Develop Bugs

Smooth scrolling a la iPhone?

I love my Desire and I cannot envisage swapping it for any other phone (except maybe a similar model with a keyboard!). It's obviously one of, if not THE best phone around at the moment.
The only thing I'm slightly envious of is the smooth scrolling of the iPhone. When I scroll through my "All programs" screen it's ever so slightly choppy. Same if I scroll through a long text message conversation. Hardly noticeable unless you put it next to an iPhone.
My question is this: since the Desire has so much horsepower, is it possible to optimise the interface so it's perfectly smooth like iPhone? I don't know anything about development, and suspect this is something that could only be changed by the Android designers, but is there any way a talented dev could do this in a ROM? Anyone care to explain to me yes/no, and why?
Thanks!

I tried out home++ beta yesterday, unfortunately it's not optimised for the desire yet (lots of icons missing) but the app list is silky smooth. I think its poor implementation on gooogle/htc's part rather than the phone being at fault.
Also I'm using handcent for text messaging, its smooth aswell, didnt notice any problems with stock messages app though.

I noticed the choppy scrolling on older Android phones, but I have not had that issue with the Desire yet. It's as smooth scrolling as possible. Even when I put my Desire next to an iPhone 3gs it is fast and smooth. The Desire is even a bit more responsive then the iPhone, which is very noticeable when typing.
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Sent from my HTC Desire

I would say my Desire is definitely fast, but not so smooth. When lists scroll or things open and close on the iPhone it is a definite, measured type of action - it happens at consistent speed from the beginning to the end of the action/animation. No jerking or choppyness at ALL. Whereas on my Desire, despite it's 1gig processor, it doesn't achieve that same effect in all places.
I don't know how else to describe it. It's one of the only places Desire falls down compared to iPhone (oh, apart from the lousy video playback, poor camera recording framerate, cheap touchscreen and poor screen performance in sunlight!).

setspeed said:
I would say my Desire is definitely fast, but not so smooth. When lists scroll or things open and close on the iPhone it is a definite, measured type of action - it happens at consistent speed from the beginning to the end of the action/animation. No jerking or choppyness at ALL. Whereas on my Desire, despite it's 1gig processor, it doesn't achieve that same effect in all places.
I don't know how else to describe it. It's one of the only places Desire falls down compared to iPhone (oh, apart from the lousy video playback, poor camera recording framerate, cheap touchscreen and poor screen performance in sunlight!).
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I noticed that too.
Menu scrolling isn't what i'd call choppy but it's just not AS smooth as the iPhone. This is especially apparent near the end of any menu for some reason.
An example of perfect scrolling speed on the Desire would be the settings menu. That is perfect, no choppiness, no lag, just perfect. Things like the app drawer and sometimes even the homescreens appear to drop a few frames from time to time.

I agree with you, is not smooth like iphone, even being faster than it. Maybe google needs to improve the ui of android to optimize it.
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I think it's rather HTC's fault, cause in the stock Android apps everything is perfectly smooth here. Only the HTC apps sometimes stutter while scrolling.

I'm on an htc hero and notice the same thing. This is something htc needs to release a fix for
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Check the clock when you scroll back to it - if an earlier time you see it for a microsecond when you scroll

yeah its definitely not anywhere as smooth as the iphone, scrolling through most lists is incredibly choppy, even my years old 1st generation ipod touch is silky smooth (even when scrolling through a list of albums with album artwork on each one)
but as someone has said, it seems to be only htc stuff thats like this (the messages app, the app drawer) other areas such as the settings scroll smoothly.

Not anywhere as smooth? Come on, don't exaggerate. It's almost the same as the iPhone, actually.
If you've ever used a Windows Mobile phone, you know what "not anywhere as smooth" means!
But still, of course, any improvement is welcomed...

shaundalglish said:
If you've ever used a Windows Mobile phone, you know what "not anywhere as smooth" means!
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LMAO!!!!
+1

yeah, but using live wallpapers will definitely slowdown the scrolling in the homescreen. It's not much, but noticable. Without using live wallpapers, the scrolling is as smooth as it should be.

iphone scrolls page to page, of course this is smoother. Iphone can't handle scrolling over the entire page/apps.
And an Iphone is a dump of icons, doesnt sound like a smartphone to me

Remember the iPhone screen resolution is only 480x320 as well, significantly less than the Desire. Much less screen estate to move around.

Yep, +1
I mainly see this when scrolling to the bottom of the All Program menu.
There are others with this too:
URL blocked by XDA - Search for "lag program menu htc desire" another post in XDA by other users
I emailed HTC about the small amount of lag but they said to return my phone for an exchange! Slightly unnecessary.
Hopefully more people post their lag issues here, HTC see it and do something about it for their 2.2 release.
I've tried various things to try and resolve - made sure no other programs are running, no live wallpapers, no wallpaper at all
Its not a massive problem, but there is no noticeable lag in the stock 2.1 Android Apps drawer - so we know it shouldnt be an issue.

