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Comment by kyro | Hacker News Reader

I'm so glad to see actual numbers for this. Time and time again I've been called delusional for saying that Android devices have more observable lag than iPhones. It is a very, very small component of the overall device and OS that has an enormous affect on the overall user experience, at least to me. It doesn't seem to be that big a deal to many as evident by phone sales, but it drives me absolutely nuts and is the main reason why I won't make the switch to Android.

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For comparison, here's another set of benchmarks from a guy who appears to use the same methodology (240fps camera, count frames between input and screen response in custom lightweight apps).

http://www.collectingsmiles.com/news/measuring-latency-in-co...

iPhone 5: 81 ms

Galaxy S3: 104 ms

Galaxy Note: 71 ms

Nintendo 3DS: 23 ms

PS Vita: 49 ms

And, to add a tv game console into the mix, apparently the latency between input on a PS3 wireless controller and home screen interaction is also about 50 ms.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3725/measuring_respons...

Its interesting that the Wii U touchscreen has 53ms latency while the 3DS only has 23ms.

At a guess, the Wii U touchscreen is bigger so the scanning frequency would drop if they are both using the same tech.

Resistive screens don't need to be scanned like capacitive ones. The moment you make contact on a resistive film the controller can detect the resistance change and perform the A-D conversion. There's more latency in the host communication traffic than the conversion.

Now I want to know delay of trackpad on a Macbook Pro.

I've got no direct knowledge of this in particular but I've heard that the mouse movement is one of the highest level interrupts in the OS and won't be preempted -- so the number is probably very small but the response by the application when you click may be longer. Also, this is why sometimes you'll see the entire computer locked up except for the mouse movement.

Part of that is due to having a hardware mouse cursor. Basically all the interrupt handler has to do is load the new coordinates into some registers on the video co-processor and co-processor takes care of all of the work of blitting the mouse around the screen. It makes processing the mouse interrupts very light-weight.

Which OS and hardware platform are you referring to now?

I think this applies to most desktop OSes and nearly all the hardware platforms they run on, aside from virtualised ones.

It wouldn't make headlines because its not a sensational news.

Apple iPhone 5 touchscreen is as fast as Android. Meh.

The note has different tech in it than the vast majority of android devices (stylus support). Also, i could not find the result to verify whether it was for touch or stylus.

From the linked page: "THIS IS HOW COLORS! PERFORMS ACROSS DEVICES – WHICH MIGHT NOT BE HOW OTHER GAMES/APPS BEHAVE ON THOSE SAME DEVICES. Each device has their own way of doing input and rendering, and we have done more work on latency on some devices than on others."

In other words, one test was designed to be a benchmark from the ground up, and the other is a cross platform app.

So basically, for all we know the Android version of their app is just coded worse than the iOS one.

> and we have done more work on latency on some devices than on others.

Or, conversely, they had to work harder on their Android app to bring latency down to that of the iOS app. Just not enough information given to know.

Not surprised at Nintendo's good showing. I remember noting that the older DSi felt incredibly responsive when using its stylus to draw. The several drawing apps I've tried on iOS haven't the same impression that your input is immediately laying down ink.

I came to the same conclusion (~85ms for the iPhone4s) in my own benchmark about a year ago, using Mobile Safari:

http://phoboslab.org/log/2012/06/measuring-input-lag-in-brow...

On the other hand, I have rolled my eyes at people like Gruber who went on and on about how the iPad is totes for creation and not just consumption, and how styli are stupid - after spending time with my iPad and trying to draw and "touch write" in apps myself.

Apple makes great devices, and I wouldn't use any other phone and tablet, but I think people like Gruber have been completely blind to the technological shortcomings of iOS devices in this area, because Steve Jobs told them styli are stupid, and the iPad is going to disrupt this-and-that.

It also brings up the whole "to stylus or not to stylus" discussion again, because one of the main reasons you wouldn't want to use a stylus for an iPad is that it highlights just how (comparatively) poor the touch latency is for the tasks that lend themselves to work with styli.

It perhaps best underscores that iPads are very much - still - disruptive technology, which by definition is in many ways inferior than sustaining technologies, but makes up for it in other compelling ways.

