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Comment by actionfromafar | Hacker News Reader

It's sad that Android doesn't automatically fall back to a simpler GUI which takes less time to render. Even Windows XP (2000, 98?) got this right (with manual settings).

Even an A53 is a super computer when it comes to graphics compared to CPUs of yore.

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A serious improvement on these budget phones is turning animations completely off, it removed most of the stuttering and GPU usage doesn't spike just pulling up the keyboard.

Android doesn't automatically fall back to a simpler GUI

How much simpler can it be, given that everything seems to already be flat and borderless? As your last sentence alludes to, Windows and other desktop OSs worked perfectly fine with far more complex UIs (including windows) on far less powerful hardware. Mobile UIs seem to be quite primitive in comparison.

In other words, this is entirely a software problem.

A visually simpler GUI (such as Luna vs. "classic" on Windows XP) isn't necessarily less resource-intensive. Implementing an actual different, less resource-intensive rendering path could help, but would double the development effort.

Is this not what Android Go is supposed to be?

Android Go is usually installed on phones with little memory and storage, but not with slow SoC.

E.g. Motorola Moto E30 has a faster processor than G22, but is sold with Go because it only has 2GB RAM and 32GB storage.

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