IOS Inertia Scolling

[tinny the cat]

How come, compared with Andriod, WebOS, etc etc, iOS has incredible smoothness in the scrolling, every time i find myself using other phones i am appalled by the insanely awful scrolling! Even since the origional iPhone it has been this way, even now with powerful phones, some more powerful than the iPhone they cant even handle this simple aesthetic necessity

 

[Mike225]

iOS scrolling is smoother than Android for sure, but I prefer Android scrolling over it still. iOS needs to slow their deceleration. Getting to the bottom of a page in iOS is a pain.

 

[FSMBP]

Use a Windows Phone 7. I would say scrolling is just as fluid.

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

How come, compared with Andriod, WebOS, etc etc, iOS has incredible smoothness in the scrolling, every time i find myself using other phones i am appalled by the insanely awful scrolling! Even since the origional iPhone it has been this way, even now with powerful phones, some more powerful than the iPhone they cant even handle this simple aesthetic necessity

My guess is because Android OS isn't optimized for scrolling to be put on the GPU and is instead put on the CPU with worse results.

 

[kdarling]

From what I can tell, the difference is...

Many Android pages are filled in on the fly. In other words, as you scroll downward, the new items are added at that time. This can cause a stutter effect.

iOS seems to preload everything, in order to make the scrolling smoother. While nice for the user most of the time, it has two critical downsides:

1) Uses a lot more memory, which is more important when you multitask.

2) It can run out of memory and fail. The best example of this was this recent discussion about how Safari can't display webpages that are loaded with large pictures.

Android phones have no problem displaying those webpages, because they don't preload the whole set, but only up to a point... and then more as needed.