren't moving away from their iPhones, but instead people who don't have a smart phone to begin with are more likely to pick an Android phone instead of an iPhone.
Maybe it's due to things like finger lag, or how great the camera / video is, or maybe for completely non-technological reasons , i.e. cost, or even as simple as which phones are available on their carriers, which I honestly think it could be it as I have heard that where I live (Australia) the iPhone has one of the largest market shares in the world (4.5 million iPhones with a population of 22 million), and I think is one of the only places which place no restrictions on which carriers can stock the iPhone.
In all fairness, it is early days yet and I think once the smart phone market has reached saturation we might start to see a different story play out between the competing OSes.
Non-geeks don't call it lag. They call it "I wish I had an iPhone but the salesman at Verizon talked me into this thing because the commission is so much higher." Just because you don't know the industry term doesn't mean the problem doesn't bother you.
Android is the new Feature Phone, in some ways. Just because someone buys a cheap Android clone doesn't mean they embrace the features in the way that nearly every iPhone user does.
Google need to work exceptionally hard, else I figure even Microsoft will catch up.
thats all the apple fanboys have, instead of this thread talking about all the amazing new features and improvements, its a bunch of hivemind people trying to convince themselves that Android isn't awesome. I'm sorry but I must of been oblivious the lag as well as the other Android users. Most people want cheap phones and/or cheap plans, a very high quality os, that make calls, send text, surf web, and maybe do some apps. A lack of an animation or a non existent lag or even a higher resolution icon , makes no difference to most people.
> "A lack of an animation or a non existent lag or even a higher resolution icon , makes no difference to most people."
Isn't Apple proof enough that simply hitting the bullet points is not enough? Or Sony (with the PlayStation, which got thoroughly trounced by a machine bearing inferior specs across the board)?
People love polish, they love attention to detail, they love absolute frictionless products. Apple has priced themselves out of the low end (the 3GS' performance is a joke compared to the Android phones at that price point), so Android is largely dominating that segment.
But make no mistake about it - Apple owns the high-end smartphone market because their product has all of those things you just blithely dismissed.
Most people want a cheap car that gets good mileage. The lack of heated seats, automatic wipers, and a V8 under the hood makes no difference to most people. But yet, we know that the dynamics of the automotive market can't be hand-waved away so easily - why do it to the smartphone/consumer electronics market?
Using the word "fanboy" to describe someone who disagrees with you isn't a serious argument. Embrace the cognitive dissonance: I like my new iPhone 4s, and I'm excited about the new Android release!
If you don't think the lag is a problem, fine, great. I personally think it's unacceptable. It's one of the reasons my daily use phone is iOS and not Android.
Why are we talking about this instead of the other new features? Because for a long, long time, Ice Cream Sandwich was touted as the solution to these performance problems.
I personally find Android unpleasant to use because of it. Worse, I think it makes my software look shitty, which makes me look shitty, which makes me tell people to demo my apps on iOS rather than Android.
sorry for the fanboy, but their are plenty of shortcomings in iOS, and because of the apple reverance on these forums, there was nothing but praise in the discussion of iOS5 but with ICS theres nothing but complaints even though there were some really awesome announcements. Just written because people can't have intelligible conversation about the disagreement in os's. If you don't like android, thats fine but in the article about android's new features and releases and the thread is filled with complaints from people that probably never used Android for longer than a demo period, not really relevant. Like take this lag issue. That was one writers opinion on what could be considered a demo unit. Now the comment underneath links to articles saying how fast it is and responsive. Its a non issue, but its something that most people want to shout about here in these threads. Another issue is fragmentation, the apple community loves to shout about that but from the sales most people don't care. As a former iphone owner, i know of Apple's shortcomings because I used it for a period of 2 years. I doubt any of these people's complaints none of them used a modern Android for that same time.
the sad thing is there's more intelligent conversation about Androids new features in the techcrunch article than here. Its sad once theres a hivemind mentality in a community.
