Hacker News Reader

Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

I should add that Jelly Bean was the first version of Android that I noticed to lose all traces of lagginess and be comparable response-wise to any iPhone or iPad I've used. Apple nailed this UX from the get-go, it took a while for Google to nail this I feel; also perhaps unoptimized Android devices were not helping matters. My HTC and Nexus, both with Jelly Bean are as smooth as, um, butter.

View on HN

I started with a Nexus One and have purchased 5 android devices altogether. I'd consider myself a Google fanboy, and rely heavily on their service platform.

But the next tablet I get will have to be an iPad or Surface Pro, because I make music and all the tablet-based music software worth talking about is on iOS. Google largely ignored the creative market in developing Android and made no effort to address concerns about latency or similar issues. The only software of note to appear on Android in the last 2 years is Image Line's well-respected Fruity Loops audio/MIDI sequencer, but I'm so jaded that I can't be bothered to install it.

Result? A huge, thriving ecosystem of interoperable audio & MIDI apps on the iPad, with zero incentive to switch back to Android any time in the foreseeable future. Android becomes identified as a consumer-only platform, iOS as a producer platform. The number of musical artists that use an iPad is tiny compared to the overall consumer market, but artists tend to be vocal about the tools they use and are delighted to be seen using them, which I think has about 100x the PR value of any given commercial depicting actors having a good time with their consumer device.

That's great to hear. Apple have always targeted content producers (music/video/graphics/...?) and I'm glad that this has carried over to their tablets.

I hope in time that Android gets the same amount of attention because those apps will eventually bolster the Linux ecosystem in general. It's great to hear that Fruity Loops is available for Android, I remember a Mac-head showing me an early version of it like 15 years ago! Ouch, I feel old.

It's a bit surprising that sound latency on Android is as bad as it is. It's not just apps for audio production that suffers, most any kind of audio toy is useless.

For people who want to tinker with audio on Android, it's possible to swap AudioFlinger with PulseAudio[1] for lower latency (20ms vs 176ms)[2], but so far you have to build and flash your own AOSP image, so it's not exactly plug and play.

[1]: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Ports/An...

[2]: http://arunraghavan.net/2012/01/pulseaudio-vs-audioflinger-f...

> but so far you have to build and flash your own AOSP image

I think you're going to see more people doing this, with the Nexus devices and the Transformer tablet. Maybe I've overestimated the popularity of the ASUS-branded hardware, but I have always had the best of luck with my TF-101 getting current ROMs and updates from the third-party vendors like TeamEOS.

Now that TeamEOS is gone, there's a void, so more people are probably going to learn to build the ROMs. There are even people picking up the torch[1] with the TeamEOS source code, taking their branches and picking up where they left off.

I know as consumers, we all want vendors to support their products... but as members of Open Source community, I see it's irresponsible to depend on them exclusively for forward motion, progress, and updates, and for freedom's sake it shouldn't be an impossible proposition to compile and flash your own ROM. (Just think if you bought an x86 computer with Ubuntu or Fedora and you couldn't re-OS it.)

[1]: https://github.com/timduru/

I constantly hear people make this claim, but in my experience, it is not true. I have owned tons of Android devices and they have really gotten a lot smoother and responsive, especially with 4.1/4.2 releases, but they still don't come close to iOS.

I have tried tons of different roms on the Galaxy Nexus and the factory roms on the One X, One, and S4, but they just don't have the iOS level of smooth.

The thing about the Galaxy Nexus is that it's essentially a Samsung Galaxy sII but with 2.4x more pixels to push with the same GPU.

There are some optimizations that iOS can make that Android can't, but the gnex in particular I think is slightly crippled.

Agreed. I have never once experienced iOS level smoothness from my Note II, and I've run both stock TouchWiz 4.1 and a CM 10.1 4.2 variant called Liquidsmooth.

Android is great, I wouldn't trade back to iOS for the world, but I've just learned to accept the hiccups, lag and odd behavior that hurts my "suspension of belief" (or whatever term describes the ability to believe that we're actually 'moving' things by touching a screen).

I just flashed 4.3 onto my Nexus 4, and I'm happy to say those annoying hiccups are virtually non-existent now! They really bothered me before. Chrome and Facebook were the apps I most noticed the stuttering in.

Are you sure this is not only due to the fact that you've flashed a new rom (you say flash so it's not OTA, I suppose) so the system is freshly installed?

I should try it on my Nexus S that has become sluggish as hell (and I've tried different custom roms)

I don't want to over-generalize based on one data point, but on my Galaxy Nexus I noticed that 4.2 pretty handily undid all of the improvements that 4.1 managed in this arena. It was indeed a paradise of smoothness for that one point release, though.

I did not notice that. You could very well be right. It'd be nice if Google could release some cold hard performance figures. Maybe I could, er, Google it.

IMHO 4.2 should never have been shipped for the Galaxy Nexus. Just too slow. I upgraded to a Nexus 4 and 4.2 is fine there, but will 4.4 be fine? Nobody knows.

I'll be building 4.3 for the gnexus after it syncs, so we'll see how it is.

Anyone wondering, it's performing faster than 4.2 on the gnexus imho. Battery life is the same though. Superuser is problematic unless you undo a change in one of the /davlik files[1]. That makes the system partition mount without nosuid as it did before Android 4.3. The other solution is uglier, using SuperSU (which is closed source) and runs as a hacky service that most apps are not compatible with yet.

[1] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/dalvik/+/9907ca3cb...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com