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Not trying to bash, but why do all Android phones have such laggy homescreens?

C

CJayC

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 2, 2010
368
0
Whenever I borrow a friend's Android phone, including one of my friend's new Droid X, the homescreen always takes at least half a second before it registers my finger page swipe.

Why are ALL Android phones like this? Why can't they make this right?
 
It's the OS. Simple as that. They for some reason tend to lag, just a bit. Not sure why. The hardware is plenty fast enough.
 
CJayC said:
Whenever I borrow a friend's Android phone, including one of my friend's new Droid X, the homescreen always takes at least half a second before it registers my finger page swipe.

Why are ALL Android phones like this? Why can't they make this right?
Click to expand...

Regardless of your opinion , it's probably not really fair to state in the title, and again in the threadm that "all" Android phones do it, when you say yourself your experience is limited to a few friends.

To be honest, my HTC Desire doesn't lag on the homescreen. It's instantaneous. And I'd be the first to admit it if it did lag.
 
allmIne said:
Regardless of your opinion , it's probably not really fair to state in the title, and again in the threadm that "all" Android phones do it, when you say yourself your experience is limited to a few friends.

To be honest, my HTC Desire doesn't lag on the homescreen. It's instantaneous. And I'd be the first to admit it if it did lag.
Click to expand...

If the newest Android phone (Droid X), the best so far and fastest in terms of specs LAGS, then I assume the older Android phones also lag. See how I used logic there?
 
played with a friend's new samsung android and evo and it was as smooth as my iphone 4.... just sayin.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A293 Safari/6531.22.7)

There have been times when all iPhones on a particular firmware have laggy homescreen due to a bug.
 
I'm using Launcher Pro which is a replaement for the stock launcher and its blazingly quick. No lag at all.

Some of the sluggishness with the OS is because of how google designed it. Programs unlike the iPhone use a customized version of java. So the iPhone has a fully compiled application, where as android uses java which is slower. This is probably the chief reason why things appear slower on android phones then the iPhone.

Now newer phones, like the DX, incredible, and the like use pure horsepower to overcome this. Google ultimately resolved this when they introduced the JIT compiler in android 2.2. Everything suddenly got a performance shot in the arm.

To summarize, there are replacement apps, like launcher pro that are faster then the stock home screens, they provide more polish and faster performance. the issue is largely due to the use of Java which google fixed with the introduction of the JIT compiler which they call dalvik
 
Personally I would love to see Android just have a standard UI that everyone uses. Yeah Sense UI is nice, maybe take some bits from that in the default Android UI.

These skins are put over Android and god knows how well they are optimized.


Not sure if that's what causes the lag, but using a skin over android just seems like a recipe for crappy performance if not coded well.

I really would consider a switch to Android if it were more unified and organized, as of right now it's all over the place. Actually that's probably why I love iOS, nature of the beast open vs closed environment.

I recently considered switching my iPhone 4 for the Samsung Captivate. Besides the screen not being as good, I noticed the lag and the tacky UI that Samsung plastered over Android. Just was not a fan, having the ability to remove that is nice but shouldn't be necessary. At the very least give me an option in settings to use the skin or not, these skins slow down updates to the phones which is also annoying.
 
Ferris23 said:
Personally I would love to see Android just have a standard UI that everyone uses. Yeah Sense UI is nice, maybe take some bits from that in the default Android UI.
Click to expand...
I could be wrong but that's one of the goals of Gingerbread (android 2.3) which is due out later this year.

I recently considered switching my iPhone 4 for the Samsung Captivate. Besides the screen not being as good, I noticed the lag and the tacky UI that Samsung plastered over Android. Just was not a fan, having the ability to remove that is nice but shouldn't be necessary. At the very least give me an option in settings to use the skin or not, these skins slow down updates to the phones which is also annoying.
Click to expand...
Samsung has probably the worst customized UI in any of the android based phones. Don't judge the platform with the samsung phones - yuck.

I'm no fan of the SenseUI and I think some of the sluggishness people complain about is the result of HTC using this UI. It sits on top of android and it consumes more resources. Motorola went with a lighter touch with the motoblur and it shows. Mostly the stock UI with some minor changes.
 
CJayC said:
If the newest Android phone (Droid X), the best so far and fastest in terms of specs LAGS, then I assume the older Android phones also lag. See how I used logic there?
Click to expand...

I don't understand why you felt the need to be rude. Have a read of your statement again - can't you see it's entirely illogical? You've forgotten to factor in software differences that ultimately contribute to any relevant improvement or degradation in performance. With Android, this will generally include Widgets and the manufacturer applied skin, both of which can have a huge impact on some aspects of performance.

See grahamnp's post re the HTC Desire, or reread my own, or ZenoVT's post regarding his own anecdotal experiences with a Samsung and Evo. And on and on ad nauseum.

You rude little person.
 
Does the droid even have 3D acceleration? #1 reason why I hated Windows mobile. Even dialing numbers on the keypad became painfully slow.

Played paper toss on my friend's Evo & it was slow/choppy as hell.
 
maflynn said:
I could be wrong but that's one of the goals of Gingerbread (android 2.3) which is due out later this year.


Samsung has probably the worst customized UI in any of the android based phones. Don't judge the platform with the samsung phones - yuck.

I'm no fan of the SenseUI and I think some of the sluggishness people complain about is the result of HTC using this UI. It sits on top of android and it consumes more resources. Motorola went with a lighter touch with the motoblur and it shows. Mostly the stock UI with some minor changes.
Click to expand...

I agree with you there on Sense, it looks nice, but I think it's a resource hog myself. My work phone is an HTC Droid Eris, which isn't a screamer of a phone, but after updating to 2.1 my phone is honestly a laggy piece of crap.

