Comment by coolcase
2 months ago
Are mobile devices slow/unresponsive. I haven't experienced that unless I realllllly cheap out. Or after 4 years of OS updates on Apple devices for some reason. Androids seem OK in this regard.
2 months ago
Are mobile devices slow/unresponsive. I haven't experienced that unless I realllllly cheap out. Or after 4 years of OS updates on Apple devices for some reason. Androids seem OK in this regard.
I switched from android back to iOS last year. There seems to be some sort of inherent latency in either android or Samsung’s UI that causes the UI thread to lag behind your inputs by a noticeable amount, and for the UI thread to block app actions in many cases.
Things like summoning a keyboard causing my 120hz galaxy phone to drop to sub 10fps playing the intro animation for GBoard were just rampant. All non existent in iOS
I do wonder if part of it is down to Android default animation speeds.... Pixel 6 here, Gboard snappy enough. Something I do on every android device I own though is go into developer settings and change all the animation durations to 0.5x. Makes stuff seem snappier. In reality I'm sure it's dropping just as many frames as it async loads garbage enterprise uncompressed asset icons or whatever, but hey it shows up on screen 2x as fast!!!!
Edit: oh, no, you have a point about the UI blocking stuff, it's fine when apps are loaded and active but "cold booting" a UI component definitely has lags in stupid places, android UX feels like a web perform sometimes due to that.... Tap button, go on holiday for a week, come back and it's responded to the button press (while you were trying to do something completely different and now you've pressed something else and you're not sure what because this time the button you pressed closed the activity overlay 1ms after)
I begin to wonder if all the commenters in this thread have compromised devices. I'm on a 5 year old Samsung (the model is, I bought it new six months ago) - my Linux machines are fast (gentoo) and my windows 10 and 11 machines are fast. My kid's computer is an i3 7350k and he plays roblox, Minecraft, teardown on it with no issues. That computer is a couple years older than he is at 9-10 years old. That computer's twin is my nas backup with 10gbe running windows - the drive array refused to work at any decent speed on Linux and I didn't want jbod, I wanted RAID.
Some things are slow, like discord on windows takes ~12 seconds before it starts to pop in ui elements after you double click. My main computer is beefy, though, 32 thread 128GB; but no NVMe. Sata spindle and SSDs. But I have Ryzen 3600s that run windows 11 fine.
Did you watch the videos linked in the article?
> I'm on a 5 year old Samsung (the model is, I bought it new six months ago)
How quick is the Share menu on your samsung? On mine, it takes about 3 seconds of repainting itself before it settles down. On iOS there's about a 100ms pause and the drawer pops up, fully populated. I found [0] which is a perfect example of this sort of bloat.
> My main computer is beefy, though, 32 thread 128GB; but no NVMe. Sata spindle and SSDs. But I have Ryzen 3600s that run windows 11 fine.
My main computer is a 24 core i9 with 64GB ram on NVMe. It runs windows fine. But, I saw exactly the same behaviour out of the box on this machine (and on the machine I replaced) as the linked article shows. I can compile, play games, do AV transcoding. But using apps like slack or discord is like walking through molasses, and even launching lightweight apps like WIndows Terminal, and Notepad have a noticeable delay from button press to the window appearing on screen. There's just something a bit broken about it.
[0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/05/05/google-please-fix-a...
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FWIW I updated my phone to a relatively budget samsung recently, and had a similar noticeable delay to bring up the keyboard, installing 'simple keyboard' from F-droid seems to have helped. I wouldn't be surprised if it is missing features compared to the samsung/google ones where their absence will annoy a power user, but for whatever subset I use it works fine and doesn't appear as though my phone hangs.
But but ... Samsung has bigger numbers in the spec sheet! It must be faster!
I have a top end Pixel phone running stock Android and encounter latency all the time. All first start time is usually a couple of seconds. Switching back to an open app is fast in many cases but some still have to do a refresh (which I suspect involves communication to servers, although that's still not much of an excuse).