Also, I didn’t even install these widgets as some of them came with the phone or were part of another app I installed like Google Music, for instance. The main point of my reply was that widgets work very well for some of us and what you call as “objective truth” regarding better functionality is actually completely subjective. You are entitled to have an opinion, but it is not by any means the end-all of what is “practical/logical/user friendly” as some of us find other things practical/logical/user friendly.

I find it absurd that you need third party software for all those basic things you just posted, it should be part of the core of the OS in question, if it isnt, then yes third party software can solve that problem for you but that also keeps Android relying on random widgets to take care of things they should have taken care of themselves. Wouldnt it be great if you just take any of your friends android phone and you can toggle bluetooth, wifi, flight mode, check the weather and play music the same way you do on your phone? Without feeling like they forgot to install something? That is why widgets fail because the only things they are relevant for, you shouldnt need widgets in the first place but an integrated function within the OS itself.

“Going Forward

Android UI will never be completely smooth because of the design constraints I discussed at the beginning:

- UI rendering occurs on the main thread of an app
- UI rendering has normal priority

Even with a Galaxy Nexus, or the quad-core EeePad Transformer Prime, there is no way to guarantee a smooth frame rate if these two design constraints remain true. It’s telling that it takes the power of a Galaxy Nexus to approach the smoothness of a three year old iPhone. So why did the Android team design the rendering framework like this?

Work on Android started before the release of the iPhone, and at the time Android was designed to be a competitor to the Blackberry. The original Android prototype wasn’t a touch screen device. Android’s rendering trade-offs make sense for a keyboard and trackball device. When the iPhone came out, the Android team rushed to release a competitor product, but unfortunately it was too late to rewrite the UI framework.

This is the same reason why Windows Mobile 6.5, Blackberry OS, and Symbian have terrible touch screen performance. Like Android, they were not designed to prioritise UI rendering. Since the iPhone’s release, RIM, Microsoft, and Nokia have abandoned their mobile OS’s and started from scratch. Android is the only mobile OS left that existed pre-iPhone.

So, why doesn’t the Android team rewrite the rendering framework? I’ll let Romain Guy explain:

“…a lot of the work we have to do today is because of certain choices made years ago… …having the UI thread handle animations is the biggest problem. We are working on other solutions to try to improve this (schedule drawing on vsync instead of block on vsync after drawing, possible use a separate rendering thread, etc.) An easy solution would of course to create a new UI toolkit but there are many downsides to this also.”

Romain doesn’t elaborate on what the downsides are, but it’s not difficult to speculate:

- All Apps would have to be re-written to support the new framework
- Android would need a legacy support mode for old apps
- Work on other Android features would be stalled while the new framework is developed

However, I believe the rewrite must happen, despite the downsides. As an aspiring product manager, I find Android’s lagginess absolutely unacceptable. It should be priority #1 for the Android team. 

When the topic of Android comes up with both technical and nontechnical friends, I hear over and over that Android is laggy and slow. The reality is that Android can open apps and render web pages as fast or faster than iOS, but perception is everything. Fixing the UI lag will go a long way to repairing Android’s image.”

I used an iphone 3g for a year and a half and with each update it got laggier and laggier. By the end, I had to wait over ten seconds for the messaging app to open.

Then I switched to a 3gs, and although it was faster than the 3g it got laggier with each update as well.

Now I am using an android with a custom rom and it is lag free! Not to mention Verizon LTE beats the crap out of any iphone’s connection

Dude’s a frickin’ intern. Come on now.

Windows has had animated backgrounds for the longest time and guess what? Nobody uses that cheesy unnecessary questionable feature. Just because you can doesnt make it better since it ads nothing to the user experience and takes a toll on performance and battery life.

Finally without active widgets and without animated background and no apps running on background, your android phone will still under performs when it comes to graphics power.

I’m sure if they removed all the functionality form Android they could get it as smooth as ios. . .

o_O

“although as long as graphics aren’t given top priority (a la real-time), platforms like iOS or Windows Phone 7 are always going to be more fluid.”

Protecting the odd priority of graphics on Android reminds me a lot of the people that protected OS/2′s single message queue, the os was great but it meant a legacy model that doesn’t scale well. OS/2′s single message queue was fixed in OS/2 for PowerPC (that never shipped really) but the x86 version was just killed because the problem proved to fundamental to poor design.

More cores does NOT fix the problem and in fact, more cores could make it worse since you often trade single threaded performance for multi threading capacity.

On top of that, this guy wasn’t a google engineer he was an intern who, by coincidence, now works at microsoft. Gee, I wonder why he would be trying to downplay the competition. If you read in the comments, a software developer already diminished his argument as well saying that the only downfall is poorly coded apps and that good developers don’t run their app on the ui thread.

And Android 5.x or later probably will take care of this issue as well I guess.
My personal opinion is: 
Customer first.I – the user are the customer. So the UI should have a high priority.

I assume its a buffer overrun.

The messages and mail apps do this to me at times as well.

Can we get an idea of why audio lags now?

Simplicity – that rears its head in the above topic, since you have to know what you are doing to get more out of it… you can’t just have everything updating all the time, and expect good battery life. But that’s not to say iP isn’t without flaws – look at Antennagate, or the new iOS5 issues that are causing problems…

Reliability? What’s that? How is iP more reliable? You can’t be talking about hardware. Myabe you’re talking about carrier issues?

As the other poster said, iP might be better for you, but it sounds like you may not be really USING the phone as heavily, or needing some of the capabilities that iP just doesn’t provide. In which case, that’s fine and great… but I just don’t see the overall argument holding true… that the iP is “just better”. I have plenty of iP friends who can’t stand their phones, and are impressed by my ANCIENT Droid1…

My HD7 is now my media player. Did it function well as my smartphone, NO. Is it the best media player out there? YES because it has Zune Marketplace/Music. Sites it have problems still, despite its UI? YES. Why allow playlists if you cant add songs to them from on the device without having to create a new one? Because the UI is awesome?

My opinion:-  In a nut shell the whole discussion can be condensed down to this.
Android was started a fair while before the iphone but was keyboard centric not touch. This meant the way it handles the UI does not have the priority it does in iOS and WP7. It can be fixed, ICS is a lot better. By the time they get to do the hardware may be powerful enough for you not to need to do a major re-write.