It does stutter a bit done it on all android phones i had from htc, if you use Helixlauncher 2 though that has a much nicer scroll menu and its as smooth as butter, i would love if they could add this style into the Sense system as it looks far better.

iPhone sucks man, if you like it why don't you buy one and you'll have your A LA iPhone smooth scrolling... Jeez, i don't understand soome people.... You have a Desire and still wanting an iPhone... SUCKS!

Using MCR (Modaco Custom Rom) here, without SenseUI. Then decided to install ADWLauncher, and to be honest the scrolling on the main screen/app drawer is super smooth now. So I'd say that this probably is HTC's 'bad' programming on the SenseUI.

phunkycow said:
Using MCR (Modaco Custom Rom) here, without SenseUI. Then decided to install ADWLauncher, and to be honest the scrolling on the main screen/app drawer is super smooth now. So I'd say that this probably is HTC's 'bad' programming on the SenseUI.
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that looks cool, I think SensUI is starting to get useless since google implemented many Sense-features into standard android too. The only thing that keeps me having SenseUI is the HTC-clock. I don't like the standard Android-clock widgets. Other than that, I think Sense is starting to get more and more useless. Last year, with android 1.5, Sense was pretty usable.

[Q] Galaxy Nexus UI Experience

As I've noticed that most (if not all) Android phones I've ever tried have been suffering from the "non-fluid" issue. The homescreen and apps experience might be fast but they're not fluid like ones found on iOS or Windows Phone and I'm guessing that it's because previous Android phones doesn't have the 2D gpu acceleration. ICS has added the feature and I'd like to ask those owner out there if the experience is now as fluid as iOS or WP7? watching video review doesnt help because videos are formatted into 30fps. Even GS2 doesn't appear to be fluid (aka I dont think it's running at 60fps)

The home screen and app launcher are very fluid if you have a static wallpaper. With a live wallpaper there is considerable slow down. Some wallpapers are less CPU intensive than others though.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA App

Android's fluidity is actually due to more than just Hardware acceleration. Most Gingerbread phones come out of the box very quick (Nexus S) and really glide without any apps installed. Hardware [was] acceleration is a big problem, as you were throwing efficiency out the window in order to run on everything. Now with it HW Acceleration, the slickness of the OS has multiplied exponentially giving you an experience on par with iOS (Joshua Topolsky, The Verge)
Now, here comes the real problem, apps. Android apps have the most freedom in the developer sense, and are also the most lax on what is allowed in the market. While iOS dev kit requires a stringent agreement and agreement to an app review process before getting your license, Google's Android Market is nothing like that. If you can pony up $25 (a requirement only recently), you can publish whatever the hell you have made, no matter how ugly, useless, or inefficient it is. Google's toolbox for Devs is great, even greater in terms of options in app making, but enforces no standards or required templates. This is why iOS apps all have the same look and feel while Android's app range from great to complete ****. This makes a lot of sense though as Android started late in the game, so they needed to bring up the app numbers, no matter how many were ugly soundboards or battery hog games.
With ICS, Google is taking a step in the right direction by offering the HOLO hook for developers, which will allow apps to be "prettied up" for ICS instantly. Also, more efficient protocols have been added to keep battery life and smoothness up, such as a revised Garbage Collector (actually, I think they removed it entirely) and allowed apps to share information with each other. The Garbage Collection is what make your phone lag, as it is recycling the unused code on the apps you're running in the background. The new location hook allows apps to now constantly turn on your GPS to pull your location, as they can simply request it from other apps if they don't need the most up-to-date info or if you just recently used your location on another app. The OS should be as fast as any other on the stock level, and as soon as the Apps become ICS friendly and more efficient, Android will truly have people falling in love with it

Chrono_Tata said:
With a live wallpaper there is considerable slow down. Some wallpapers are less CPU intensive than others though.
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This is particularly annoying. My last Android (Nexus One) was pretty smooth on almost all live wallpapers - certainly on the stock ones. The Galaxy Nexus lags like hell (slow juttery screen swiping) on all of them except one of them. Very, very disappointing and hope it gets fixed somehow.

Live Wallpaper
Thank you everyone, I'm now ordering one for myself and hopefully there won't be a let down on the UI experience!
rikbrown said:
This is particularly annoying. My last Android (Nexus One) was pretty smooth on almost all live wallpapers - certainly on the stock ones. The Galaxy Nexus lags like hell (slow juttery screen swiping) on all of them except one of them. Very, very disappointing and hope it gets fixed somehow.
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Strange, I owned Nexus One too and live wallpaper (stock one) isn't running at acceptable frame rate at all....it's laggy and sluggish (i changed from iPhone 3G and that might explain why)
May be you can try changing live wallpaper on Galaxy Nexus cuz the one u'r using might not be that optimized?
PS. One more question, how u guys find the battery life?

dnlsmy said:
Also, more efficient protocols have been added to keep battery life and smoothness up, such as a revised Garbage Collector (actually, I think they removed it entirely) and allowed apps to share information with each other.
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No, they most certainly did not remove the garbage collector but they implemented a more modern algoritm for it and it now makes sure to run on a different CPU core as to not take CPU cycles from the app. A garbage collector is part of the Java platform and could never just be removed since that would result in constant memory leaks that would result in a crash as soon as you filled up all the memory.