Android is growing fast because its on every crappy free/buy one get one smartphones that are basically used as a glorified feature phone, NOT because its good.
Two years ago! You'd think they'd get animation, finger mapping, etc down by now, considering the arms race in Android seems to be around screen size and processor power. I appreciate what Google is doing and I did like my Android phones (I don't have any right now however), but the animation thing and finger mapping bugged me.
Personally I just think it is clear that Android has gone well beyond the limits of caring (not perception) for the vast majority of users. There will always be nits for picking, but acting like this really needs to be addressed (especially considering how subjective this performance perception can be) is silly.
Fast and responsive on this hardware, sure. But what about the other less powerful, free, bogo Android phones out there? Will your carrier-crippled Android phone be able to even upgrade to ICS?
The "regular people" I know who own an Android phone bought it because it was cheaper, and in fact have a sub $150 thing (unlocked, retail).
They also are regularly out of pre-paid credit.
As a developer I couldn't care less about that kind of user, and I suspect few developers make a living on a fragmented and inconsistent platform like Android.
This in turn means less quality and variety of apps, which detracts even more from the experience.
If you have no money and no taste, sure lagginess, a terrible UI and advertising laden apps can be acceptable.
I find the lagginess of the stock browser infuriating on my Nexus S. On graphics-heavy pages it can become almost unusable. Pages with mainly text are generally fine. But here's the thing, Opera Mobile on the same phone and on the same laggy pages is smooth as silk. It has remained snappy and responsive no matter how hard I've tried to make it choke.
Kudos to Opera. I would like to ask: has anyone else observed this? If not, could you give it a whirl and see how it compares?
Only downside is that it takes a while to load and seems to lose its state when switching away. Still, it's a much better experience than the stock WebKit browser.
So the question on my mind is, how does Opera do it? Is the WebKit browser simply failing to use GPU acceleration? Why? Clearly Android as a platform can do responsive, non-laggy UX because it's right there in Opera. And yet the WebKit browser lets us, and the many apps that exploit it, down.
Is it purely that GPU support hasn't been baked in yet because of lack of handset support? Or is it something more fundamentally problematic in Android?
One final tangential observation: OS X suffered from similar poor performance when it was first released. I clearly remember the tech press scoffing and ridiculing it in comparison to Windows XP and OS9. But it matured, helped by ever improving hardware, and grew into a great OS known for its style and snap. Is Google treading a similar path?
I agree. I bought a Samsung Omnia 7 with Windows Phone 7 over android (and I am a free software kind of guy) because I found the Android experience lacking. I just found every Android device to miss the nice snappy response iOS and WP7 gives.
What MS lacks is the complete package. The OS is great, it's incredibly snappy and responsive - much moreso than Android, and the only player that can give iOS a run for its performance money.
But so far all the hardware we've seen out of MS's camp has been me-too almost-clones of existing Android devices. None of the hardware have contained any features or industry design that would really make it desireable.
MSFT desperately needs a piece of hardware to act as WP7's flagship - something with the build quality and design quality of the iPhone 4. A real piece of art people can hold in their hands - IMO this would be the ticket to MS having a fighting chance in the smartphone wars.
They also desperately need to stop marketing in-house. Microsoft blows at marketing, and everything they do in-house falls flat on its face, and so far everyone they hire from the outside seems to suck equally as much (if not worse. Seinfeld?). Microsoft desperately needs to get its marketing act together.
"Free phones (with contract)" is a bit like saying the house you bought was one fifth the list price (with a mortgage).
Perhaps we should only count phones that are sold for the full, unsubsidized price, to avoid giving an unreasonable edge to phones that sell for $200 with contract.
Does that information come from the same source that informed TechCrunch of the leak of information about U2 listeners?
The article in question is http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/26/androids-dirty-secret-shipp..., and the claim in question is "many return rates are approaching 40% said a person familiar with handset sales for multiple manufacturers." And that's exactly the amount of detail provided. Forgive me if I'm not bowled over.
