[nkoren]

Good article! But I have to question the default assumption that iOS isn't laggy. I'm using an old iPhone 3G and it has become laggy as hell over the years. Scrolling on a web page is only ever smooth once a page has finished rendering -- and often not even then. The map application has become so laggy as to be completely unusable; every scroll or keypress takes 20-30 seconds to register (not exaggerating). Installing an app more or less bricks the UI throughout. I'm sure that these problems do not exist on modern iOS hardware -- but on that basis, the only fair comparison is with modern top-of-the-line Android hardware.

(In other news, I just ordered my Galaxy Nexus yesterday and am rather looking forward to it. Can you tell?)

The trick is that there is effectively only ever one model iPhone / iPad at a time -- so right now it's the 4S, for example, that captures all the mindshare and forms the basis of comparison. Legacy iOS devices simply cannot keep up, and certainly do not maintain the buttery-smooth experience that people identify with iOS. But nobody appreciates this, because legacy iOS devices aren't an active force on the market. Android devices, meanwhile, come in many hardware configurations, some of which are much more analogous to my old laggy 3G than to the latest iOS hotness.

This isn't an excuse: it just means that Android has set a harder task for itself than iOS has. But that's no reason not to succeed at that task. 15 years ago, my hand-built BeOS box gave me an unbreakably buttery UI -- even during obnoxious geek demos such as simultaneously playing 30 different videos in 30 different windows -- so there's no reason that ANY computing device, even a very cheap one, should not be able to match that performance today. This article gives a good insight into how Android is failing to do so, and what some of the solutions might be.

[twoodfin]

> Installing an app more or less bricks the UI throughout. I'm sure that these problems do not exist on modern iOS hardware -- but on that basis, the only fair comparison is with modern top-of-the-line Android hardware.

That's not the "only" fair comparison. The 3G is a three and a half year old device. It's also severely memory constrained and probably shouldn't have gotten iOS 4 to begin with. You're certainly running into paging issues: iOS doesn't have a backing store for virtual memory, but it will drop and reload read only pages out of flash storage when it's memory constrained.

The iPhone 4 is almost 18 months old and compares quite favorably with year-newer Android devices on the UI responsiveness front.

[X-Istence]

Not just the iPhone 4, the 3GS holds up really well with iOS 5 on it as well.

I have a 3G and like you said it should have never gotten iOS 4. But the 3GS is just fine.