When will the stuttering laggy UI experience be addressed?
I'm tired of all the mis-information. There's a pattern: Google is about to release a new handset, they don't show the handset scrolling in any of their ads, or if they do, it's super-imposed. A handful of 'mainstream' bloggers praise the handset calling it quick and responsive and lag free. You buy into it, buy the handset, and the basic UI is anything but CONSISTENTLY fluid and responsive.
I stupidly bought the Galaxy Nexus, really wish I hadn't. Here's just one example of the issue: I have an SMS thread with a mere 27 SMS messages between a friend and myself. When I scroll the up or down the thread, it's embarrassingly choppy (stuttery - don't know what word to use for it). It's extremely unpleasant, and completely ruins the end-user experience.
What annoys me is that Romain Guy closed Android Issue 6914, claiming that it was implemented in ICS. Now ICS is here, and the Android phone is still plagued with the stutters and non-fluidness Android is renowned for. Thankfully someone else has opened a new issue (Android Issue 20278), and hopefully this time Google will FULLY address the issue.
Understandably, it annoys some people more than others. Any user who has experienced a mobile UI that is buttery smooth and fluid (free from 'jitters' and 'stutters'), and where a page or menu sticks to your finger like a magnet when you scroll, would not be able to put up with what Samsung and Google have produced. It's what the kids today would call an 'epic fail'.
---------- Post added at 10:17 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:11 PM ----------
I'm tired of all the mis-information. There's a pattern: Google around about to release a new handset, they don't show the handset scrolling in any of their ads, or if they do, it's super-imposed. A handful of 'mainstream' bloggers praise the handset calling it quick and responsive and lag free. You buy into it, buy the handset, and the basic UI is anything but CONSISTENTLY fluid and responsive.
I stupidly bought the Galaxy Nexus, really wish I hadn't. Here's just one example of the issue: I have an SMS thread with a mere 27 SMS messages between a friend and myself. When I scroll the up or down the thread, it's embarrassingly choppy (stuttery - don't know what word to use for it). It's extremely unpleasant, and completely ruins the end-user experience.
Understandably, it annoys some people more than others. Any user who has experienced a mobile UI that is buttery smooth and fluid (free from 'jitters' and 'stutters'), and where a page or menu sticks to your finger like a magnet when you scroll, would not be able to put up with what Samsung and Google have produced. It's what the kids today would call an 'epic fail'.

scott.deagan said:
I'm tired of all the mis-information. There's a pattern: Google is about to release a new handset, they don't show the handset scrolling in any of their ads, or if they do, it's super-imposed. A handful of 'mainstream' bloggers praise the handset calling it quick and responsive and lag free. You buy into it, buy the handset, and the basic UI is anything but CONSISTENTLY fluid and responsive.
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I find this to be untrue, the experience for me has been really good so far. Not perfect but its close. They have come a long way, it'll only get better.
And if you think any of the ads including apple are using true device operation in their advertising you are fooling yourself.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

Can one of you guys post some video footage of said lag? I just ordered a Galaxy Nexus and can still cancel it. Thanks!

Yea there is an iPhone YouTube video performing the exact same steps they show in the commercials and it takes a LOT longer in real life.
Oh well.
G2x - 2.3.7 CM7
Transformer - 3.2 Revolver OC/UV

serialtoon said:
Can one of you guys post some video footage of said lag? I just ordered a Galaxy Nexus and can still cancel it. Thanks!
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Click to collapse
Not something worth canceling your order for, it's barely noticeable.

Nexcellent said:
Not something worth canceling your order for, it's barely noticeable.
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Its the main reason i left Android. Hoping that one day they will use GPU rendering to assist with UI fluidity. If that is present, its enough for me to cancel an order. Ive been a long time Android enthusiast, but the UI sloppiness is what has kept me from keeping an Android phone for too long.

As a fellow UI lag hater I can tell you it's still there in some places. The problem is, although the base of ICS supports and uses GPU acceleration, 3rd party apps dont yet, and even if you "force" it in the developer settings, it isn't compatible with some apps, and will sometimes cause crashes.
That said, it is ages ahead of Gingerbread, but still not as smooth and fluid as iOS and WP7; not even the GPU accelerated parts.

ICS is a big improvement over gingerbread in terms of fluidity.. but it's not on the same level as iOS and WP 7 yet.
UI lag is one of the things I always hated about Android.. and I feel better about ICS than previous versions.. but they still need to improve it if they want to be on the same level as Apple and Microsoft.