Linux has (had?) this annoying little "feature" of minimal input lag. Unnoticable at first, becomes a deal breaker after a while (especially if you work on Windows machine in the meantime).
Same story: Firefox, or even Chrome - when compared to Opera. Opera has it's weak points, but it's interface interaction is amazingly snappy. Actually, it's quite amazing how big difference these tiny things can make.
I think it comes down to the fact that most of the Android users don't care about the responsiveness. Maybe there exists this mentality at Google that since Android is expanding pretty well, why bother spend extra resources into GUI acceleration or design? And to an extent, that makes perfect sense. Most Android users don't care enough about responsiveness to pay more (sometimes less) for iPhone or don't even know smartphones could be—and should be—"smooth" since all they have used are Android phones.
We are simply spoiled by the Apple's way of doing things: fixing things that aren't broken for the betterment of UX. Take the smoother folder opening animations in iOS 5, for example. Apple didn't have to fix it but Apple did it anyways because both Apple and its users care about things like that. Unfortunately, some people just don't.
The “let’s cut corners because most people won’t notice or care” mentality you mentioned is where sub-par software comes from. Good software shouldn’t be a luxury that one can be “spoiled” by — it should be the standard.
The big problem with this argument is that there isn't a software creator out there that doesn't cut corners, not the least because there isn't one agreed-upon master list of what constitutes a corner.
Poor responsiveness for a touch screen interface on such a late generation device is an embarassment especially when you look at the features that have garnered focus.
Do you know what wasn't on my list of corners for 2011? Unlocking my phone with my face.
"Poor responsiveness"? Yes, that's on my list. 2011, and 2009 back when my 3GS made every Android phone on the market look like it was running through treacle.
The gap has narrowed, but it's still embarrassing that so much computing power has been thrown at this, but still it feels like Android just can't keep up with my finger movements. Coming from iOS, this is a really big UX issue. List and scroll views on iOS feel like they're glued to your fingers. On android they don't, and it makes the whole UI feel 'slippery' - like you don't have a decent grip on UI objects.
I like baseball. I get that a lot of people don't, and that's fine, but I do. And growing up where I did, there weren't a whole lot of options for watching baseball; there wasn't a local major-league team, and the ones geographically closest weren't on our list of cable networks. WGN was on our cable, though, so I grew up watching -- and eventually loving -- the Chicago Cubs.
Boston fans used to complain about their streak of 80+ years without a World Series win, but of course that's all over now. The Cubs, meanwhile, have passed the century mark: since they didn't even make the playoffs this year, the streak stands at 103 years, with the last win in 1908.
Thirty years into my personal fandom, I've grown accustomed to shrugging and saying "there's always next year" because, well, there is. Of course, "next year" never really happens; even when they get so close there's always something, like Game 6 of the 2003 NLDS when the wheels just completely came off in the space of about an inning.
But then, "next year" probably isn't going to materialize soon anyway. The Cubs have spent too many years in a row now chasing over-the-hill ex-stars, giving them huge contracts and then living with the results. The farm system's a mess and there's no cohesiveness to the team or the organization, and won't be for a good long while.
Which is why a lot of people probably think it's crazy to keep betting on "next year", when what's really needed is a massive overhaul and then four or five years of rebuilding effort. They probably think it's crazy, too, to just pretend there aren't systemic problems in the organization, to talk about how this year's problems were different from last year's problems, to act as if bringing in a couple big-name hired guns and slapping some lipstick on the pig will lead to winning it all, and soon.
But I've been watching the Cubs for three decades now, and I'm a devout member of the Church of Next Year. I'm a fan, and I'll always be a fan, and even if there isn't a championship in the cards I can be proud of the fact that at least Wrigley Field will always be packed, which is something you can't say for a lot of teams that actually win (heck, Tampa Bay fans didn't even turn out to watch their team mount an epic September comeback and make the playoffs on the very last day of the season). And, of course, a stadium full of seats is probably worth a lot more to the owners than a championship, right?
