Not every user owns an iPhone
calendar.perfplanet.com
calendar.perfplanet.com
I refuse to pay $1K (Canadabucks) for something that could be destroyed in an instant if I happen to drop it or sit on it. I get whatever low-end phone Costco is pushing at the moment. The current one is a Moto G Play 2023 that cost me all of CAD$140 on special. It works fine, but bloat can catch up to anything.
I use an app called Flashfood. It was fine. Then they restyled it. And whatever else they did, on my phone it is now so glacially slow that I don't use it as much any more. They'll never know, because they test it on $1K phones where you can waste so much compute on a glorified screen refresh. The actual functionality could have been done with a 2010 vintage phone, if coded efficiently.
They should be testing on low-end phones. Because a significant percentage of the user base has them. Somewhere in a fiction novel I read about a music industry executive who would listen to new material on a crappy little record player, not on super fancy studio monitor equipment. Because that's what it had to sound good on.
Interestingly, Google uses and emulated Moto G (Power) for site speed testing in their pagesight/lighthouse tool.
> Captured at Jan 9, 2025 at 11:23 AM EST Emulated Moto G Power with Lighthouse 12.2.3 Single page sessionThis data is taken from a single page session, as opposed to field data summarizing many sessions. Initial page load Slow 4G throttling Using HeadlessChromium 131.0.6778.139 with lr
The article states that the fastest Android phone is about the same speed as the 4 year old iPhone 12.
Also if you buy a few generations old refurbished, it's only a few hundred, not $1k.
All this being said, of course apps should run on low-mid end hardware. They're still wildly powerful devices.
A friend had hers snatched by thieves. Gone in an instant. I don't in general need the power (or camera) of an expensive phone (except for the app mentioned). And I'd rather have a recent, lower-end one than an older higher-end one, having been burned a few times by apps "not compatible with your device" due to the OS being too old, admittedly only on older iDevices that the kids play with or truly ancient Android tablets.
Oh, and two iPhone 7 vintage devices that were given to us as kids' playthings a few years ago (both with forgotten activation locks, so useless) were absolutely thrashed. They are tough but not infinitely so.
I prefer Canadollars
Tangent, but the Yamaha NS10, the de facto studio monitor, is used precisely because if you can make it sound good on those it will sound good on anything. They're awful.
And, your comment is without exaggeration, as per the wikipedia article on the speaker: "it may lead to listener fatigue with prolonged use in the domestic setting"
https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/auratone-5c-super-sound...
https://tapeop.com/reviews/gear/111/5c-super-sound-cube-spea...
They compared high end Android phones and they were still slower than any iPhone that has been introduced in the past three years.
In the US, 70% of users own iPhones. They are all faster than any Android phone if bought in the last three years.
I'm not justifying badly-optimized sites/apps but frankly I don't expect an entry level 4 cylinder gas-powered car to perform the same as a high-end EV.
Marissa Mayer, while at Google, kept using dialup at home so she would experience what someone without broadband sees.
Odds were good that each year Apple would reserve space for or specifically invite (one year onstage) folks from the company to WWDC. And each year the founder of the company and usually at least 2-3 developers would buy the latest iPhone or Mac, and that would become the new development flagship. Sometimes they’d get advance access to new hardware, and they’d always take advantage of face to face time with Apple’s platform developers.
Now it made sense for new features like Touch ID, then Face ID. There was good reason to test that support on real hardware. But we’re talking every year.
I try to use my devices until they’re no longer in support at least. Sometimes I’ll upgrade outside that cadence, but rarely.
I learned the impact that has on the end user real quick. In 2018 I was rocking a 2015 MacBook Pro that was not maxed out on RAM and CPU, and our flagship product ran like shit on it because all the developers were running new MacBook Pros with as much RAM and CPU as they could buy.
This is absolutely not an "iOS vs Android" discussion, and the author completely misses this fact.