FWIW, I bought the phone having read in several reviews that the phone still suffered (albeit much less) from the usual android-lag. It now compares favorably to iOS and the windows mobile platform, just doesn't match or pass them in fluidity and smoothness.
In my experience, many aspects of the UI are "buttery-smooth" and whatever else reviewers usually say. However, there are still a good amount of moments where lag and hangups are present. The difference is, I'm ok with that. I've accepted the phone for it's plusses, despite it's minuses.
To be clear though, it does lag and hang from time to time. Rebooting once a day helps and I believe forcing GPU rendering under developer settings generally helps.
Sent from my GNex

Dont forget that Andoid does much more in the background and foreground compare to iOS or WP7.
Think multitasking, customization, widgets, etc.
It is understandable Android cannot be as smooth as those iOS and WP7.
And for me, it is more than good enough. I wont ditch Android because it might lag a little bit, because the advantages are much more valuable.
---------- Post added at 11:58 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:48 AM ----------
Here, this just in ... a thorough explanation from Google Developer about Android graphics:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105051985738280261832/posts/2FXDCz8x93s
I copied the text here:
How about some Android graphics true facts?
I get tired of seeing so much misinformation posted and repeated all over the place about how graphics rendering works on Android. Here is some truth:
• Android has always used some hardware accelerated drawing. Since before 1.0 all window compositing to the display has been done with hardware.
• This means that many of the animations you see have always been hardware accelerated: menus being shown, sliding the notification shade, transitions between activities, pop-ups and dialogs showing and hiding, etc.
• Android did historically use software to render the contents of each window. For example in a UI like http://www.simplemobilereview.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/2-home-menu.png there are four windows: the status bar, the wallpaper, the launcher on top of the wallpaper, and the menu. If one of the windows updates its contents, such as highlighting a menu item, then (prior to 3.0) software is used to draw the new contents of that window; however none of the other windows are redrawn at all, and the re-composition of the windows is done in hardware. Likewise, any movement of the windows such as the menu going up and down is all hardware rendering.
• Looking at drawing inside of a window, you don’t necessarily need to do this in hardware to achieve full 60fps rendering. This depends very much on the number of pixels in your display and the speed of your CPU. For example, Nexus S has no trouble doing 60fps rendering of all the normal stuff you see in the Android UI like scrolling lists on its 800x480 screen. The original Droid however struggled with a similar screen resolution.
• "Full" hardware accelerated drawing within a window was added in Android 3.0. The implementation in Android 4.0 is not any more full than in 3.0. Starting with 3.0, if you set the flag in your app saying that hardware accelerated drawing is allowed, then all drawing to the application’s windows will be done with the GPU. The main change in this regard in Android 4.0 is that now apps that are explicitly targeting 4.0 or higher will have acceleration enabled by default rather than having to put android:handwareAccelerated="true" in their manifest. (And the reason this isn’t just turned on for all existing applications is that some types of drawing operations can’t be supported well in hardware and it also impacts the behavior when an application asks to have a part of its UI updated. Forcing hardware accelerated drawing upon existing apps will break a significant number of them, from subtly to significantly.)
• Hardware accelerated drawing is not all full of win. For example on the PVR drivers of devices like the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus, simply starting to use OpenGL in a process eats about 8MB of RAM. Given that our process overhead is about 2MB, this is pretty huge. That RAM takes away from other things, such as the number of background processes that can be kept running, potentially slowing down things like app switching.
• Because of the overhead of OpenGL, one may very well not want to use it for drawing. For example some of the work we are doing to make Android 4.0 run well on the Nexus S has involved turning off hardware accelerated drawing in parts of the UI so we don’t lose 8MB of RAM in the system process, another 8MB in the phone process, another 8MB in the system UI process, etc. Trust me, you won’t notice -- there is just no benefit on that device in using OpenGL to draw something like the status bar, even with fancy animations going on in there.
• Hardware accelerated drawing is not a magical silver bullet to butter-smooth UI. There are many different efforts that have been going on towards this, such as improved scheduling of foreground vs. background threads in 1.6, rewriting the input system in 2.3, strict mode, concurrent garbage collection, loaders, etc. If you want to achieve 60fps, you have 20 milliseconds to handle each frame. This is not a lot of time. Just touching the flash storage system in the thread that is running the UI can in some cases introduce a delay that puts you out of that timing window, especially if you are writing to storage.
• A recent example of the kinds of interesting things that impact UI smoothness: we noticed that ICS on Nexus S was actually less smooth when scrolling through lists than it was on Gingerbread. It turned out that the reason for this was due to subtle changes in timing, so that sometimes in ICS as the app was retrieving touch events and drawing the screen, it would go to get the next event slightly before it was ready, causing it to visibly miss a frame while tracking the finger even though it was drawing the screen at a solid 60fps.
• When people have historically compared web browser scrolling between Android and iOS, most of the differences they are seeing are not due to hardware accelerated drawing. Originally Android went a different route for its web page rendering and made different compromises: the web page is turned in to a display list, which is continually rendered to the screen, instead of using tiles. This has the benefit that scrolling and zooming never have artifacts of tiles that haven’t yet been drawn. Its downside is that as the graphics on the web page get more complicated to draw the frame rate goes down. As of Android 3.0, the browser now uses tiles, so it can maintain a consistent frame rate as you scroll or zoom, with the negative of having artifacts when newly needed tiles can’t be rendered quickly enough. The tiles themselves are rendered in software, which I believe is the case for iOS as well. (And this tile-based approach could be used prior to 3.0 without hardware accelerated drawing; as mentioned previously, the Nexus S CPU can easily draw the tiles to the window at 60fps.)
• Hardware accleration does not magically make drawing performance problems disappear. There is still a limit to how much the GPU can do. A recent interesting example of this is tablets built with Tegra 2 -- that GPU can touch every pixel of a 1024x800 screen about 2.5 times at 60fps. Now consider the Android 3.0 tablet home screen where you are switching to the all apps list: you need to draw the background (1x all pixels), then the layer of shortcuts and widgets (let’s be nice and say this is .5x all pixels), then the black background of all apps (1x all pixels), and the icons and labels of all apps (.5x all pixels). We’ve already blown our per-pixel budget, and we haven’t even composited the separate windows to the final display yet. To get 60fps animation, Android 3.0 and later use a number of tricks. A big one is that it tries to put all windows into overlays instead of having to copy them to the framebuffer with the GPU. In the case here even with that we are still over-budget, but we have another trick: because the wallpaper on Android is in a separate window, we can make this window larger than the screen to hold the entire bitmap. Now, as you scroll, the movement of the background doesn’t require any drawing, just moving its window... and because this window is in an overlay, it doesn’t even need to be composited to the screen with the GPU.
• As device screen resolution goes up, achieving a 60fps UI is closely related to GPU speed and especially the GPU’s memory bus bandwidth. In fact, if you want to get an idea of the performance of a piece of hardware, always pay close attention to the memory bus bandwidth. There are plenty of times where the CPU (especially with those wonderful NEON instructions) can go a lot faster than the memory bus.
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you saying iOS has no stutter lag..
My iPad stutters all the time. Its no where close to smooth!
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

