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Will android ever be as responsive as iOS?

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actually, in the measurements I've seen, windows phone is about the same as android in responsiveness.

older iOS devices are still more fluid and immersive than android devices. Very obvious while scrolling through articles.

However, they stutter more.
 
How are they more "immersive"? That's a pretty vague statement to make. Also, how are they more fluid if they stutter more? That's a pretty contradictory statement to make. I have to disagree with people who say older iOS devices still run great, I put iOS6 on my iphone 4 before I sold it and it ran considerably worse than iOS 4 or 5 on it.
 
VashHT said:
How are they more "immersive"? That's a pretty vague statement to make. Also, how are they more fluid if they stutter more? That's a pretty contradictory statement to make. I have to disagree with people who say older iOS devices still run great, I put iOS6 on my iphone 4 before I sold it and it ran considerably worse than iOS 4 or 5 on it.
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True, the iPhone 4 is slow, and iOS 5 ran better than iOS 6, which in turn ran better than iOS 7.

However, the iPhone 4 came out 4 years ago. the now relatively old iPhone 5 still is usually buttery smooth, and more so than any Android device I've used (but with the caveat I haven't used any model that was released in 2014). (I have the iPhone 5s, but my wife has the iPhone 5.)
 
I have an iPhone 5 (iOS 7), it experiences the very same occasional lag and hiccups that any other phone does. If someone tells you their phone is 100% buttery smooth, be it an iPhone, Android, or Windows Phone, they are lying or have selective memory. All phones experience occasional lag and stutters.

My wife has the 5S, it also experiences lag and stutter. Her phone will randomly freeze for a few seconds in Messages. Not every day, it happens maybe once or twice a week but it does happen. My iPhone 5 keyboard lags every now and then, where I'm typing but the letters don't start showing up until a few seconds later. Usually it happens when first bringing the keyboard up. In Safari a webpage will be loading and I start scrolling down, but then it pulls me back up to the top as it loads other things.

These are all examples of things I have experienced on iOS and Android, it's not exclusive to any particular OS.
 
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BD2003 said:
Maybe the browser hangs, but the mouse pointer stays as responsive to your movement as ever.
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Clicks don't register. The cursor might animate, but it isn't responsive to user input. Hell, I still get occasional instances on Windows where keyboard input is delayed and OS X still has the pinwheel of death that means you aren't doing anything until it goes away.
 
Red Storm said:
I have an iPhone 5 (iOS 7), it experiences the very same occasional lag and hiccups that any other phone does. If someone tells you their phone is 100% buttery smooth, be it an iPhone, Android, or Windows Phone, they are lying or have selective memory. All phones experience occasional lag and stutters.

My wife has the 5S, it also experiences lag and stutter. Her phone will randomly freeze for a few seconds in Messages. Not every day, it happens maybe once or twice a week but it does happen. My iPhone 5 keyboard lags every now and then, where I'm typing but the letters don't start showing up until a few seconds later. Usually it happens when first bringing the keyboard up. In Safari a webpage will be loading and I start scrolling down, but then it pulls me back up to the top as it loads other things.

These are all examples of things I have experienced on iOS and Android, it's not exclusive to any particular OS.
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I agree with a previous poster that 98% of it is just acclimatization. It's why iOS users get frustrated with all Android keyboards and screens and vice versa. I was an iOS user and switching to Android frustrated me for a week b/c you get accustomed to exactly how the screen responds. Now I can't use my wife's iPhone without experiencing the same frustration. I tap and tap things occasionally and nothing happens.

Once you get muscle memory for a new OS, almost all of that frustration goes away. Honestly I think it's mostly gone for a week, but can take up to a month for all the tiny niggles to finally go away.

Android L also looks promising in eliminating any noticeable difference, especially with iOS7 having gone the other way.
 
dawheat said:
I was an iOS user and switching to Android frustrated me for a week b/c you get accustomed to exactly how the screen responds. Now I can't use my wife's iPhone without experiencing the same frustration. I tap and tap things occasionally and nothing happens.
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Yeah, this was something that surprises me whenever I use an iOS device. I'm so accustomed to using Android that somehow my finger actions don't always register on iOS and it would be disconcerting.
 
Red Storm said:
I have an iPhone 5 (iOS 7), it experiences the very same occasional lag and hiccups that any other phone does. If someone tells you their phone is 100% buttery smooth, be it an iPhone, Android, or Windows Phone, they are lying or have selective memory. All phones experience occasional lag and stutters.

My wife has the 5S, it also experiences lag and stutter. Her phone will randomly freeze for a few seconds in Messages. Not every day, it happens maybe once or twice a week but it does happen. My iPhone 5 keyboard lags every now and then, where I'm typing but the letters don't start showing up until a few seconds later. Usually it happens when first bringing the keyboard up. In Safari a webpage will be loading and I start scrolling down, but then it pulls me back up to the top as it loads other things.