"Delivery - Mobile - Free - Your phone's your ticket. Locate your tickets in your account - or in your app. When you go mobile, your tickets will not be emailed to you or available for print."
I occasionally help a coworker buy tickets as he has a flip phone and no computer. Yesterday, the above was the only delivery option, so I couldn't help him. He was able to buy the tickets at the venue, but that is slowly going away as well.
> Are you going beyond measuring a high level p75 and looking at the detail beneath?
Hear hear.
IMO this should be in QA/SDET's realm (ideally via automated testing). If you're rich maybe you have one or a few SWEs devoted to performance. This will force other people within the company to also think about these metrics. Don't be a siloed developer quietly fixing all of these things for free just because it's slow on your machine.
What is worse is that apple has handicapped safari from taking full advantage of its HW and does not allows other browser-makers to do it either this results in inferior experience for ios owners using webapps and web app developers are forced to release their apps on iphone.
If other browser makers can’t make a performant browser on Android, what makes you think either Google or Firefox is going to make a faster one for IOS?
The article states that the inferior experience is on Android. If anything you need to make an app for Android because of how bad browsers perform even on top end phones
Chrome on iOS will be faster than Chrome on Android for this reason
I interpreted this as you saying that Chrome wouldn’t be faster on iOS whereas I’m pretty sure it will
And why aren’t Google’s own phones the fastest Android phones?
Apple's SoCs have huge processor caches which makes quite a big difference
Here's the processor cache sizes for the A16
L1 cache 320 KB per P-core (192 KB instruction + 128 KB data) 224 KB per E-core (128 KB instruction + 96 KB data)
L2 cache 16 MB (performance cores) 4 MB (efficient cores)
Last level cache 24 MB
The L1 / L2 / L3 cache sizes in the Pixel 9 CPU don't appear to be documented but based on previous CPUs I'd bet they aren't going to be very large
Are you seriously saying that you think Chrome on iOS is going to be slower than Chrome on Android?
What it is not is implementing every Google “standard” and when things break it can be a PITA to debug.
Irony here too is that the linked site features a weird display of the author’s image and bio that takes up the entire screen and more on iPhone. It took me a couple seconds to realize it wasn’t a focus of the page.
This isn’t a iOS vs android problem, it’s a “our website isn’t optimized and we run 1000 ads and trackers” problem.
Incidentally for browser games even that is way too high.
Isn’t the lesson just the opposite? If you want performance on an Android phone you have to write a native app - especially for low end Android phones
You have to just laugh at shit like that.
They tend to fall into 2 categories.
1, you pay for the app, the app disables ads and/or enables full functionality. End of transaction
2, you pay for the app, the app then redirects you to the next "tier", where you are expected to pay more (or monthly) for some added feature.
If you do not, you now get less functionality than you did before you paid for the app.
You no longer get random ads, instead you get the same ad over and over telling you to spend more money on the app you just bought.
(This was some music streaming app, I think TuneIn radio or something)
If your app is #2, your company is also #2 and someone should flush it down the toilet.
If your app is #1, then people should be content that they are getting what they paid for.
Yes they see the visitors IP address (but often don’t store it), they’ll often drop a cookie so pages can be tied together as a session but generally they’re bot interested in tracking people across sites or long time periods
Second, minimum reqs are/were a thing. I'm not necessarily arguing for or against anything, but at some point... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Lastly, people using badly performing devices (not always inherently a hardware issue) are probably accustomed to things not working smoothly. You can only do so much.
Almost any currently in use iPhone has a 'pretty good' processor and probably has up to date software. Even the iPhone 8 still holds up pretty well.
On the Android side you get a wider spread of devices. I imagine a Pixel 8 or S23 compare pretty well to 'iOS'. The problem is old, low powered budget phones. I wonder how much of the problem one those phones is specific to the tech we use to build sites, and how much is the crappy hardware.
