“A laggy UI breaks the core affordance language of a touch screen. The device no longer feels natural. It loses the magic. The user is pulled out of their interaction and must implicitly acknowledge they are using an imperfect computer simulation. I often get “lost” in an iPad, but I cringe when a Xoom stutters between home screens. The 200 million users of Android deserve better.”
A long, but really interesting discussion on why Android is still laggy, and why it won’t be fixed until they do a major overhaul of the entire operating system. Also of note is this quote:
“Beyond the perception issue, lag is a violation of one of Google’s core philosophies. Google believes that things should be fast. That’s a driving philosophy behind Google Search, Gmail, and Chrome. It’s why Google created SPDY to improve on HTTP. It’s why Google builds tools to help websites optimize their site. It’s why Google runs it’s own CDN. It’s why Google Maps is rendered in WebGL. It’s why buffering on Youtube is something most of us remember, but rarely see anymore.”
This is a great point. For a company who crows over optimising search results by mere milliseconds, who introduced displaying search results before you have even finished typing, it seems bizarre that this hasn’t been priority #1 for the Android team.
Google engineers: less face unlock, more dedicated UI rendering thread development.