These are all examples of things I have experienced on iOS and Android, it's not exclusive to any particular OS.
Click to expand...
In truth, iOS is not always 100% buttery smooth, I will agree. But in my experience, even an iPhone 5 is smoother than pretty much all Android phones I've tried (up to 2013).

And like I said, I don't think it's acclimatization since I was Android exclusive for 9 months.
 
VashHT said:
How are they more "immersive"? That's a pretty vague statement to make. Also, how are they more fluid if they stutter more? That's a pretty contradictory statement to make. I have to disagree with people who say older iOS devices still run great, I put iOS6 on my iphone 4 before I sold it and it ran considerably worse than iOS 4 or 5 on it.
Click to expand...

I have an ipod touch 5g. Every time I use it, it is noticable how much more immersive it is compared to my Moto X.

But it crashes a lot more. And games have problems. Low RAM likely culprit.
 
Wife got an iPhone 5S and the animation is absolutely annoying. My Note 3 is so much faster in response time
 
openwheel said:
Wife got an iPhone 5S and the animation is absolutely annoying. My Note 3 is so much faster in response time
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And those are actually a big improvement over how they were with iOS 7 first came out. Haha. You'll get used to them (maybe) and some you can turn off.
 
I don't know why some people keep insisting on comparing older and/or less expensive phones to iPhone/iOS. If you take the best of the current generation flagships from the top three platforms, Android, iOS, and Windows Phone (can't speak about Blackberry since I don't own one), there is little appreciable difference in responsiveness for normal users, though there are cases for all three where you can get them to lag, hitch, freeze up, etc depending on the situation, and on paper or in benchmarks I'm sure you can find differences.

To answer the title question, "Will android ever be as responsive as iOS?", I think the answer is "yes", or "close enough as to make no difference", considering what the current situation is. If you are extremely sensitive or focusing intently on just touchscreen responsiveness and ignoring other UI elements then maybe iOS takes the crown (I'd argue Windows Phone does) but the reality is none of these operating systems are flawless, but they are good enough for most consumers at the high end.

Apple doesn't make inexpensive phones (the fact that the cheapest current iPhone is still in Nexus 5 territory should give you some clue) so it's only fair to compare similarly priced phones at the top end. It's not fair to penalize other manufacturers for giving you choice.

I look forward to seeing the crop of phones arriving this fall. iPhone 6, One M8 Prime, Galaxy S5 Prime, Lumia "McLaren", and whatever else is in the pipeline from the other manufacturers should make things interesting.
 
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Probably the best thing iPhone has going on right now (imo) is their fluidity. android has never gotten it into that buttery movement, but I sure hope they do.

When, I'm not sure. I hope they release a smoother Android really soon though.
 
Crono said:
I don't know why some people keep insisting on comparing older and/or less expensive phones to iPhone/iOS. If you take the best of the current generation flagships from the top three platforms, Android, iOS, and Windows Phone (can't speak about Blackberry since I don't own one), there is little appreciable difference in responsiveness for normal users, though there are cases for all three where you can get them to lag, hitch, freeze up, etc depending on the situation, and on paper or in benchmarks I'm sure you can find differences.

To answer the title question, "Will android ever be as responsive as iOS?", I think the answer is "yes", or "close enough as to make no difference", considering what the current situation is. If you are extremely sensitive or focusing intently on just touchscreen responsiveness and ignoring other UI elements then maybe iOS takes the crown (I'd argue Windows Phone does) but the reality is none of these operating systems are flawless, but they are good enough for most consumers at the high end.

Apple doesn't make inexpensive phones (the fact that the cheapest current iPhone is still in Nexus 5 territory should give you some clue) so it's only fair to compare similarly priced phones at the top end. It's not fair to penalize other manufacturers for giving you choice.

I look forward to seeing the crop of phones arriving this fall. iPhone 6, One M8 Prime, Galaxy S5 Prime, Lumia "McLaren", and whatever else is in the pipeline from the other manufacturers should make things interesting.
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I'm not interested in fairness, nor am I interested in price/performance or broader OS capabilities. I started this thread to specifically discuss input lag/touch responsiveness between the two major mobile OSes, I had no intention of it ever devolving into a general iOS vs android thread.

Where the discussion goes is obviously out of my control, but all I really care about is what's the root cause of the difference in input lag, and what google is trying to do about it (if anything.) Perhaps the difference is minimized by the brute force power of the latest android flagships, but that's just papering over the issue and is outside of the scope of the discussion (the one I intended to have, at least.)
 
BD2003 said:
I'm not interested in fairness, nor am I interested in price/performance or broader OS capabilities. I started this thread to specifically discuss input lag/touch responsiveness between the two major mobile OSes, I had no intention of it ever devolving into a general iOS vs android thread.

Where the discussion goes is obviously out of my control, but all I really care about is what's the root cause of the difference in input lag, and what google is trying to do about it (if anything.) Perhaps the difference is minimized by the brute force power of the latest android flagships, but that's just papering over the issue and is outside of the scope of the discussion (the one I intended to have, at least.)
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From what I remember they would have to do a major overhaul of Android to get it to the same place, and AFAIK Google doesn't have any plans to do it. My simple explanation may be wrong, but I think it has to do with iOS being designed for touch input from the ground up, with UI response being very high priority, whereas Android wasn't necessarily built that way and touch input was added during development at some point.
 