There was some suggestion in this thread that any acceleration is currently software based only, and that the hardware acceleration has yet to be enabled.
I don't know how accurate that is, and there doesn't seem to be a definite answer in that thread.
Perhaps in the 4.1 update?

Evostance said:
you saying iOS has no stutter lag..
My iPad stutters all the time. Its no where close to smooth!
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk
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+1
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using xda premium

I hate to admit it, but my Nexus is a little laggy

I have a live wallpaper on, but it still shouldnt be that laggy. My sensation could handle a lot that was thrown at it without being all that laggy. Even with live wallpaper off it's a little laggy. Keyboard in landscape mode? Laggy. Swipe from one home screen to another? Laggy.
Any fix for this!? I just can't wait until CM9 now to fix all this stuff!

I don't know man. I came from a Sensation (running CyanogenMod 7) and the Nexus blows it out of the water in terms of speed and smoothness...and the Sensation was pretty ****in' fast running stock Android.

Well I still think my Nexus is better. I love it to death! But the sudden lag kind of kills it. I don't know what the deal is either.

I read some of the live wallpapers are laggy but not all of them
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

Hi monkey hung
I too noticed some laggyness to begin with the Live Wallpaper turned on. Sounds like your last phone was an iPhone 4?
I've been playing around with settings and have a few concepts on what might be going on:
1. First of all, under: Settings > Developer Options, there is a setting called "force GPU rendering". I haven't tried this with the Live Wallpaper on yet, but perhaps this might help the 2D UI laggyness? Let me know what you find.
2. Disable your Live Wallpaper, I did, it saved battery life and things are much snappier.
3. Close your unused apps. I know ICS is meant to deal with old apps much better now, however, I find my Galaxy Nexus to be snappier when I close down the 30 odd applications I have left in a suspended state. It doesn't take long to swipe them off from the home screen using the right "Application" touch button down the right hand corner of the screen.
4. I've noticed that dragging my finger along the screen does not give the same smooth/matte feeling of the iPhone 4. As a matter of fact, it almost jitters/vibrates across the contour glass. If I touch with a less contact force, I tend to find the performance of touch screen to be smooth, rather when I apply more force it tends to jump across the surface of the screen creating a jagged touch slide. I've also noticed the higher sensitivity of the accelerometer. If you have a very steady hand you can see the extra performance, if you hand is un-steady, it almost looks worse than the previous phone, but in reality, it was simply my inability to hold the device in one spot that gave the poor performance, really this a reflection on how responsive the phone is to my dodgy movements.