I also don't imagine the expected value of a potential customers on a flagship iPhone or Pixel device is the same as a potential customer using a Huawei P20.
The bigger problem is how much money you can budget for supporting every phone and which platform is more profitable. This is a video game but, Warframe was ported to iOS and then to Android. If this isn’t an indicator that you will make more money than what is ?
Locking all sorts of basic stuff to two for-profit closed platforms sounds rather non-ideal to me. It's also quite a shift from stuff being web-based, where in principle you or I could sit down and write a compatible browser and/or port an existing browser (some work, but very doable).
It's not all that different from locking everything to Windows and/or Internet Explorer like it was 20 years ago, except worse because it's so much more pervasive now. The old "mandatory Microsoft tax" got replaced with a "mandatory Google/Apple tax". Any startup has basically zero chance of entering the market.
Statistics I saw for the US is 97% of adults have smart phones
Yes, you can make an app or sell a widget without supporting transactions via mail, but many companies providing critical services are starting to require cellphones to participate.
https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...
This use to be limited to land line phones. But now is expanded to cell phones
It’s much cheaper than physical infrastructure.
But do you expect Amazon to except postal mail and work like the Sears Catalog?
This is great to see. Yes, assuming it is implemented well this is better than the sears catalog.
In fact from the article it doesn’t. Modern Android phones have the performance of a 4 year old iPhone.
When the new iPhone SE is introduced this year - Apples low end $400 phone - I wouldn’t be surprised if it is faster than high end Android phones. It will probably be based on the iPhone 16 SOC.
> In fact, your looking at the iPhone 12 until you find a previous version of the iPhone that scores less than todays fastest Samsung Android device. To add a little more perspective, this device was first sold over 4 years ago!
The halcyon days of the Qualcomm Krait (which certainly had some problems) are very long gone by now.
I wonder if the relationship between Geekbench score and TTI etc. are linear though. My guess is the areas that slow Android down are crappy phones that are freezing up from lack of RAM lack of headroom in processing power due to system overhead. ie any phone above a certain threshold score is probably fine.
I could be very wrong though!
If a low end hypothetical iPhone SE comes out this year with the iPhone 16 SOC, there will be no iPhone that is as slow as the fastest Android phone.
The iPhone 14 is the slowest iPhone Apple sells and soon won’t be selling that or the SE in the EU at least because they both use Lightning instead of USB.
My point is that in the graph showing Geekbench score and INP [1] you can draw a straight line, but what I see in the graph are three clusters – phones with a Geekbench score: - above 1,500 (look very good) - between 500 and 1,500 (look decent still) - below 500 (really terrible)
Both an iPhone and a flagship Android will have a much better INP than a phone with a Geekbench score of 500. I'm not so sure if an iPhone has a much better INP score than a flagship Android though (maybe it does, I'm not seeing that in the data though).
[1] https://calendar.perfplanet.com/images/2024/alex/1_9TNKz0qd5...
The thing that really winds me up is forcing you to use a mobile for 2FA, when it would be easy to support a landline as well, which thankfully my bank does.
"It's just a few seconds" is the sort of mind-rot the article is targeting... every second matters, even when it seems like it doesn't...
I give my engineers different Android phones as their primary development devices and yet the weird Android issues that keep cropping up are near constant.
When it's a "works for me" on one platform but falls over with different hardware, that usually points to some serious issues (e.g. threading, contention, false assumptions) in your code/app.
Not to say that there probably aren't buggy areas in Android itself, however with an appropriate test budget you could determine which are likely hardware (different phones) vs OS (common across devices, with simple repro apps) vs your software (you have bugzorz).
Saying that half the population somehow doesn't matter for one of the country's largest supermarket chains is completely mental on every level and is not a serious viewpoint.
It's slightly more, but still not continental style: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/germany
Android users in the english speaking world do have a habit of being way more trouble than they are worth.
Wouldn’t life be a little better if we considered the needs of people a bit less lucky than ourselves?