It's one of the many reminders that we shouldn't get too busy throwing out everything paper and analogue. Disruption is not synonymous with obviation.

What about "stylus when you need it" a-la galaxy note?

I love styli; I own several for my iPad.

I'm just saying that Apple have a good reason to discourage people from using styli with their iPad, for reasons other than the new finger-based touch paradigm. (As it exposes inherent shortcomings.)

I don't fault Apple and Jobs for that, though; I am just bothered by Gruber's rather naïve praise and uncompromising defence of the iPad as a device for creation over consumption, an argument I think he more than Apple and anyone else champions.

I'll second that the ipad is a great creation device but just not for proper stylus based creation - some paint styles, most drawing, and any handwriting. But it is good for more common creative applications - a lot of photo apps, music, keyboard-based writing. If Apple also made a stylus-based product I'd get it in a heartbeat (because ironically it's weakest as a paper notebook replacement for meetings and sketching ideas), but if I had to choose between those types of creative applications, there's more mileage in the ipad.

I think you misunderstand the point that he is trying to make. Gruber's "iPad isn't for creation" jokes are purely a rebuttal to all the naysayers that repeated, ad nauseum, that iPads are only for consumption. iPads may not be the best drawing/production/editing/writing devices out there, but it's clear that people are using iPads for professional level work.

I don't get the sense that Gruber thinks the current incarnations of the iPad are even particularly good for much beyond gaming and reading.

The iPad is eminently mediocre for any principally visual task such as sketching or painting. The touchscreen, while highly responsive, simply lacks the resolution (even with a stylus) to do detailed work without a massive zoom ratio.

For things that don't require visual precision, such as music production or writing or concept diagramming, the iPad is highly capable. I look forward to the day its touchscreen can handle pen input to an equal degree.

Wow, you had better explain that to my brother - he just finished illustrating a children's book with beautiful water-colour style images - all done on an iPad. But maybe I imagined that...

People do great things with mediocre tools all the time, so that does not tell us anything about the quality of the iPad as a tool for this type of drawing.

They do. When they don't have access to better tools for one reason or another. This is not my brother's case though - he simply found the iPad to be a superior solution to the problem.

I agree. I've been doing professional illustration for print (among other things) since the late 70s. My most recent published project is a book cover illustration. I have access to a huge range of media - gouache, acrylics, oils, pastel, oil bars, inks, etc - as well as pressure sensitive graphics tablets and various painting and illustration software for desktop platforms.

I was free to choose any of these, but I chose to use an iPad because it allows the immediacy of sketching and painting with natural media and the significantly faster turnaround of digital image making.

Like any tool it takes some adjustment, but once it clicks, there is nothing more immediate than using your finger(s) to directly paint an image. The fat touch region is a non-issue once you've learned to use it - after all, there's nothing terribly immediate about flexing one's fingers and having a mark appear 2-10 cm away at the tip of a pencil, pen, or brush - we've just become so accustomed to it that it seems "normal." A bit of time with an iPad and tablet finger painting seems equally immediate and natural.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Speaking as someone who regularly sketches on his iPad, this is just wrong. You want to know what sucks for graphics work? A trackpad — it took me fifteen years before I could manage 3D and bezier manipulation with a trackpad as well as with a mouse. (I could draw freehand with a mouse within a day.)

The Android numbers from the OP are just for few devices - for e.g. the Tegra devices with DirectTouch aren't included. Also from another post above the Note has better latency than iPhone 5. If you want to go Android - you can mostly get what you want :)

>>If you want to go Android - you can mostly get what you want :)

As long as multiple requirements are met in a single device.

For instance, if you want regular O/S upgrades you have about as many Android phones to choose between as there are iPhone models :-)

I have a Samsung Captivate, an iPhone 4 and a Nexus S (developer phone) all purchased in Q4 2010. Nexus S updated until 4.1, iPhone is still current with iOS 7 and the Captivate got ONE update (manually via USB) from 2.1 to 2.2... the Software Update NEVER updated.