Thanks but I had HTC Sensation with CM7. I think you must have mistaken when I made topic about my girl friend having an iPhone 4 haha

berglh said:
1. First of all, under: Settings > Developer Options, there is a setting called "force GPU rendering". I haven't tried this with the Live Wallpaper on yet, but perhaps this might help the 2D UI laggyness? Let me know what you find.
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Click to collapse
please don't go around suggesting people to do this. They are developer options for a reason.
Force GPU Rendering is only likely to introduce bugs as some apps don't handle it well. Wait for the developers themselves to enable GPU rendering. In addition, GPU rendering adds extra memory overhead to the app (8MB vs 2MB).
By suggesting this, you only end up with people who post back at the forum complaining that App X or App Y no longer works.

berglh said:
Close your unused apps. I know ICS is meant to deal with old apps much better now, however, I find my Galaxy Nexus to be snappier when I close down the 30 odd applications I have left in a suspended state. It doesn't take long to swipe them off from the home screen using the right "Application" touch button down the right hand corner of the screen.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This doesn't "close" anything. It just removed the application from your app switching list. FYI.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA App

I agree!
Im running an Unlocked version on tmobile. Its very laggy. It takes 2 seconds for screen to rotate to landscape and back, and overall its just slow. Even the data keeps fading from hspa to 3g Im beginning to fall in love with its for its beauty but performance wise my galaxy s2 was way faster and smoother. Is an update going to address this? Any input would be appreciated.

davidbart said:
Im running an Unlocked version on tmobile. Its very laggy. It takes 2 seconds for screen to rotate to landscape and back, and overall its just slow. Even the data keeps fading from hspa to 3g Im beginning to fall in love with its for its beauty but performance wise my galaxy s2 was way faster and smoother. Is an update going to address this? Any input would be appreciated.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The rotation delay is intentional.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using xda premium

I'm experiencing the same thing you are but the delay is intentional. If my screen was rotating all the time I would get really annoyed!

Also, the switching between 3G and 4G is intentional. 3G uses less battery... it kicks over to 4G when you're actually using the data connection.
My galaxy nexus is almost perfectly responsive. It lags on occasion, but I find it to be much smoother and more responsive overall than just about any other android device I've used. (including the galaxy S II)

davidbart said:
Im running an Unlocked version on tmobile. Its very laggy. It takes 2 seconds for screen to rotate to landscape and back, and overall its just slow. Even the data keeps fading from hspa to 3g Im beginning to fall in love with its for its beauty but performance wise my galaxy s2 was way faster and smoother. Is an update going to address this? Any input would be appreciated.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If your phone is laggy, then it's probably something on it you're running that isn't optimized for ICS. My phone runs just fine and easily outclasses any other phone I've used (and I've used pretty much every high end gsm phone that has come out here in the states). FYI your data isn't "fading from hspa to 3g", the phone idles on UMTS and when it's transmitting data it goes to hspa. This is very normal. Do a search on it if you want to know more.

kwazi said:
please don't go around suggesting people to do this. They are developer options for a reason.
Force GPU Rendering is only likely to introduce bugs as some apps don't handle it well. Wait for the developers themselves to enable GPU rendering. In addition, GPU rendering adds extra memory overhead to the app (8MB vs 2MB).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Wow, we are really going to miss that 6 MB with the 1 GB available to the GN. My last phone was an Xperia X10 with only 384 MB of RAM, yes it was chuggy, but comparatively this amount of allocation is small and the feature seems to work well thsu far. I hardly think they are going to miss it, but your point on the Development Settings is valid to a certain degree.
kwazi said:
By suggesting this, you only end up with people who post back at the forum complaining that App X or App Y no longer works.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I would rebut this by saying that most of my paid apps either don't work at all or don't work correctly due to the fact I'm running Ice Cream Sandwich prior to turning this option on on my own phone. There are many other reasons that apps are going to fail, particularly on Android. In retrospect, a disclaimer to this effect might have been appropriate considering the ramifications of the advice, and I direct this at hung monkey:
If you are not smart enough to draw the correlation between enabling the 2D acceleration and most of your apps suddenly not working, then you should probably not turn it on.
I have turned it on, it fixed the laggyness of the default Live Wallpaper, I haven't tested how much it saps the battery yet. Turning it on has only resulted in an improvement to my phone thus far.

davidbart said:
Im running an Unlocked version on tmobile. Its very laggy. It takes 2 seconds for screen to rotate to landscape and back, and overall its just slow. Even the data keeps fading from hspa to 3g Im beginning to fall in love with its for its beauty but performance wise my galaxy s2 was way faster and smoother. Is an update going to address this? Any input would be appreciated.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
From what I read about your "laggy" screen rotate. That is intended so it doesn't accidentally change orientations.

matt2053 said:
This doesn't "close" anything. It just removed the application from your app switching list. FYI.
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Click to collapse
Don't be so sure that it doesn't. For example, if I load a relatively heavy game in to memory, such as Pocket Legends or NFS Shift, and I multitask, the app is suspended. I can use the app selection menu to resume that app, and quite quickly I might ad, much faster than the time it takes for the game to load in memory.
If I then kill it with the Task Switcher, it then has to load from the start, like the suspended session was terminated when I removed it from this list. Even Google themselves said that if you like to manage your apps, then this is how you can end them, but ICS will do a good job of managing it for you anyway, the controls are there if you want them.
This behavior does not match your allegation, would you please care to shed some light?
Cheers!

I concur with the Op - the phone by comparison with my Samsung Galaxy S2, it does seem a bit laggy when scrolling between screens - I have everything setup exactly the same way as on the SGS2.
I'm not technical but I can only hope that these reasons of laggyness come down to the apps,etc. haven't been optimised for ICS yet?
When scrolling up and down the twitter, facebook or google reader apps, it just isnt as smooth as the Galaxy S2 or even the Galaxy S1.
Otherwise, very beautiful UI.

