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Comment by Ocha | Hacker News Reader

Last time I used android it was version 4.1 boasting how it improved responsiveness of the system. Here we are with Android 12 still trying to improve responsiveness and smoothness of the system...

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It is really good and has been like forever. You of course have to spend equal amounts as for an iPhone to get a high end experience, and it was like that back then as well. Many people failed to understand this and bought shitty underpowered handhelds, and blamed Android for being laggy.

I had high end Android devices up to Android 7 and still experienced lagging and stuttering. It was clear there were optimisation issues with the software that couldn’t be solved by throwing hardware at.

Agree. I have a Samsung S21 which is supposed to be top of the range and I occasionally experience such poor performance that wouldn't be tolerated on a lower end iPhone. Android is really a mixed bag even on high end device. Sometimes it just flies then next minute it lags and stutters so badly...in the same app doing exactly the same thing. I only stay on Android due to pretty much a single app that's not available in iOS, otherwise I would be using an iPhone. They're not perfect but gosh iPhones are so much more polished, consistent and at least reasonably quick/smooth even if you have older/lower end devices.

Ever since iOS 15 came out I’ve been getting small stutters in CarPlay. I’m on an iPhone 12 Pro so it’s not a hardware speed issue.

You know what? You’re right. It sticks out like a sore thumb because it’s so different from my normal experience. I’m used to some 3rd party apps being terrible but not the OS itself.

(Never used Android for more than 5 minutes, can’t comment there)

Samsung devices (and I read, Xiaomi devices too, but to a lesser extent) have shitty performance. Yeah, they have excellent specs, but the software is horrible. I know this because Pixels are almost always guaranteed to be extremely fluid, but my comparable S10 suffers from significant stutters and lag.

Open developer settings and change the three "animation scale" settings to 0.5x. Modern phones rarely have responsiveness issues outside gratuitous animations.

I can confirm it improuves things. But sometimes is prone to race conditions.

I feel like this has been solved for a while now (at least on pixel devices in my experience)

Performance is still variable on Samsung/Xioami devices in my experience. I have a Samsung S21 which can be really fast one minute and stuttering the next. Possibly it's better on Google's own devices.

highly recommend unless you need knox or some other propritary samsung app. I also wish they would stick with one processor. The exynos vs snapdragon differences are annoying when trying to read reviews or troubleshoot

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