Funny, what I read was: "This is how Android graphics work, criticize it or praise it, but don't go off explaining it in your own words using wrong facts or incorrect assumptions and telling people you are an expert on the subject"
That was just one part of the statement, and I agree with that general sentiment. However:
"There are certainly some advantages to how iOS work, but this view is too focused on one specific detail to be useful, and glosses over actual similarities in how they behave...
...This is very different from iOS’s original design constraints, which remember didn’t allow any third party applications at all."
Really, who cares if they allow third party apps or not? I don't have a jailbroken iPhone, but I've seen jailbroken apps run smooth as butter, so this mystical "Apple quality stamp of approval" argument goes out the window.
The post continues:
"In fact it was just not feasible to implement hardware accelerated drawing inside windows until recently. Because Android is designed around having multiple windows on the screen, to have the drawing inside each window be hardware accelerated means requiring that the GPU and driver support multiple active GL contexts in different processes running at the same time."
Translation: we designed the system to behave in a way which didn't utilize system resources the best way possible. I hope that this is fixed now, but I have my doubts.
"I saw an interesting comment from Brent Royal-Gordon on what developers sometimes need to do to achieve 60fps scrolling in iOS lists... I am no expert on iOS, so I’ll take that as as true. These are the exact same recommendations that we have given to Android’s app developers, and based on this statement I don't see any indication that there is something intrinsically flawed about Android in making lists scroll at 60fps, any more than there is in iOS."
Nobody said iOS is perfect; yes they have their own flaws (e.g. Safari crashesevery on every once in a while, 3GS sometimes runs out of memory in iOS5, etc), and finding a (edge?) case in which the UI is not smooth on a competing platform seems petty.
Really, who cares if they allow third party apps or not?
If payed attention to the security concerns mentioned, it's pretty obvious that Apple was able to sidestep a lot of problems by ensuring a walled garden. They test and approve apps, they prevent the trivial pushing of broken malicious things out to the customer (mostly).
Now, I understand that you might not have the background in systems engineering of the folks on the Android team, but at least as an intellectual exercise please consider how allowing unsecured third-party apps might impact the sorts of corners that can be cut in your implementation.
Translation: we designed the system to behave in a way which didn't utilize system resources the best way possible.
Please, by all means, explain to me how lightweight an OpenGL context is. Tell me about the ease of instantiating multiple copies of an oh-so-simple state machine and having it reasonable timeslice on the GPU, especially when you don't control the hardware vendors. Please, tell me more.
finding a (edge?) case in which the UI is not smooth on a competing platform seems petty.
It really does, doesn't it? Especially when such smoothness is a tradeoff in favor of increased security.