Live wallpapers need to die a horrible death. Worst Android feature ever.
To the OP, use a normal wallpaper instead and you'll see an improvement in the overall speed of the UI.

case0 said:
Live wallpapers need to die a horrible death. Worst Android feature ever.
To the OP, use a normal wallpaper instead and you'll see an improvement in the overall speed of the UI.
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Click to collapse
I agree! This phone lags really bad with all the live wallpapers except for the Phase Beam one. TURN THEM OFF and its by far the smoothest phone.....lol

I use wp clock and havent noticed any lag versus having it off....

Live Wallpapers - Lag

Lag
Blue Skies Free
Bubbles
Fire Work
Microbes
Nexus S LWP
Spectrum
Water
Not Lag
Holo Spiral
Maps
Phase Beam
Starfield
Anyone else....?

DJTaurus said:
Lag
Blue Skies Free
Bubbles
Fire Work
Microbes
Nexus S LWP
Spectrum
Water
Not Lag
Holo Spiral
Maps
Phase Beam
Starfield
Anyone else....?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Never used live wallpapers.I avoid them like hell

Ditto. They are laggy, battery-draining pieces of crap and they should die a horrible death and be removed from Android..

I'm wondering why some live wallpapers are laggy and others are not !
Phase Beam is almost perfect and home screens are fluid...

I personally LOVE the live wall papers and that is all I use. I dont believe they are killing my battery much more at all. My phone lasts 15 hours a day and thats good enough for me. Wish the wind mill live wallpaper with night/day and weather updates from SGS2 was available on the GNexus.

I also avoid Live Wallpapers. They have caused lag issues on every Android phone I've owned. The GNex is no exception. Maybe when phones have quad core processors and 2gb+ of RAM. But even then I will probably still avoid them.

They do cause a little lag, but they are great to show off the phone. I personally use the "Beautiful weather" LWP that comes with the "Beautiful Widgets" app, and notice even less lag than the "Microbes" LWP that came stock had. And the Beautiful Weather LWP looks amazing on the screen...

I am not really interested in 'fight' between : lovers / non lovers.
I'd like to know WHY STOCK live wallpapers of G Nexus are laggy and Phase Beam NOT.
It's weird...it's unusual...maybe ics code is not 'mature'... In my old NEXUS ONE live wallpapers that came out with the phone were not laggy at all !

lesilent said:
I am not really interested in 'fight' between : lovers / non lovers.
I'd like to know WHY STOCK live wallpapers of G Nexus are laggy and Phase Beam NOT.
It's weird...it's unusual...maybe ics code is not 'mature'... In my old NEXUS ONE live wallpapers that came out with the phone were not laggy at all !
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Then I'm not the only one wondering why such a thing happens!
Phase Beam is the only one working flawlessly!

DJTaurus said:
Lag
Blue Skies Free
Bubbles
Fire Work
Microbes
Nexus S LWP
Spectrum
Water
Not Lag
Holo Spiral
Maps
Phase Beam
Starfield
Anyone else....?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have the same issue with the same live wallpapers.
A couple more that lag are:
Snowfall
NFL Teams

this is funny, people still think LWP kills battery.

download launcher pro or go launcher ex and use the same live wallpaper and see if it still lags. I use Christmas HD and it stutters a little at the end of the homepage swipe, in both Nova and Stock Launcher (which are kinda the same) but in Launcher Pro and Go Launcher they are buttery smooth

just posted this on another thread regarding the lwp lag, but then found this one...
I don't know much at all about development, but thoughts from my own observations as to WHY this happens... Something I have noticed that I thought might have an impact on performance:
all the lwp's that have lag (for me) are ones that "move" when you switch homescreens. the bubbles fly around, the nexus 'brain' slides side to side, the microbes move, etc.
phase beam doesn't move when you slide screens. and performance is perfect (for me). that leads me to believe that the lag has something to do with ics (or whatever) moving the lwp while switching home screens.
just a thought...

TeddyBlair said:
just posted this on another thread regarding the lwp lag, but then found this one...
I don't know much at all about development, but thoughts from my own observations as to WHY this happens... Something I have noticed that I thought might have an impact on performance:
all the lwp's that have lag (for me) are ones that "move" when you switch homescreens. the bubbles fly around, the nexus 'brain' slides side to side, the microbes move, etc.
phase beam doesn't move when you slide screens. and performance is perfect (for me). that leads me to believe that the lag has something to do with ics (or whatever) moving the lwp while switching home screens.
just a thought...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
And i think ur maybe right!

there is no lag in the ones that move side to side with go launcher and launcher pro.

highly recommend you all give Nova Launcher a try with live wallpapers, i noticed performance improve dramatically!
not sure why thought :|

That is just unbelievable! Haw on earth this hardware could be beaten by LWP? I didn't use LWP's actually but since I found THIS and found that it lags on SGN, I nerd-rage'd
I really hope that google will figure out issues with updates and one of them will fix that damn issue.