I had this same experience. In 2010, I decided to buy the Captivate over the iPhone 4 after reading a bunch of reviews online. IIRC, I bought it right when it was released, which almost exactly coincided with the release of Froyo. After four or so months of putting up with a laggy interface, cheap (feeling) build quality, and no software updates in sight, I sold it and finally bought that iPhone 4, which I used for the next 3 years.

Recently, I decided to give Android another try and went with the Galaxy S4 when that came out. I was pleased with how far the OS had come since Eclair, but it still felt less responsive than even my 3-year-old iPhone. As for the build quality, that's my biggest regret in buying a Samsung product again. It's hard to beat the feel of an Apple device, but at least the Nexus 4 and HTC One are trying.

I have cyanogenmod. Updates every day and according to recent news, they are expanding for non-technical users.

Hell, even a friend of mine who doesn't have any it-background installed it without a problem :)

Is it safe to update to the nightly releases? Can you do it automatically?

I just upgraded to the latest release candidate (from a 1+ year old version) and it re-locked my phone and disabled the Google Play store. I finally figured out after much googling that I had to reflash google apps but was pretty stressed for a while there.

I'm wondering if perhaps I auto-update to nightlies if I wouldn't run into that problem again, but then I'm also worried about a bad release.

I've been running nightlies for maybe 8 months to a year now. I update every few days to a week. I've had two issues in that time:

1. When the alarm clock app was rewritten/significantly changed it began crashing in startup. Cleared the app data for it and it worked fine. 2. More recently, when they merged in the 4.3 branch from AOSP, it required an update to gapps as well. I didn't actually read the change/upgrade logs and ended up just reinstalling my phone clean.

Really not all that many problems when you consider it, and not all that serious. The worst case scenario (reinstall phone, restore from backups) only came up once.

This is probably because you came from 10.1 and upgraded to 10.2.

Then it locks your phone again, but its easy to re-enable. Updates between 10.2 versions don't lock your phone.

You can just download new updates in your configuration, system submenu of your phone.

Just download and then click install. I never had a problem with it actually (although they are nightlies), sometimes battery improvements are noticable and system improvements, that's really cool. So, i never experienced a bad release, and i'm always capable of downgrading my phone to the previous release (i download a new upgrade, install the new release and after some days i delete the old installation files).

A lot of days, i just do an update every day at midnight when i'm going to sleep.

One day, my phone went from 1 day battery time to 2 days (after the update from 10.1 to 10.2, somewhere the fifth nightly update i did).

One advice, if you install 10.3 in the future, install GAPPS in your system/app directory first. So you can install it immediatly.

I didn't have a problem with rerooting though.

Thanks for that.

It's complexities like this that I am too old to have time for that would make me more than happy to pay $x/year for a premium Cyanogenmod "subscription" service as floated recently that takes care of all this for you.

I hope I see the battery life improvements, that's one of my main complaints about Android.

You're welcome.

Actually, i only realized how much battery life makes it easier for you :P

But i still have 2 extra batteries in my car, for when i have no time. One of the best benefits of Android smartphones :-)

So the problem of battery life didn't really affect me much, just switch the battery and it's done... :)

Omitting Flash sizes - there is Nexus 4, Galaxy S4, HTC One and soon Moto X which Google will update like they do any other device they sell. Pretty good variety than iPhone models I'd say.

That is three (and one coming). About the same as the number of iPhone models you can buy in a store.

How many of those phones can you update in three years, like I just did for my iPhone 4? (An armless man can count them on his fingers? :-) )

Key difference is you don't get the mostly similar 3 iPhones - you get 4 vastly different phones with meaningfully different feature sets - and they are even made by different companies. Way more variety and choice.

I bet all of the Google Play sold devices would see at least 2 major updates. (My Gnex got 4.1/4.2/4.3 - and unlike my iPad 3 ios 7 update, it actually got better at every update.) That's good enough for me considering that Android updates are really not the same as iOS updates - most apps including the Keyboard get updated independent of the OS.

I'm glad to see numbers on this too. Hardware benchmarks like this are nice because they can capture end-to-end latency, but they're difficult to run. If you want to easily capture some latency numbers yourself, I've been working on an all-software benchmark for input latency: http://google.github.io/latency-benchmark

One of my biggest uses for the ipad is as a control surface for synthesizers (via Lemur). You need a high precision screen. There is a reason iOS devices are popular as control surfaces and synthesizers.

