I haven’t used an Android device since my last one, the Galaxy S8. Beautiful hardware, beautiful design, but it was plagued with animation stutters and dropped frames. I switched to an iPhone and an iPad around 6 years ago. And the animations were buttersmooth. It was almost unthinkable to achieve such a fluid interface on any Android phone I had ever used, flagship or otherwise.
Now I am curious about how it is now. Especially after a 2-3 years of use. Does your phone or tablet stutter when you scroll, open an app, switch to another app, start multitasking etc etc? One thing I especially remember was opening certain apps like big games or Office apps. When I’d tap on the app’s icon, there would be a half a second delay. But in that infinitesimally short period of time I would question whether the phone registered the touch or not. I would then reach with my finger again but the app would launch right before my second tap. That was constant and infuriating. Does that sort of stuff still happen on Android?
Thanks (:
I been using android since version 2 and never encountered this. I guess it depends on the device a lot, as I’ve worked a lot in the mobile industry I’ve tended to have the more powerful devices.
Which makes sense, smart phones being small computers and all, the slower ones are slow sometimes and the faster ones tend to be faster.
Androids diversity has always been it’s strength and weakness
This will really, REALLY depend on each device and manufacturer.
I have Poco X3 Pro. It also has 120Hz so almost everything seems fast, but there’s some components that just seem to run at lower frame rate. For example per-app dark mode settings menu. And it’s also really buggy. But that’s expected from MIUI.I’ve had Moto G5s Plus (2017) that was extremely laggy on Android 8.1. Then I put PixelExperience 11 (Android 11) on it and it was mostly smooth. Some manufacturers are just shitty with optimizations.
I’ve always been on android, so take this with a grain of salt. In my opinion Samsung phones have come a very long way. They used to be slower and bloated in comparison to other brands, especially while the market was still moving fast. I used to have a Sony, a ZTE, a Motorola, an Umi and a Jiayu - I tried quite a few over the years.
The recent generation are all fast enough and performance wise last 4+ years before they get noticably slow and an upgrade becomes necessary. Software support on Samsung is now phenomenal. I had so many bugs and hitches on other vendors’ phones and they were rarely fixed - the absolute opposite has been the experience on my Samsungs. Updates are frequent, smooth and stable.
I know this reads like an ad, but I was honestly positively suprised after I bought a Samsung tablet a few years back and have slowly switched over to Samsung devices. The same happened with all other members of my family. Samsung simply won.
I suppose the iPhone is very similar in that regard, both simply work and are great for everyday use. It’s almost boring!
I do advice you to look at the upper end though, they simply have more performance reserves. If you are a display menace and battery destroyer though, you won’t notice any significant slow down from the cheaper range in the 2 to 3 years you have before it becomes uneconomical to repair the device anyways.
I’ve had Samsung androids for over a decade, and they’ve had smoother animation and less loading lag since about iPhone 4 (which I’ve used for work in the same period). They’ve also had comparable feedback on presses.
Then again, the HTC androids I’ve tried occasionally have been real bad, so I get the question.
You shouldn’t have to rely on the words of Internet random though, go try one out.
You shouldn’t have to rely on the words of Internet random though, go try one out.
That’s true and I have done that a few times. However they weren’t so informative since I was only able to try some recent Android phones at stores so they weren’t used. My close friends and family either have iPhones or midrange/budget Android phones. So I thought my next best bet is to ask others online.
I don’t know where you’re at, but around here there are stores with refurbished phones, where you can play with last year’s models, and buy them at low-mid range prices. Sometimes they have 2-3 year old phones at a steal, some of the online ones have generous return policies as well, where you can try it for a bit and then send it back.
Have big games and office apps not given you the same problem on iOS?
Tbh, I never noticed this on android 🤔 But maybe I’m just less perceptive.
The first thing I do on any new phone is go to developer options and turn all 3 animation settings to off. It’s a night and day difference. I’ve probably saved a collective hour of my life not waiting for animations lol
I’ve had a pretty smooth experience with both the Pixel 6 and the Pixel 7 Pro.
in iOS the UI thread is split from the rest of the compute, and runs at elevated priority if i recall correctly. this used to not be the same case for android. having said that, my android devices run just fine as long as they have plenty of ram. so, if you buy a flagship samsung it usually comes with 12gb ram. the current minimum I’d say is 8gb. used to have the pixel 4xl with 6gb which kept lagging… how the situation develops in 2 to 3 years and if 12gb is still enough remains to be seen. in general apple is better with long-term device support (up to 5 years). all this is of course very subjective and depends on ur usage and if u game a lot on ur device.
I’m pretty sure this difference isn’t real. On both, the UI is supposed to be for the UI and anything that takes longer is supposed to happen on a different thread. Even Windows Phone had that. However, in practice developers don’t always do it and this isn’t as great as it sounds. If you’re scrolling or something and scroll faster than the background threads, it will stutter. If the app has a resource leak, it will stutter. If the graphics are too complicated, it will stutter.
RAM requirements depend on what you’re doing. I had a Pixel 4 and it always ran great. I had to get rid of it because it was physically falling apart and Google stopped releasing security updates for it.
Forgive me for asking if it was obvious in your comment but, when you said
in iOS the UI thread is split from the rest of the compute, and runs at elevated priority if i recall correctly. this used to not be the same case for android
did you mean that now Android does the same?
