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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

> Android itself still has issues with responsiveness and latency that bother me

> Chrome in particular is really bad regarding responsiveness and latency

This can't be emphasized enough. The Android and Chrome teams should be absolutely ashamed of the current state of performance. On my Nexus 5X I regularly have to wait 5 full seconds or more after pressing the app switcher or home buttons before I can perform another action, while animations chug and jank. Screen transitions within apps are often delayed multiple seconds before starting. Launching apps like Twitter or Facebook or Google Maps sometimes takes 10 seconds or more. Scrolling in every app is constantly interrupted by multiple missed frames as new items load. Loading websites like The Verge is just a terrible experience as the whole page jumps up and down for many seconds while scrolling is completely impossible. It's infuriating.

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I cannot agree with this hard enough. When I went back to my old iPhone 5S after breaking my 2nd Gen Moto X's screen, I was astounded how fast and smooth everything was. I love the flexibility of Android, but there's no doubting it is significantly worse than iOS (and WP) in terms of overall UI performance.

Although the sheer awfulness of the iPhone default keyboard and the flakiness of its implementation for 3rd party replacements continues to amaze me.

> This can't be emphasized enough. The Android and Chrome teams should be absolutely ashamed of the current state of performance. On my Nexus 5X I regularly have to wait 5 full seconds or more after pressing the app switcher or home buttons before I can perform another action, while animations chug and jank. Screen transitions within apps are often delayed multiple seconds before starting. Launching apps like Twitter or Facebook or Google Maps sometimes takes 10 seconds or more.

What's worst about this is that on newer Android-devices this problem is significantly worse than it was on any previous Android-device I have owned with any previous or earlier version of Android.

Android 6.x seems to have serious performance issues, memory leaks(?) and require me to reboot my devices regularly to keep them working.

It completely blows my mind how this release could pass QA and end up released to market.

Within the developer options, consider enabling 'Force GPU rendering', followed by a restart. On my Nexus 6P, this significantly improved UI responsiveness, bringing it closer to that of the iPhone 6s. Scrolling, zooming, and app switching are now silky, or "buttery", smooth. My friend with a Nexus 5X, however, noted only a marginal improvement; so your mileage may vary.

How does your battery respond?

Completely agree with all your points, especially with Chrome. This is one reason I'm still hoping the Chrome OS / Android merge will take more from the Chrome OS side as the performance there is great.

One thing to check though - do you have _any_ accessibility services enabled (Lastpass is a common one). They absolutely murder performance and since turning Lastpass off my 6P is far from perfect but much better than it was.

Not that it's much consolation, but you can make your Nexus 5X run better by rebooting it nightly. I am hoping future software updates fix it, seems to be some sort of RAM issue.

I reboot my Nexus 5 daily and have not seen these kinds of performance issues.

Leave it for more than a day, and the memory leaks will drive it into absolute uselessness.

I've had the camera spend 5-10 seconds to launch, then spending 3-4 seconds per picture ... which it ended up not saving.

Android 6.x has some serious memory-management issues as far as I can tell, because the Nexus 6P owners I've talked to online does not have these issues, but they have 50% more juggle room for memory leaks and to work around memory-fragmentation issues.

I'm having issues with pictures not saving on an LG g3. It seems that pictures only get saved after its done processing (5s or so), and if one shuts off the screen before that it just forgets it. Such an odd big bug to exist in 2016.

This. 10000 times this. I really, really hope that Windows 10 wins this battle. It provides the best of both worlds. We can have snappy performance (iOS) while having access to the file system.

> while having access to the file system.

Android has easy access to the file system. You can download one of many file managers.

What I meant was that Windows can have the good parts of both iOS and Android. To be clear: it can run as smooth as iOS while letting me access the file system as Android does. Another rant on Android: Developing apps for it is so bad... The guy that thought it was a good idea to destroy and recreate an Activity's after orientation changes should be fired. iOS's approach is 10000 times easier and faster

EDIT: Corrected when I said Activity's UI was destroyed to the Activity itself

One possible contributing factor is that the Android app switcher is a cluttered mess. On phones, instead of Chrome having some sort of tab manager in the app, you wind up with one entry in the app switcher for every single tab you leave open as you switch to other apps. The same occurs with the Google search app. So the app switcher becomes more a cluttered stack of browser and search history than a proper app switcher.

I love that feature. I use the web way more than apps, so having web pages in the app switcher is awesome for me. I wish I could have several YouTube app tabs in the app switcher too.

It might be useful if it got it right. Say per-website. Instead you wind up with 10 different Facebook entries - or whatever website you happen to use a lot.

I actually prefer this feature, and even searched for a similar option in Firefox. Either way, it can be easily disabled in the Chrome settings by toggling the 'Merge tabs and apps' option.

You can disable that in Chrome (which brings back the swipe down gesture to open the tab switcher, which is nice). However, the way the Google Search app interacts with the app switcher and back button is awful and there's no option to fix it. For example, using the app switcher to go back to a voice action result will often re-execute the action. Or sometimes no entry gets added to the back stack, so you can't go back to a results page. Or sometimes clicking something in the results opens Chrome and sometimes it doesn't. I just avoid the search app whenever possible and use Chrome.

I could go on about the clusterfuck that is "OK Google", but maybe I should stop now before I get too worked up.

Nice! Thanks for the heads up. I must have missed that when I hunted for it a while back.

Consider using Opera, it's so much better. It's the only mobile browser I know that does text reflow, which is essential for me.

Add to this Firefox which has reader-mode, which I consider to be absolutely superior to anything I've seen in any other browser.

Is that issue wrt to Nexus 5X? I had used N4 and now use One X both gave me very smooth experience.

You should consider freeing up some device space, it worked wonders for me.

Weirdly enough, this may be a valid suggestion.

EXT4 seems to have some odd behavior when the partition it is trying to work with to nears full.

I think you're describing a separate issue.

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