I don't like baseball. It boggles my mind how boring it is. Imagine if the players in a "sport" you're watching spent most of the game standing around. (Ha! Real sportsmen run at least 54.3% of the time.) It's a personal opinion but by golly, I'll state it and tweet about it!
this is a very elitist way of thinking of things. Some people just aren't able to afford the luxury of a "good software" as you put it. So does that mean they shouldn't have access to a solid operating system and access to mobile web. In many parts of the world where they buy their phones outright, does smoother animations really justify the extra cost for access to email and web. Get real.
Android is free to license, and the OEMs are benefactors of an incredibly wealthy company that seems to have no qualms about throwing gajillions of dollars into R&D to make a best-in-class mobile OS.
Android not being "good software" cannot be in any way spun as a win for the proletariat - because there is no opportunity cost. The cost to engineer the OS is in no way passed on to the consumer, and so far only the hardware is (with some marginal amount of software integration).
In other words, Google is pouring hundreds of millions to develop Android. The average phone consumer (in any part of the world) is not paying for its development (customers of other Google products are), so the argument that somehow these "cut corners" has resulted in a more affordable product is a complete non-sequitor.
how ever you want to justify your opinion is good for you, but the fact is look at the cheapest phones offered to countries like africa and china, and they are Android phones. This allows people with probably no other way to access the internet to be able to have the same luxuries through there phone. However you want to try demonize it is fine, regardless Android/Google offers high quality services at the same cost to everyone.
Demonize it? Wow man, you really do live up to your username.
> "This allows people with probably no other way to access the internet to be able to have the same luxuries through there phone."
And that is an excuse for poor engineering... how? Your point is that, if Google didn't "cut these corners", this free product may very well not exist, and thus unable to provide these benefits to the developing world at low cost.
Which is, again, a non-sequitor, since there is no evidence whatsoever that Google treats Android like an exercise in budget engineering for the developing world. They are banking practically the whole company on it, and throwing top talent at Android, with a seemingly bottomless budget.
Suffice it to say, if Google spent some more time optimizing and improving UI responsiveness, the developing world will not suffer, and in fact will get a better product for the same price they're currently paying: $0.
This is the same stupid argument that people used with Nokia years ago, before (surprise!) Android came in and ate their lunch. Those budget candy bar phones sure did bring mobile telephony to the masses, and any attempt at critiquing the phones' hardware or software was rebuked with claims of "well if it was better it wouldn't be affordable you elitist".
And of course, then Google came in with Android and now we have touchscreen smartphones in the developing world. And people continue to jump on criticism of Android with the same lame-duck excuse.
what corners are cut, software development is about prioritization and scheduling, a balance of features vs support. This release tries does a very good job of both. You're not going to make everyone happy, at the same time not all problems are easily solved. What you call cutting corners could just be, they haven't figured out a great way to solve the problem. Android supports just about all possible hardware configurations from low end to high end. iOS supports pretty much 1 hardware configuration that they define (realistically Apple cuts out features out of older phones). Like Nokia if google doesn't address big things, then some one will pick up the slack, so be it. As the parent comment was pointing out, people are willing to pay for the luxury of animations, or polish. For most people just getting calls, text, email and mobile web, at affordable prices is all we really want. Without actually knowing what Google's budget or legal/development/marketing etc costs are, I think theres really no way to assume how they prioritize things. One less animation, or a smoother scroll no one is suffering and for google to offer all that they do at basically free of cost is amazing.
The responsiveness of Android has been a thorn in its side since day one - personally I'm going to withhold judgment until I can play with one in person. ICS is supposed to bring to bear a large amount of hardware acceleration for the UI that will make 99% of these UI lag issues disappear entirely.
If it doesn't, that'd be supremely disappointing, since it's truly one of the things that has been plaguing Android since it first launched.
> "Android supports just about all possible hardware configurations from low end to high end."
