wumpus has still failed to explain how exactly any of our Android phones are slow or have ‘embarrassingly awful’ performance - particularly when a phone that scores 1/3rd of a 6S in benchmarks has a more fluid and responsive user experience outside of artificial benchmarking.
Slower /=/ slow, something I would have thought obvious. It seems wumpus’ strange arousal for benchmarks seems to trump common sense.
Yeah “strange, weird” benchmarks like… this very web site you are using right now. cough
behold the carnage… in real world apps. And most Android users don’t have a device as “fast” as the Galaxy S7, either.
Wait, how is that a real world speed test? Have I been using my phone wrong this whole time? And by wrong, I mean actually using an app instead of turning them on and off in rapid succession?
In other news, I am going to charge me phone and listen to music on my earphones. Enjoy having to use crappy bluetooth ears if you want to do the same.
Yes, clearly all the benchmarks and videos are somehow gamed or incorrect. It can’t possibly be that Android has fallen far behind in the smartphone performance race.
Believe me, I wish they weren’t sucking so unbelievably hard, and you can absolutely blame Qualcomm’s shitty last two years of hardware releases for a lot of this. But it’s the truth.
(It’s also why Google is super anxious to build their own mobile CPUs. They’ve seen the carnage, and they know they are in a deep hole performance wise at this point.)
I never said “strange, weird benchmarks”. Legowarrior never accused the benchmarks or videos of being gamed or incorrect.
No-one claimed that Android phones outperform iPhones on benchmarks.
You appear to have a tenuous grasp on reality when it comes to reading posts. Please try to respond to what people actually post, rather than what you wish they had posted. It’s a bad habit and honestly, rather shitty.
Sure you did.
not “real world”. somehow “artificial”. you wish ;)
I own everything, so I don’t really care who wins. But it’s clear that Android, performance wise, is in a dark place and has been for some time now.
The EPA runs tests to benchmark fuel consumption on vehicles. Surprisingly, that isn’t representative of real world mileage - it’s artificial by definition. Are you really so invested in ‘Android performance being awful’ that you now want to redefine the very concept of benchmarking tests?
Actually, it wouldn’t surprise me.
It also isn’t clear that Android is in a dark place performance wise.
Indeed, you’re the only person I’ve seen claim that. Anywhere.
Oh, i fully grasp exactly what it’s testing.
It’s just that it doesn’t really matter to the extent you suggest, in my real world experience with my phone.
Now, it may be that having a processor with fewer, faster cores like the iPhones, in an Android phone, would improve the experience by speeding up some tasks.
But iOS is not the experience i want. Android is better, in my opinion. So really fast JavaScript execution isn’t really that important to me in the grand scheme of things.
All that said, Discourse is noticeably laggy in ways that Tapatalk wasn’t on my phone. Dunno if that’s a WebKit/JS thing or what, but it’s noticeably herky-jerky compared to dedicated apps.
edit: not necessarily a slight against Discourse. It’s entirely possible that other JS-heavy websites would be equally annoying to use (God, do I hate when the page “skips” a quarter-inch after it seems to have finished loading, making me tap the wrong link). . . I just don’t really have any other occasion to read actual websites on the phone. 95% of my use-time is spent in non-Chrome apps, if not closer to, say, 98%.
Honestly, as an Apple user who has owned various Android devices over the years as well, speed really doesn’t matter anymore since nothing seems to be written to use it. My iPhone 6 was nice and zippy, nothing ever pushed it, even when it was an outdated model. It’s been awhile since I had a Nexus or Kindle tablet, but they didn’t have any speed issues either.
I would guess that developers have more latitude when working with iPhones to improve apps beyond what might slow them down on other devices. I have always found the app quality on iOS to be far better than the Andriod equivalents. I might be wrong, just my experience, I really don’t want to get in an Android vs Apple fight.
And Timex, iOS is far superior. (Kidding, I can see both sides, I just prefer Apple.)
That’s just the nature of web apps versus real apps.
Discourse is a very good web app, and I’ve never noticed any sloth on my N5X, but it’s always and forever going to be an inferior UX to a native app. That’s just the nature of mobile.
I’ll fight you bro
Remember how people in the year 2000 used to say how crazy and ridiculous it was, the idea that Anyone Would Ever Run Photoshop in a Web Browser? I mean come on.
We can only hope that since you’re an Apple user, your post will somehow sneak through @wumpus 's Blinders of Willful Misinterpretation +3. We’re not calculating a million decimal places of Pi on our phones; they just need to be fast enough to display what we’re looking at quickly and responsively. Anything extra is certainly nice to have, but not terribly relevant to most use-cases.
For the vast majority of the time that I’m using my phone, the limiting factor in how fast things get done is either the speed of the Internet connection or my own attention and ability to absorb information. Time spent waiting for the phone processor to complete some task is a rounding error. I’ll readily concede, based on the benchmarks you find so definitive, that using an iPhone would give me an even smaller rounding error. But for me, that savings would be massively overshadowed by losses elsewhere in the usage process.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that you’re the only person outside of Adobe to remember that.
That they exist is not in dispute. That they’re better than dedicated tools for same is very much so.
Two reasons:
The fastest Android device you can buy today is about the same speed as Ye Olde iPhone 5s. Or if you want to be really charitable, the pride of November 2014, the iPad Air 2 (and thus the iPhone 6). So CPU wise, it’s just so-so, even in “best available thing you can buy today” form. This is mostly Qualcomm’s fault for the last two years.
Android is disproportionately bad at JavaScript perf for some reason, even though Google controls Android and Chrome (but… not the hardware). I did notice in Chrome 54 they improved about 20% over Chrome 50 though, and they had a 25% improvement around Chrome 45, too. Not all bad news here, but they are still way in the hole.
Well, another valid reason is that I’m stuck using a web app now instead of something that can be written in native code :-P
FWIW Discourse is perfectly smooth and responsive on my year-old Note 5. I still use Tapatalk for another forum, and there’s no noticeable performance difference between them.
I never have any trouble at all on discourse on my 6p. It seems to run flawlessly.