On iOS, updates to the UI happen on the main thread, but all animation, surface compositing, and rendered graphics run on the dedicated Core Animation rendering thread.
The user complaints are with regards to delays in event processing ("sloppy" or "laggy" touch events), not general animation that does not involve user input; the specific examples in this article demonstrating how this "dedicated" UI thread with "real-time priority" exists detail touching the screen and watching the system lock up as it is now busy handling the scroll events.
Also, it is my understanding that surface compositing is done in hardware using surface-backed textures, with any software rendering of those surfaces being done on the main UI thread while responding to messages such as drawRect, using CoreGraphics (not CoreAnimation). The only thing that gets shoved to background threads are, AFAIK, animations that are specified in code but then "set free" into the CoreAnimation backend.
I thereby don't feel like these comments adequately defend the statements made in the article: the things it claims are benefits of iOS's graphics architecture either A) work the same on Android (per the post it is responding to from the Android developer regarding the myths of Android hardware surface compositing) or B) actually happen in software on the main/UI thread on iOS. I think we need to look elsewhere for the real cause of Android's horrible touch response. ;(
"The user complaints are with regards to delays in event processing ("sloppy" or "laggy" touch events), not general animation that does not involve user input;"
Obviously you never went through tunnels. When I am playing a 100% offline game (without internet access) and my bus goes in the tunnel, everything stops. Who cares about this "game" when I have tons of networking to do. Networking takes precedence over animation so what happens is any touch events or animation or anything is heavily delayed.
What about the phone? When the call is ending, it can't render a UI update that the button was touched, thus just a delay. It even delays processing the next input event until after the screen switches states. End result? I make a call when I try to hang up or vice versa. Point being that these problems are not exclusive, but the iOS solution is significantly better for these edge cases which are the ones that cause the biggest headaches, they still happen in iOS but very infrequently vs consistently bad every other time.
I think one subtle difference is that in iOS there is some degree of parallelism even in the UI Updates as they happen in the NSRunLoop of the main thread(main NSRunLoop).
So that an UI Update that is waiting for hardware can be delayed and the next UI update in the loop can be processed.
I dont seem to recall any such pattern for Java main thread UI Updates.
An NSRunLoop is normally a CFRunLoop, and a CFRunLoop is pretty much just "get next task; run that task; loop": if one task blocks, it cannot run the next one; the only way for it to look like it is doing multiple things at once is for code to reenter the runloop using CFRunLoopRun(), which is hardly ever used (it increases the size of the stack pretty quickly and breaks assumptions about single-threaded concurrency). Any concurrency with hardware compositing is going to happen at the kernel or hardware levels, not in the app.
Also, it is my understanding that surface compositing is done in hardware using surface-backed textures, with any software rendering of those surfaces being done on the main UI thread while responding to messages such as drawRect, using CoreGraphics (not CoreAnimation). The only thing that gets shoved to background threads are, AFAIK, animations that are specified in code but then "set free" into the CoreAnimation backend.
I thereby don't feel like these comments adequately defend the statements made in the article: the things it claims are benefits of iOS's graphics architecture either A) work the same on Android (per the post it is responding to from the Android developer regarding the myths of Android hardware surface compositing) or B) actually happen in software on the main/UI thread on iOS. I think we need to look elsewhere for the real cause of Android's horrible touch response. ;(