I've always experienced a perceptible lag or lack of touch responsiveness in Android in comparison to iOS, and it really grinds my gears that Google thinks so little of their customers that they still haven't bothered to fix it yet some 6 or so years later. Its that level of contempt for their customers that steers me away from trusting Google to do the right thing for me as a consumer. Apple on the other hand, tends to be completely the opposite and goes out of their way to try and please me with the devices and experiences they build.

I'd really love Google to change and start focussing more attention on consumers instead of being in the pockets of advertisers, manufacturers and networks. I think we'd all benefit from a more consumer focused Google.
 
BD2003 said:
IIRC, I did hear something similar a while ago, that iOS puts UI updates on the highest priority (basically system interrupt?) whereas android does not. IMO it's the right way to do things - no one should tolerate an unresponsive touch UI any more than they should tolerate a mouse cursor that wasn't responsive.

Regardless, is there any way to modify this behavior?
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Yeah, that was a post by a google college intern kid from like 2011.

The funny thing is that the response from Android devs was pretty furiously passive-aggressive. You had them saying shit like he was going on a "do not hire" list.
 
I think all this thread is proving is that people are sensitive to different degrees on every possible things and put varying degrees of importance on them.

1. I, like many others, have used both iOS and Android devices for years and don't find them materially different outside of browsing. I totally give Safari on iOS the leg up in rendering smoothness compared to Android browsers. Otherwise on a modern, Android flagship, it's anywhere from imperceptible to a non-issue.

2. You, like many others, notice a difference and it bothers you (outside of normal acclimatization). While the difference continues to decrease due to raw horsepower (and I don't think it should matter how an issue is solved outside of its results) - you still notice a difference. I would like to see something more objective regarding this with a modern phone like the M8 or Z2.

3. Android L, whether for this reason or not, will have several major improvements that may improve this issue for the users in group #2. I'm hoping that this does improve the browsing rendering difference on Android phones.
 
Interestingly enough, it's the presence of Opera Mobile that continues to give Android the edge for web browsing for me. It's unbelievable to me that nobody seems to have figured out text-wrapping properly except for Opera (and the original AOSP browser but Google seems to have jetisoned that with Chrome).
 
dawheat said:
I think all this thread is proving is that people are sensitive to different degrees on every possible things and put varying degrees of importance on them.



1. I, like many others, have used both iOS and Android devices for years and don't find them materially different outside of browsing. I totally give Safari on iOS the leg up in rendering smoothness compared to Android browsers. Otherwise on a modern, Android flagship, it's anywhere from imperceptible to a non-issue.



2. You, like many others, notice a difference and it bothers you (outside of normal acclimatization). While the difference continues to decrease due to raw horsepower (and I don't think it should matter how an issue is solved outside of its results) - you still notice a difference. I would like to see something more objective regarding this with a modern phone like the M8 or Z2.



3. Android L, whether for this reason or not, will have several major improvements that may improve this issue for the users in group #2. I'm hoping that this does improve the browsing rendering difference on Android phones.
Click to expand...


I def agree that it doesn't matter how it's solved outside of results, but that is one comparison that should be taken in context of price. If it's takes a $600 flagship to match the input lag of a $300 2 year old iPhone 4s or a sub $200 windows phone, then I don't consider that a solved problem.
 
s44 said:
No one agrees with you that this is the case.
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There's no shortage of people in this thread that do. Regardless, no one has to agree when there's objective benchmarks that prove there's a difference.

Whether it matters to you is purely your opinion, but I'm obviously not alone in noticing the difference.
 
BD2003 said:
I def agree that it doesn't matter how it's solved outside of results, but that is one comparison that should be taken in context of price. If it's takes a $600 flagship to match the input lag of a $300 2 year old iPhone 4s or a sub $200 windows phone, then I don't consider that a solved problem.
Click to expand...

Neither of which support the same features current gen Android phones are expected to support (and the tradeoff in Windows Phone is animations which can obscure actual app load times, and the browsing speed on those $200 devices doesn't compare).

You are going against the actual question you asked in the OP/title, which is "will" Android ever be as responsive as iOS, not "has" Android lagged behind in the past versus iOS, which means it would be foolish to ignore the leading edge of current Android hardware. If you really don't want to be fair - and you've stated so - then this really is just an Android bashing thread, or you've taken your own thread off topic.

It makes zero sense to compare a $700 or $ 600 iPhone against a $200 or $100 Moto G or lower phone. If you want to go down that road, at least hypothesize what kind of features and performance a $200 iPhone would have. Otherwise what you are doing is like asking why your Corolla or 1976 muscle car doesn't give you the same acceleration as a Ferrari. It's just a ridiculous comparison to make.
 
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