And just for those who care, Rheyne does a phenomenal job of using iPads as controllers (http://vimeo.com/72861463)

Agreed. The latency on the android devices I've tried prevents them from feeling real.

It depends on the device. Some Android devices are very snappy. For example, Samsung's 7" tablet appears to be very snappy to me - and I'd be hard pressed to pick the difference between it and my iPad 3rd gen.

However, there are a few Android phones that are particularly laggy. The Galaxy III comes to mind - when I last used one. It didn't feel anywhere near as responsive as my iPhone.

The international version or the US (LTE) variant?

I have the Verizon SGS3 (albeit running CyanogenMod) and the responsiveness is very good. TouchWiz (the Samsung Android overlay) probably adds some latency and CyanogenMod uses a newer kernel (3.4.xx vs 3.0.xx) so that might also contribute to the difference...

Agree and disagree. The touch screen is the most important aspect of a touchscreen device. Observable lag affects the user experience when they're moving faster than the device will allow.

It is a big deal but I don't think the majority of users are bothered because they see it as an inherent trait of a computer to lag.

I guess this is the difference. Android users are using computers. iPhone users are manipulating things under glass.

That makes absolutely no sense.

the latency on android gives the phones the feeling of using a computer. the lack of latency on ios gives phones the feeling of actually manipulating things on the screen.

iOS latency is still well above what's noticable by human perception. Tack on to that all of the delays you get once you're running a newer version of iOS on older devices (which I suspect is the majority of people using Apple products) and I think it's pretty obvious that there's less of a gap in how people perceive the interaction model than you're suggesting.

It's indisputably obvious how much better the iPhone screen is than other platforms. How is, for example, the difference in menu scrolling not apparent? I can't believe we needed a study to realize that. And this is coming from someone who's never had an iDevice in his life, just Android and Windows.

The reason it isn't apparent is that most people do not have the opportunity to really compare the two phones side-by side, with everyday actions: swapping between apps, swiping menus or notifications, etc, and so VERY few people get to really experience the nice things about one platform that the other doesn't do well, and vice-versa.

I don't think it's that rare... people often have multiple devices.

I have an Android phone and an ipad. It's very clear after a little use that the ipad is "snappier" (and animations are smoother etc), but iOS also feels very very limiting by comparison with Android. There are so many little things that Android just does right, that iOS...doesn't.

So which is more important, smoothness or functionality? I suppose it depends on the person and how they use the device... but really, I'd like both... :]

> There are so many little things that Android just does right, that iOS... doesn't.

Namely..?

Besides the things iPhone copied blatantly from Android phones (Notification center, 'Today', Quick toggle settings panel, new multi-shot camera etc.), you have: 100 things iPhone 5s-5s can't do that Android can. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVTrazT99Ps

Really?

I don't notice it at all.

It's very possible that there's a difference, but it simply isn't large enough to be something that even registers for me - when I use my device my attention is not on trivial stuff like that. There are annoyances and things I notice lag, but touch response or menu scrolling just are not amongst them.

I think people here are significantly overestimating how much most people pay attention to these things.

There are a lot of things to learn from Apple: I don't [want to] understand why browsing Internet in the iPad Mini is smoother than in my high end notebook. Why my iPhone 1 browsing experience was better than the Samsung S2.

Just like the pixel density of an image, beyond a certain value, makes no difference to the human eye, perhaps the touch screen response time also gets perceived only up to a certain speed. Any faster and it makes no difference. Outliers with above average visual capability do perceive things differently and maybe you have a similar ability with respect to noticing touch screen response times. That might explain why most people don't care so much. Just theorising here, but if anybody has any numbers, it would be good.

These latency numbers are around the border of minimum perceptible visual latency, which is somewhere around 100ms (http://stackoverflow.com/a/2547903/547213) A difference between between 55ms and 123ms is enough to matter.