All the more reason the UI stack needs to be optimized from end to end. Apple can pretty much just assume you have a 800MHz dual-core under the hood, Google cannot. It's taken some serious firepower to get Android's UI to be suitably responsive (we're talking dual-core, 1+ GHz beasts)... what hope does the developing world have trying to run that kind of software on little 400MHz ARM chips?
We know from the development of OSX (or iOS, depending on where you want to look) that even a minimal amount of hardware acceleration from low-end GPUs can do wonders for overall UI performance. A reasonably low-end GPU will lay waste to a large number of problems that even mid-high-end CPUs are poorly equipped to solve.
If anything, if Google wants to make a difference in the developing world this needs to be a top priority - after all, this is the market that is least able to brute force their way past performance problems with raw hardware.
> "As the parent comment was pointing out, people are willing to pay for the luxury of animations, or polish. For most people just getting calls, text, email and mobile web, at affordable prices is all we really want."
I think it's short-sighted to call responsive, rich UI a "luxury". Before Android phones hit the developing world, the status quo was candy bar phones. I'm sure there were enough people back then proclaiming they couldn't imagine needing anything more - it places calls and gets texts, what else could someone reasonably wish for?
But then Android brought smartphones to these parts of the world and the goalpost moved. Now expecting mobile web and email on your phone is entirely reasonable, thanks to what used to be the sole territory of luxury devices. Software is something that has literally no marginal cost - once produced, it can be shipped on ten million phones for negligible cost, and in this sense is pretty much the cheapest way you can improve your products. IMO saying that good UI is exclusively the territory of luxury devices is doing a great disservice to the developing world.
Google ought to be doing better, considering the sheer force they have thrown behind Android, and if these long-awaited hardware acceleration features fail to significantly tame the UI performance beast, it is in every way appropriate to call them to task on it.
As someone running a 600MHZ phone running cm7 (coming from an iphone 3GS), I never noticed any lag, in fact it runs better than 3GS and iOS. The dreadful UI you continuously bring up, has never been an issue and never got in the way of doing what I need to do. In fact there are things about Android's UI that are superior to iOS IMO. Most of what you call good UI is probably subjective. I'd rather have google focus on bigger issues than, a marginal improvement in scrolling. What android phone did you use and for how long ?
Single reason I got a Playbook over a Galaxy Tab. Lag disturbs me greatly, I have an Android phone and I can't bring myself to use it because of that. Regularly I check in stores to see if they finally made it acceptable and so far they haven't.
It really makes me wonder.
This reminds me of Amiga vs Windows. Many years after Amiga's demise, the bloody mouse cursor still lagged in Windows very noticeably. I guess not many people had done much work in Amiga's workbench so it wasn't a big deal for almost nobody. But it wasn't until Pentium III times that it stopped disturbing me on a daily basis.
Thank you. All 2D surfaces can/are accelearated I would bet money that the lag is in legacy apps. For some reason, new apps have to opt-in to hardware acceleration. I can't see any lag at all in all of the hands on videos I'm seeing.
By opt in, they have to bump their targetSdkVersion, so it's not a big deal. Source: http://developer.android.com
Yes, it seems that although hardware acceleration was possible prior to Android 3, it wasn't as easy as it is now. It also requires a degree of care to be taken by the dev to do well.
Given that it hasn't been available in phones until now (that is, in ICS), it’s understandable why we've seen laggy UI.
"The subtle, pervasive lag that has characterized the Android UI since its inception is still there."
You have got to be kidding me. How is it that Android still doesn't map a user's finger movements with nearly 1:1 accuracy on the screen? Pinch, zoom and flick response times on the iPhone have been superior to Android for years, even with significantly less powerful hardware (compare a 3GS response speed to a Nexus S and it's painfully different).
Imagine if your mouse cursor couldn't keep up with your hand movements, or if letters didn't appear on the screen until a moment after you pressed your keyboard. That's what using Android is like for me, someone who has owned an iPhone since 2007. When I use my friends' Android phones, any of them, especially in the browser, it boggles my mind how laggy everything is. When will this actually be addressed?