I’m not certain, but given that I’ve not seen a lot of UI lag in recent android releases I believe they must have fixed it.
That’s what they wrote, yes.
The only time I’ve noticed issues like this on an Android phone was the device I had before my current one. This was a phone that was great when I got it, and I started to notice issues after about 4 years of use. The reality was it was a mid-range device when it was released, it was already a year or two old when I got it, and after a couple of years, the hardware was just not powerful enough for the stuff I was asking it to do.
So I’m inclined to agree with the others who’ve said it really depends on exactly what device you’re using. If you’re buying a budget phone that’s not particularly powerful when it’s brand new, then it’s definitely going to be having issues 2-3 years later, because apps get more demanding as hardware improves, so if your hardware is subpar, you’re going to have issues.
While the allure of getting the cheapest possible phone is strong, if you use your phone for a lot of things, you may have to consider spending a bit more money. One consideration is instead of getting a brand new budget phone, get a second-hand model with higher spec: the price will be similar, but you’ll get better performance for longer. I’m actually trying to think now if I’ve ever had a brand new Android phone, and I can’t remember any of them being new, but they have all served me well, with only one notably having performance issues by the time it was ~5 years old.
My pixel 7 pro is perfectly smooth and seamless. Oh and voice assistant is far faster than anything on iPhone thanks to the on-board Tensor chip.
I’ve had this issue with Samsung phones and tablets I owned in the past. Working as an app developer I still see this kind of problems on heavily oem-customized versions of Android.
Personally I “solved” this by switching to Pixel phones which in my experience don’t slow down even after 3-4 years of usage and updates. I believe this is true in general for phones that stay as close to AOSP/stock Android as possible.
To be honest I don’t really care about this at all.
I also owned an S8 which I used for years until they dropped support way too early. It’s been my best phone ever. I have an S23 now (which was a unique chance to get a real Snapdragon in a Samsung here in Europe). It’s smoother but I’m not sure if it will be acceptable to you.
I still loved my S8 more though. With its 3,5mm jack, Notification LED, flat camera (nothing sticking out), curved display and higher resolution than the S23 has today.
I have an S22 ultra and still miss my S8+. I like having a stylus, but I don’t use it a ton. My S8 still runs, but the screen is pretty jacked and the battery life is non-existent. Thinking about turning it into an Octoprint server so I can use my Pi for something else
Yeah there was actually a Samsung reuse-for-IoT program for old hardware.
Unfortunately it was really dumb and you could only use your phone for a few usecases blessed by our Samsung overlords. As far as I remember you could use the phone as a light sensor or something which was terrible overkill.
It wasn’t anything like postmarketos. It’s been deprecated or killed off silently too in the last few years.
Unfortunately the S8 are hardly supported by AOSP distros. Lineage only supported the S7, S9 and S10 (the latter two it supports still) but the S8 was never on the radar somehow. Postmarket doesn’t support it either. The only distros I found were a few once-off images (so no updates whatsoever) on XDA-Developers, with lots of things non-working.
Ah, that sucks. Fortunately for my use, Octoprint runs on the stock phone just fine. It can even use the phone camera for print monitoring.
Oh octoprint is available as an Android app? Sorry I wasn’t aware.
Yes indeed! https://github.com/feelfreelinux/octo4a
OK, so you have the opinion of people with flagship or even midrange phones, now here I come with my budget phone, a Redmi Note 8.
I’ve used budget phones all my life since, well, they’re cheaper. The truth is that yes, you do notice some animation stuttering and some delayed responses, especially as the years go by and you have more apps installed (probably doing stuff in the background) and the apps you do have keep updating to be more bloated.
This phone in particular makes it very hard to multi-task, as it’s very liberal with killing apps in the background to save RAM. This is annoying. But I’m using MI UI instead of stock android, and I’m sure I could change this.
Honestly, I do feel like I’m being left behind and that I’m going to have to switch phones more often than if I had a more expensive model. But so far I haven’t encountered any apps I could not run (or even that I could run but only with too much stutter, making for a terrible user experience). So I’ll keep using it until I truly feel left behind, which can take a surprisingly long time. My usage time tends to rival that of people with flagship android phones and iPhones (maybe I even come out ahead)
But you specifically asked about animation stutter. It does happen but it simply doesn’t bother me at all. It’s not constant, only happening when the phone is doing something else at the same time, and even when it does I can wait a few seconds and it’ll be fine. You also mentioned lag when opening an app, so much that you thought it didn’t register your input. It doesn’t happen to me since, while the app itself can take some time to open, the icon has feedback so I know I pressed it.
Overall, I don’t think any of these issues are enough to bother me significantly for a good few years.
I’ve literally tried every single fix like toggling settings, installing and playing around with custom kernels or trying out root apps, and I’ve never been able to reduce the aggressiveness of MIUI’s RAM management.
That issue persisted even on my flagship-equivalent end MIUI devices. It only seems to disappear after installing AOSP-based custom ROMs.
I have a galaxy s21 that I’ve been using for the last 3 years. I haven’t noticed any difference in performance from the day I got the phone, and I don’t feel I’ll need to upgrade for another couple years. Full disclosure, I did use adb to remove a ton of Samsung bloat when I got the phone, and that definitely improved performance, so I’m not sure how different my experience would be with all the extra Samsung stuff added.
Scrolling is fucked up in most apps than it should be, change my mind.