Compare any two drum set applications - no drumming skill needed - on even a high end Android device vs a 4 Gen iPod Touch and the iPod has much better response aurally. In fact, Android instruments are universally so laugh they are unplayable. If there is a usable android drum program/hardware combo I'd like to see it... So far, I don't know why people even make instrument apps for android other than sequencers.

There's a certain amount of lag I can get used to with Android. I noticed that upgrading from 4.1 to 4.2.2 didn't eliminate the lag, but it reduced it to being much more usable. I used a WP8 phone for a while, and I found that even though the swooshy animations can take a relatively long time to complete, it was so responsive in starting an animation that it was hard to go back to Android.

According to this test WP8 isn't any better than Android. Well, specifically the Lumia 928 isn't any better than the Galaxy S4. Need to be specific about which device, since we're almost exclusively talking about hardware here (touch controller, GPU, and display controller) - the OS isn't doing much.

Are you sure? The article doesn't seem to say whether it's a hardware or software issue, and the iphone's hardware parts aren't exactly secret proprietary stuff... I mean the Galaxy S4 is supposed to have the better PowerVR GPU for example. I'm thinking the difference is in the software stack, I think you'd be surprised at how much code gets run between the time there's an input event and an app reacts to it on the screen.

Anyways, it'd be interesting to know if running Android on an iphone showed the same delays.

The hardware that matters here is not the GPU. It's the touchscreen controller, the display controller, the associated firmware, and to a lesser extent the drivers for those. All either Apple proprietary or heavily customized.

The GPU can matter as well. On the Nexus 10, for example, the fill rate is pretty low compared to the screen size, so applications have to be very very careful not to exceed the limit or they'll end up adding frames of latency (which looks like touch or interaction latency).

But in general you're right, those are the components that contribute the large majority touch latency to a device.

I mean, fundamentally it's both. Touch controllers and their firmware can add 15-45ms of latency based on their technology (hardware) and the quality of their filtering in the firmware (software). On the other side of the spectrum it's all about fill-rate, inherent latency in drawing pipeline, whether the input dispatching is phase locked with the display refresh, etc. etc. Again, some of this is software, some of it is hardware, but most of it is directly tied to the specific device. The actual input pipeline on Android, once you get out of the touch controller, is pretty negligible today (<1ms from touch controller interrupt until the application receives the input event).

The test measures the "minimum response time", but I don't think that's the most useful measurement of responsiveness. After all, changing the software does make a difference in how "laggy" the phone seems.

Although I periodically am annoyed at Apple for various things, it's frequently clear to me that they understand that certain aspects of the user experience are really important.

Much of their competition treats user experience just like any other consumer electronics company: If it doesn't crash, ship it!

This is the reason why I changed my Android for an iPhone.

Agreed!

Most Anroid customers don't value these little touches. Being able to install various ROMs and have widgets on the homescreen plus other customizations are more important to them.

The fact that one platform is ahead or behind in one area isn't telling of what a mass of half a billion or a billion plus customers value or don't value.

Most apple fans don't realize that negligible differences in touch responsiveness against a small cherry picked selection of android devices doesn't make up for flexibility, cost, choice...

And yet you seem to confirm the parent's point by calling a 50+ ms difference negligible. :)

Except that your finger is bigger than that so you can't see what you're doing anyway. On ANY touch device. STYLUS (as you said) ftw. Or a mouse pointer. Infinitely small.

To split hairs, not infinite---instead, minimum size = 1 pixel

Agreed. To me it's either when you are at the minimum size of a numbering system with discreet quantum. Also yo ucan do a cross hair with the middle pixels empty so I guess that would be infinitely small, and a closed crosshair would be 1.

You are comparing size with time, which is an invalid comparison without further constraints (e.g. a visual response constrained to emanating out from the touch of a finger). Thus, you are making the assumption that all visual responses to the input of a finger will only occur directly under the real estate occupied by a finger - an assumption that I would argue is entirely unfounded in the realm of modern phones.

Most Android customers don't know what a ROM is but maybe widgets are a big deal to them.

...and others just pick the phone they can get for free.

Then complain about how they have no idea how to use it and call the nearest family member when their clock widget "disappears" (on the next homescreen page).

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