Google’s Android platform is frequently singled out for having a significantly laggier and less responsive interface than other platforms. As TiPb points out, recent Google intern Andrew Munn has shed some light on the reason why.
As it turns out, iOS and Windows Phone both treat graphics and interface as a higher processing priority than Android, which treats graphics and interface as a normal priority. The end result is a laggier, bogged-down experience, especially when running other background tasks.
Android UI will never be completely smooth because of the design constraints I discussed at the beginning:
- UI rendering occurs on the main thread of an app
- UI rendering has normal priority
Another significant factor is that Android doesn’t do nearly as efficient a job of cleaning up unused memory as iOS and Windows Phone, with previously run apps and content hogging up much of a device’s available memory.
Performance of Java and other runtimes also contributes, as Apple’s built-in engine does a much better job of reducing workload on the processor, and has far more refined interfaces for these runtimes.
Munn’s comments also point to hardware choices (such as low-bandwidth NVidia Tegra 2 chips) and other factors as sources for the lag.
While some of these issues can be easily fixed, that’s not true of all of the concerns. Thus, Android is likely doomed to be laggier and less responsive than iOS and other platforms for some time into the future.
For more information, as well as a more detailed explanation, check out Munn’s full post on Google+.