Depending on the code written for each live wallpaper you are going to find some are better than others simply by the way they are written. This should be pretty obvious and I don't understand why you guys don't see this.
Some live wallpaper that someone writes for Android that is optimized in Froyo isn't necessarily going to run like a dream on ICS and the opposite should be true as well. It's not like you throw this in an engine with defined specs and it just churns at whatever it can based on the specs of the engine. The code matters too.
This is why sometimes you see updates vastly improve performance because optimized code can speed things up. I wonder if some of these wallpapers can't even use the 2nd core.
Some are going to be better than others. I run a Tron live wallpaper that I find to work just as well as a static wallpaper in terms of battery life right now.

xarthos said:
Depending on the code written for each live wallpaper you are going to find some are better than others simply by the way they are written. This should be pretty obvious and I don't understand why you guys don't see this.
Some live wallpaper that someone writes for Android that is optimized in Froyo isn't necessarily going to run like a dream on ICS and the opposite should be true as well. It's not like you throw this in an engine with defined specs and it just churns at whatever it can based on the specs of the engine. The code matters too.
This is why sometimes you see updates vastly improve performance because optimized code can speed things up. I wonder if some of these wallpapers can't even use the 2nd core.
Some are going to be better than others. I run a Tron live wallpaper that I find to work just as well as a static wallpaper in terms of battery life right now.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You are right. Performance depends on many factors, but that is not he case here. Those LWP's work better on Nexus S with ICS :O

Yea I've seen some LWP get updates that go from laggy to smooth. I don't know what it is but devs know.
LTE EX Galaxy Nexus CM9
Asus Transformer Revolver

Launcher and global strange lags/low performance ?

Hi everyone,
I have my GSM Galaxy Nexus for nearly 2 months, and I'm really pleased with this phone, which replace my old yet good Galaxy S. The device is snappy, smooth, I can play every games and watch nearly every movie files I want etc, perfect for me, especially with its huge wide screen.
That said, I always try to find a little thing to reproach to my phone. Not so easy, but even so, I find something which can be a bit annoying.
We all use our launcher a lot, obviously, it is like the core/bridge app of our Android device. I noticed that the 4.0 launcher has some performances problems, let me explain you how to easily reproduce them (close all your apps in order to have the best performance as possible) :
-The transition between the app-drawer and the desktop panels can be not so smooth as it should with such a powerful device. Try to go in and out the app-drawer, you will notice that sometimes it lag, sometimes not. I asked myself why it behave like that, and I may have found the problem. When you enter in the app-drawer or when you flip your panels on the desktop or in the app-drawer, you surely have notice this little blue bar at the bottom at the screen, which indicate you where you are. If you try to go in/out the app-drawer while this bar is on the screen, the transition will be laggy. Just wait it disappear, and it will be smooth (if not, do it 2-3 more time, and it should be good).
-When you clicked on a widget in the app-drawer, a message will pop out about how to add it to your homescreen blablabla. It also notice that if you try to flip your panel in the appdrawer or the desktop while the message is on the screen, everything will be laggy, especially in the app-drawer, it will have horrible performance, but as soon as this message disappear, everything become smooth like before.
Why ? It don't know. At first, I thought the problem comes from the launcher, but maybe not. Indeed, if messages like the one I talked about above appear anywhere while you're using your device, like in the Web Browser for example, it will lag, maybe less than in the launcher, but it will.
So what ? Maybe the launcher is not fully hardware accelerated, or it lack optimizations ? It may be the case, but I try to run CM9 on my old Galaxy S, and it doesn't have such problems (the performance will depend on the old hardware itself), it is also the same on a friend's Galaxy SII, its launcher is butter-smooth even if you do want I explain.
Is the OMAP4460 or the PowerVR SGX540 too bad to run it correctly ? I doubt it is the case, since my 2 years old Galaxy S run it good. Indeed, even if I overclocked my device to 1400MHz with the "performance" governor, only the 1st case problem will be partially solved, the 2nd one will still make your device run like crap.
Since those lags can appear everywhere if above conditions are met, the problem may be that our phone can't run correctly if there are 2 "layers" on the screen, the message on foreground and your launcher on background for example. It is probably the case, and even if I study IT, I can't explain it really well, sorry
I obviously try a lot of ROMS : Stock 4.0.2/3/4, AOKP, CM9, ARHD, with stock and custom kernels, and they all have the same problem. If you want to have better performance, try to put the minimal CPU frequence to 700MHz, you will maybe lose 30 minutes of battery, but it is globally more usable if you want my opinion.
Do you experiment the same problems ? Have you any ideas about how to solve them ? Thanks to read me !
PS : The Galaxy Nexus also has performances problems if you are using it in landscape position. Everything will be less smooth and snappy. The best example is if you use the app-drawer, it back absolutely unusable.

Since upgrading to nova launcher prime my UI is very fluid. Landscape is still choppy but less so.
bow chicka wow wow.

I forgot to say that I also tried Nova and Apex, it has the same problems