What happens when your general approach (ignore the margins) means the "bona fide charitable causes" can't operate because they all require top-of-the-line equipment to even be functional?
Software is already shite, stop trying to justify making it more shite.
I got my first smartphone years and years ago, and it was an android. Then they came out with the iPhone 3GS, and I briefly had that. Didn't like it, traded for an Android. Was ready to experiment back then, even briefly ran Windows Phone flashed on a HTC device. But inertia had its way with me, and I've been sticking with Android ever since. I have all the apps I need. I have my ages-old "weird" workflows set up, like keepass synced through OneDrive. I run an andblocker on firefox. Moving to an iPhone would be just so much pain for no real gain.
If you don't provide an Android app, well, provide me with a burner iPhone if you want me to use your service.
Disadvantaged people deserve a chance to have solutions to their problems too. If we want a society that’s worth being a part of, we’d do well to consider those people.
The fact that you equate people who can’t afford an iPhone to “bottom feeders” is quite telling.
I view maintaining android compatibility as a part of a vendor mitigation strategy, avoiding the creep of tight coupling that can make adjusting to market shifts an intractable problem.
Personally, I don't understand why people buy iPhones. If you're in the US, I can understand the texting and video calls lock-in, but even then, I'd buy an Android just because I'd refuse to be a hostage to Apple's services, and I'd wear that green badge with pride.
Furthermore, paying the price of the latest iPhone Pro (or Samsung S Ultra for that matter) is ridiculous and is only acceptable to people with high prices on their contracts. Much like what US people are going through — i.e., if you're paying $100+ on a mobile plan, might as well throw an iPhone in the mix to sweeten the deal. But on my 5 EUR unlimited data plan, me and others do not want an expensive phone included and prefer to pay for that phone up front.
And you can get a phone plan for $15/month
As a company do you want people like that as your customer?
Tesco is a low-mid end supermarket chain in the UK, so this is kind of irrelevant as they need to hit everyone, but in such circumstances people should not complain if the UX sucks on their device because they were excessively cheap, and yet, of course, they do. The truth is the numbers in the article are unacceptably slow across the board.
You can have alternative app stores, you can download torrents on it and then play them with VLC, you can have the actual Firefox browser and even Chrome clones (e.g., Brave) are more capable than iOS Safari web views. You can have an email client that works locally (K-9 Mail). Android has had usable PWA support for years. The most popular chat app, WhatsApp, is not Google's app. Samsung phones don't even push people into many of Google's apps, shipping with Samsung's own launcher, Calendar, Notes, Camera, Gallery, etc., and it even has their own apps store in addition to Google Play. And AOSP, the open-source distribution, is actually usable even without Google's Play Services, which has spawned distributions such as LineageOS breathing life into old devices.
I'm an Android user, and except for the Play App Store and Google Maps, I don't use any other apps from Google and that hasn't happened due to some attempt for "degoogling". Even the app that syncs my CalDAV/CardDAV accounts is not developed by Google (on Android this isn't native, but that's completely fine).
I don't understand why many iPhone users resort to such mental gymnastics to justify an expensive device that's being rented from Apple.
And yes, as an app developer, you want Android users because Android (and its allies, like WhatsApp) are actually winning in the marketplace. Providing clients for all people is how WhatsApp came to dominate the landscape. This is why Apple is so reluctant to give up on their nefarious practices related to their App Store or the restrictions they place on developers, continuously trying to undermine the EU's DMA because they know they only have a short window during which they can milk the user base.
Outside the US, Android is the dominant platform by a wide margin and iOS support is lower priority. And for many services you can't just exclude users anyway, be it for legal reasons or because network effects.
Considering iPhones tend to stay usable much longer than the $150 Androids, it may be cheaper in the long run.
Of course, not for the early adopter types who change their phone yearly. But that's their own fault.
Sent from my Z Fold 6.