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Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

An app with no animations at all is going to feel terrible. You can test this out yourself, if you have an Android you can set animation speed to 0x in the developer settings. It is jarring to see instant changes and it actually takes your brain a second to process what happened, and that process is probably slower than having the animation in the first place.

I have mine at 0.5x and that feels sufficient, still fast but I can see apps opening and closing etc.

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I'm a happy user of android with animations turned off. It's the only mean to make it somewhat "snappy". IMHO lag is always worse than lack of fancy transient state in input -> UI change context.

Not for me, I always turn off animations. It feels fine for me, and I can operate the phone a lot quicker without having to wait for animations to complete.

I don't turn them off entirely, I kind of enjoy the feeling of momentum animated elements can provide, but I definitely do go in and speed them up massively. I find that when a phone is feeling unresponsive or sluggish, it's usually because I'm moving two steps ahead of the animation and it has to catch up. Feels like tripping on your own feet.

I have mine at 0.5x.

The problem with 0x is that it seems to only affect like 90% of the UI. Certain things still animate, and the cadence feels awful as a result.

At 0.5x the stuff that's mysteriously unaffected by the animation speed setting isn't as jarring.

I would use 0x if it worked properly.

All animations are just wasted time while you can't properly interact with the UI, it's much better to just turn every one of them off.

After using Android for like a decade, I eventually succumbed and got a iPhone 12 Mini (back when it was new). I still miss the ability of turning off animations as I could do on Android, and I'm 110% my current phone would feel 200% faster if I could just turn off every damn animation that just exists to exists. I'd much rather have a second to process if that's needed (which I don't think it is), than being slowed down by one second every time an app changes the page, everything feels like molasses when you navigate around.

Try "reduce motion"? It's not quite the same thing (prefers cross-fades in many cases), but it might help. Anecdotally some things are noticeably faster, and not having them swing around before settling lets me get a read on their location faster.

Sadly, basically no difference :/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48520988

Kinda fits with what I remember when I used iOS daily - I suspect it's because there's so much more UI customization compared to Android (where practically everyone uses the stock animation core pieces, of composes stuff from it).

Having been an Android dev who handled this stuff very carefully: yeah it's very error prone to do by hand. You have to keep in mind which animations are generally "desired" (like inertial scrolling and panning) and rebuild the stock stuff by hand to work around it if you have custom views or animations, so they don't jump around weirdly (leaping ahead of where you release, because there's where the inertia would settle).

I kinda wonder if this stuff is part of the reason for the new Jetpack Compose stuff - it makes custom views significantly more difficult, so you're very strongly incentivized to just combine stock components, where this all mostly works correctly by default.

Give it one day and you won't come back to those sluggish animations slowing your intent down.

I have it at 0.5x. 0x is just not smooth enough, plus sometimes apps actually don't load fast enough so you're stuck waiting for them anyway.

It's jarring to see instant changes that don't make sense. Animations are primarily a way to paper over UI that sucks to begin with.

Many transitions in Android are perfectly fine at 0x animation speed. The majority of transitions that suck without animation suck because the pre-/post-transition layout sucks and the transition between the two states doesn't make sense as a result.

It's the same with several of the transitions in TFA. For example, the address bar placeholder text[1] should just be left-aligned all the time. The save dialog[2] should leave all the basic controls in their original location[3] when switching from the basic mode to the advanced mode. That means the "Where:" label should also remain in the advanced mode, and the controls[4] that pop up to replace it should either be moved to the right or below. The search bar should also be moved down.

These are some really basic details and it is my understanding Apple used to not screw them up nearly as badly.

[1]https://tonsky.me/blog/every-frame-perfect/safari@2x.mp4?t=1...

[2]https://tonsky.me/blog/every-frame-perfect/save@1x.mp4?t=178...

[3]https://imgur.com/ZpHLCsv Artist's rendition. Please excuse the minor jank and criminal amount of empty space; I couldn't be arsed to fiddle with the screenshots to get pixel-perfect positioning and shrink the advanced dialog horizontally. Bikeshedding over where exactly the new controls belong is welcomed but irrelevant to the point I'm making.

[4]Is it just me, or are their icons uselessly, impenetrably, unhelpful?

An app with no animations feels awesome. It's great and it doesn't take my brain any time to process what happened since I already knew what was going to happen when I press the button that makes things happen on purpose.

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