Comment by corresation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by corresation | Hacker News Reader

Some incredible conjecture here. Assuming that Android is caught with its pants down and will desperately try to "catch up" with Apple (the other scenario is that Android has diverged dramatically, and if anything this is Apple catching up with Android, but I hardly expect someone like Marco to ever spin it that way), the notion that the new UI rudiments on iOS 7 are intense on GPUs -- and thus out of the capabilities of lower-end devices -- is incredibly presumptive. I haven't installed the beta of iOS 7 on any of my devices to pull the metrics, but it looks incredibly mild on the GPU (effects like layered blurring or transluency are an absolute laugh for any modern GPU, even on very low-end devices). This does not look demanding on the shader or fill rate whatsoever, which of course Apple would avoid because the GPU can be very expensive on the battery, and can monopolize the memory bus.

This is all quite funny regardless. Samsung had parallax and accelerometer (later gyroscope) based interfaces for years in their TouchWiz shizzle, just as Google heavily pushed 3D interfaces (see RenderScript). I would never argue that it is identical to what Apple has introduced, but once against from the zeitgeist of Apple fanatics you would believe this is the next step brought to us from Apple.

Yet how long after the hardware was absolutely capable of matching iOS for responsiveness in the current UI, did it take for Android to prioritize and achieve that goal and how long did it then take manufacturers to update their implementations? And to what extent has it filtered down to the bulk of cheap devices?

I don't think the (sane) argument is that Android can't match. Or that the hardware to match is unavailable/expensive. I think there's a valid point about Android having different priorities that often see it ignoring this area and the manufacturers of cheap devices generally just not caring to try. [1]

So inasmuch as iOS6-class performance was in reach of even the 'don't really care' class of Android manufacturers, iOS7 does present a higher bar (that they are likely to continue not really caring about), meaning tens-to-hundreds of millions of devices that don't (regardless of whether they could) match on visuals. Until the inexorable march of performance-per-watt brings them brute force solutions.

[1] Is Google even going to think it's worth the resources to chase blur effects at the expense of other features? And if they don't, would Samsung? And as the maker of its own 'cheaper' devices, would Samsung filter that higher-end look to its cheaper devices out of the gate? Or retain it as a differentiator to push people into buying new Galaxy kit, instead of the lower-end devices?

Android still hasn't matched iOS in the responsiveness front, owing to some fundamental architectural choices made early in Android's development (chief being the overuse of managed code, and the costs that come with it). This is entirely a software problem, having little to do with hardware, yet the article makes a hardware argument that is simply not supported.

It's also worth giving some perspective on those rampant "cheap" devices: The most common Android handset in use in the US of A is the Galaxy S3. Other very powerful devices fill the top echelon of deployments. Any notion that assumes that it's legions of bottom tier devices just isn't accurate. And the great thing about GPU shaders is that they're eminently scalable. Again, assuming that this notion that Android will chase iOS is true, these things are the most easily toggled, and having better effects on top tier devices that scale back on lower devices is trivial.

All of this (the submission I mean, and related articles) is just conjecture. Apple did what Apple felt was right for iOS to improve the operating system. Framing everything in an Android context is just speculation.

Android still hasn't matched iOS in the responsiveness front

Guessing you don't use Android or at least haven't in awhile? I've been Android user now since the release of 4.0 and it seems much more responsive now than my wife's iPhone 5 in almost every category from web browsing to gaming. I was very aware of the lag pre-4.0 and that was the main reason I never switched (was an iPhone user before that). Now it's as smooth as can be.

I use both Android and iOS for a considerable part of my day. On the Android side I roll with a Galaxy S3, Nexus 4 and Nexus 7.

It has gotten much better, most certainly, via things like concurrent and partial garbage collections (and the improvements in the integer-units in the CPUs, simply brute forcing through these UI thread impediments), and other core improvements, but it's still most certainly behind iOS (where UI priority was a core architectural concern from day one).

Aside from a still not silky smooth experience, Android still has an endemic problem with completely non-responsive interactions -- you click or do something and everything just stops with absolutely no hints or feedback....and then three seconds later a result appears.

I honestly don't see that at all on my nexus 4. Maybe it's just the limited apps that I use. I do see more performance related issues on my Nexus 7 though.

I agree that modern Android phones (mine [Sharp 200SH] has 4.1.2, dual core CPU, 1GB RAM) are pretty smooth, and seem more or less the same as modern iOS devices on that front. [Apple sometimes seems to go to extra lengths to put in little animations etc (e.g. the screen rotation), but I'd classify most of them as frills.]

... with one glaring exception: on my Android phone, at least, pressing the home button very often takes a good 1-2 seconds (sometimes more!) to take you to the home screen, with no visual feedback that it's doing anything. A second with no feedback is an eternity in GUI time. iPhones (and iPads), on the other hand, respond pretty much instantaneously to the home button.

I'm pretty used to this behavior, so I know to just wait, but it's still pretty annoying (one hits the home button quite frequently in typical usage).... Even if there's some property of the Android software that makes it challenging to do the switch itself quickly for some reason, couldn't they have at least provided a little visual feedback that it's doing something...?!

> "The most common Android handset in use in the US of A "

has very little to say about what the bulk of Android devices are, given that something like 80% of Android activations are outside the USA. Further, the discussion isn't just about cheap/underpowered hardware, but even adequate hardware that suffers for lack of effort/support. Hardware superior to Nexus builds routinely perform worse than Nexus builds. This is a consideration larger than what Android or the hardware in a given device can do.

> "Apple did what Apple felt was right for iOS to improve the operating system."

This I very much agree with. I think it's fine to say plenty of Android device makers will continue to release devices with much less thought to performance than Apple, or even Google, and these devices won't look or perform like iOS7, or even stock jelly bean on a Nexus device.

But I doubt very much that anyone at Apple spent any real time planning UI performance/feature tuning as a competitive advantage. This situation is very much like Apple tweaking the UI performance of the very first iPhone until animations could match the speed of touch-response. And they did this solely so that "dragging" an object appeared more 'real' -- to reinforce the concept with visuals and visual performance.

And they did that without regard to what hardware competitors might ship, or even what priorities competitors might have -- as there really were no competitors for the device they were building, when they were building it.

This blur and transparency is no different. It's there to reinforce the UI concept. This is more a story about Apple continuing to devote non-trivial time and effort tuning hardware -- and giving up general performance and battery life -- in the pursuit of a level of UI polish they are internally satisfied with.

  > effects like layered blurring or transluency are an
  > absolute laugh for any modern GPU, even on very low-end
  > devices

Yet for some reason some simple scrolling still has problems on anything but top Android devices. Now combine scrolling with that oh-so-easy translucency and blurring.

The issues with scrolling on Android is not and has never been a GPU issue -- you can't solve it putting a more powerful GPU in place.

Instead it's a UI-thread issue and composition hindrances like stop-the-world garbage collection (or synchronous load-on-demand UI rudiments that halt or significantly impede UI interactions). If it were a simple GPU issue we would have quickly moved past it (GPUs now are dramatically more powerful than a few short years ago), but alas, it is not.

Yeah, scrolling is easy if the entire bitmap you are scrolling exists in memory already. Then it's just a GPU thing, like the stuff in iOS 7. Scrolling is a lot harder when the content that is being scrolled to is being rendered in realtime, and when the scroll buffer is endless. Then it's not the GPU that is the problem, but the threading interaction.

Now now, don't let history get in the way of a good narrative.

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