> It's not an accident that iOS devices were so much better at animations compared to Android devices in the early days, despite not necessarily having the best hardware.
Pixel perfect layouts had NOTHING to do with that performance gap, and iOS devices have far and away the best GPUs of each generation. iOS devices consistenly push fewer pixels (lower resolution screens) with faster GPUs than Android does.
The only reason people think Android devices are such power houses is because everyone still just looks at the CPU core count and clock speed. Which has almost no impact on scrolling and animation performance.
EDIT: For example compare the Galaxy Nexus to the iPhone 4S. Both shipped Nov 2011, both use PowerVR GPUs. The GN is rendering 920k pixels, the 4S is only 615k pixels! The GN is making due with the SGX540 at 307MHz, whereas the 4S has the SGX543MP2 at 266mhz or so - literally double the GPU power of the GN, and for a lower resolution screen.
No, dynamic layout is a big factor, which is the reason why Google added new APIs for apps to tell the OS not to re-evaluate layout.
In every year's Google I/O there's at least one session on Android performance, and in every session there was always some technique on how to prevent layout calculation during animation.
Pixel perfect layouts had NOTHING to do with that performance gap, and iOS devices have far and away the best GPUs of each generation. iOS devices consistenly push fewer pixels (lower resolution screens) with faster GPUs than Android does.
The only reason people think Android devices are such power houses is because everyone still just looks at the CPU core count and clock speed. Which has almost no impact on scrolling and animation performance.
EDIT: For example compare the Galaxy Nexus to the iPhone 4S. Both shipped Nov 2011, both use PowerVR GPUs. The GN is rendering 920k pixels, the 4S is only 615k pixels! The GN is making due with the SGX540 at 307MHz, whereas the 4S has the SGX543MP2 at 266mhz or so - literally double the GPU power of the GN, and for a lower resolution screen.