I can't even tolerate using it, I refuse to believe that's all Android. Would it be easy to strip Sense UI off of that?

I'd like to see a before and after with that phone using just a stock Android UI.
 
droeun said:
Does the droid even have 3D acceleration? #1 reason why I hated Windows mobile. Even dialing numbers on the keypad became painfully slow.

Played paper toss on my friend's Evo & it was slow/choppy as hell.
Click to expand...

The Samsung Captivate actually has a better GPU than iPhone 4. YouTube that phone with some games running on it. There was one racing game that looked and ran awesome.

It must use some sort of acceleration for that. Evo is not a great gaming phone at all.
 
Ferris23 said:
Would it be easy to strip Sense UI off of that?

I'd like to see a before and after with that phone using just a stock Android UI.
Click to expand...

You need to root the phone and install a custom rom. One of the more popular roms that increase performance, battery life and battery life is Cyanogenmod. Check out xda forums for specifics on rooting and loading custom roms for your phone.

I did this on my Nexus and it was fairly easy. Unfortunately moto has locked down the droid x with a encrypted bootloader so custom roms is not possible. They did this for the motorola milestone and will do it for subsequent android phones as well.
 
Ferris23 said:
The Samsung Captivate actually has a better GPU than iPhone 4. YouTube that phone with some games running on it. There was one racing game that looked and ran awesome.

It must use some sort of acceleration for that. Evo is not a great gaming phone at all.
Click to expand...

My God, Samsung Captivate? Not knocking the phone as I did indeed watch a couple of impressive videos but I can't keep up with all these names!:(
 
Android at present doesn't GPU accelerate the 2D UI stuff. It's slated for release in Gingerbread (Android 3.0), coming Q4.

The reason for this is that the older hardware (anything below Nexus One), could only supports one EGL context at a time, which was reserved for any applications using it.

This means that all UI graphics pushing is done by CPU which sometimes causes it to lag if there is something else happening in the background while you flick through stuff.
 
Bashing is exactly what you're doing. Nothing good can ever come from threads such as this. All smart phones are good for the people that like them, can't we just leave it at that and be happy with our own device?

Of course I know exactly where you're coming from after seeing your attitude in the thread that got sent to the wasteland yesterday.
 
Perhaps your friends have lots of Apps running in the background? My Froyo'd 2.2 Nexus One is noticeably faster than my iPhone 4. This includes navigation of the menus, changing homescreens, browsing, app launching, etc.

A perfect example, I use Foursquare. I have the Foursquare app on both my iPhone 4 and my Nexus One.

If I'm connected to Wifi and I have the two side by side, I will launch the app on both devices at the same time. The iPhone 4 takes about 7 seconds upon startup to launch the app, and then locate me.

On the flip side, the same process takes about 2 seconds on the Nexus One. (I am seriously not joking) While this specific example might depend on GPS chip, etc, other apps such as Pandora and Twitter exhibit the same behavior on both platforms, and the Nexus One always has the upper hand in terms of performance and load times.

iOS is a great experience, however Apple put a lot of those cool menu animations in to make it appear the device is loading faster. The fact of the matter is if they stripped out the menu transitions, and you just hit the button, it would still take a second or so to change menus. (often times much longer on the iPhone 3G and below) The animations are put in place to mask this behavior. In fact, this is very obvious sometimes. When your phone is lagging and you hit a button to open up Messages or Settings, sometimes you will quickly see a blank background for a second or two. (the blue/gray color) This behavior is exhibited because the phone is still trying to process/render the next screen.

On the Nexus One? You hit the menu item, and it's instantly there. Literally instantly, faster than you can blnk. No lag, nothing. Oh, and if you don't like that split-second menu transition that Android DOES have by default, they allow you to disable it in settings. (and subsequently, the load time improves)

I'm still debating on returning my iPhone 4 or not, primarily based on principle due to Apple's recent PR response. They have a clear antenna defect, but they can't admit it and I don't like that. The phone itself is great, and it does get better battery life than my Nexus. However the two big missing items for me are Google Navigation and free Wifi-Hotspot. (Froyo - and I'm 99% sure the iPhone will never get either of them)
 
Why is this in the iPhone Forum? If i remember right, the iPhone doesnt run Android ..
 
Sometimes when a UI lags, it's because its programmers built in extra gestures, and have to delay to determine which one you've done.

For example, the original HTC photo display app allowed the user to zoom in by circling any section with your finger. A very intuitive motion, just as much as double-tapping a spot. You could also rotate a photo with an "L" motion.

However, that meant it had to wait until you lifted your finger before it calculated whether you'd done a rotate or zoom or flip between photos.

To a longtime smartphone user, this delay was okay. To most new consumers, who didn't understand the processing, it seemed like the UI was "laggy". So HTC dropped those extra gestures.

Does the Moto Blur UI have any extra gestures? Also, sometimes an active widget on the screen captures the finger movement first.

I saw something similar on the iPad, btw. I will try stroking between home pages with my finger down by the page number dots. Sometimes it thinks I'm tapping on one side to move that way when I'm really trying to move the other. I learned to avoid page strokes in that area.
 
xLucky7 said:
Why is this in the iPhone Forum? If i remember right, the iPhone doesnt run Android ..
Click to expand...

Dear Mr. June 2010,

The OP, who is also a fellow June 2010 n00b member, posted this thread in the iPhone forum probably for the sole purpose of bashing Android. ("not trying", yeah OK buddy :rolleyes:) Because he is uninformed, I typed up a lengthy response, pointing out his faults.

Welcome to MacRumors.

Signed,
An Android & iOS Owner
 
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