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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Click to collapse
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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Click to collapse
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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Click to collapse
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!
Click to expand...
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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Click to collapse
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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Click to collapse
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
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
+1
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using xda premium
This was on the front page. Would it be possible to port this feature to our AOSP roms? A flashable standalone would be pretty EPIC (and thats what we're all about on this phone )
http://www.xda-developers.com/android/d4-rom-for-the-sgs2-brings-modular-goodness/
We all like customizing our Android devices. In fact, for many of our 4.4 million members, that is the main reason we chose Android in the first place, rather than going with some unnamed fruit company. It is in this customization that we make our mobile devices truly our own. Many prefer to do the customization with themes and other mods, but sometimes it can go even deeper.
We’ve covered methods of customizing ROM installations in the past using the Aroma Installer. The installer, which is similar to nLite for Windows power users, allows end users to customize how exactly their ROM of choice is installed. However, this requires both a porting effort to your device and implementation into the target ROM. Unfortunately, this leaves many users out in the cold. Furthermore, other users would like a modular ROM that can be tweaked well after installation.
Luckily for Samsung Galaxy S II owners, however, XDA Recognized Developer D4rKn3sSyS has released a CyanogenMod 9-based ROM that includes some modular functionality. Using the built-in control app, you can easily modify things such as battery style, LCD density tweaks, enabling or disabling system sounds, switching recording video format, switching USB mode (UMS or MTP), and much more.
D4 ROM goal is to offer the maximum stability possible, and easy-to-user features, like changing LCD density, Recorded video format and so on. But it’s main aim is allow user to choose what mods he wants, and enable them with just a tap.
Have in mind, that what differs from this rom, is not the base, but the options that can be added via OTA. Some of the features are:
*OTA App for adding features on the air, like:
-Battery Styles
-MP4 / 3GP Recording
-MTP / Mass Storage
-Sound Management
*Minor inbuilt tweaks
*Custom bootanimation
And more
Those lucky SGS2 owners looking to get started with D4 ROM should head over to the ROM thread.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
3/7 - LG Optimus G Software Update - Jellybean Android 4.1.2 (LS970ZVA)
LG Optimus G Software Update - LS970ZVA
*
Enhancements/Fixes
- Android 4.1.2 Jellybean***
* - Google Now™
* - Expandable, actionable notifications
* - Android Beam™ to send photos and more
- QuickTranslator application downloadable from the Application Manager
- Smoother user interface. Vsync timing across all drawing and animation done by the Android framework,
* including application rendering, touch events, screen composition and display refresh; and triple buffering
* in the graphics pipeline
- User-installable keyboard maps
- Ability to turn off notifications on an app specific basis
- Shortcuts and widgets can automatically be re-arranged or re-sized to allow new items to fit on home screens
- Bluetooth data transfer for Android Beam
- Improved voice search
- Improved camera app
- Android mobile version of Google Chrome replaces stock Android browser
- Ability for other launchers to add widgets from the app drawer without requiring root access
Important Notes
- Software version is LS970ZVA
- Refer to the LG Optimus G Software Update blog for install instructions
Already a thread for this...
Are you serious? There is a thread RIGHT underneath this one.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2180816
Sent from my LG-LS970 using xda premium
Still nothing OTA here.
Interestingly, this build is labeled as LS970ZVA, whereas
the build that was rolling out to some users in February
was LS970ZVB. We're guessing that other build was
slightly newer, and that for some reason the ZVA build was
chosen over ZVB for the wide rollout. Or Sprint made a typo
over at the Sprint Community Forums. The latter sounds a
little more plausible.
If you look at the changelog, there's actually a pretty big
item hidden in some technical jargon about vsync timing
and drawing by the Android framework - that's Project
Butter. Project Butter does not just automatically work
when a handset is upgraded to Jelly Bean. The OEM
actually has to go into its own software overlay and rewrite
portions of the code to take advantage of the Project Butter
improvements, and this is by no means required. So, not
every handset running Android 4.1 out there actually uses
Project Butter (COUGH HTC ONE X+ COUGH), but LG
apparently has chosen to do so on the Optimus G.
You should receive the update over the air in the next 10
days according to Sprint.
And now you are copying and pasting people from that thread...
Sent from my LG-LS970 using xda premium
Thread already exists on this topic http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2180816
Closing thread