People always say that iPhone runs smoothly without any lag, but Android runs very laggy?

When buying a mobile phone, the most common advice is to buy an Apple phone if you have money, because it will last for several years without any lag. Therefore, even if the new Apple phone is sold at nearly double the price of most other phones on the market, many consumers will still pay for it because they believe that Apple phones can be used for a longer time and provide a better experience.

In fact, it is true. Although the configuration and experience of Android flagships are getting better and better, Apple seems to still maintain its dominant position in the mobile phone industry. This article will explain to you why iOS can last long without lag while Android frequently freezes.

Full-screen gestures — “smoother animation effects”

The design and experience of iOS have always been well-known, especially the full-screen gesture experience after iPhone X. At present, no Android phone can fully achieve the tracking of global gestures on iOS12, and the animation effects in various parts of the system, such as opening the control center, swiping when multitasking, or scrolling in the app, these operations will be smoother and more sensitive.

Although Android has a variety of shortcuts, custom gestures, full-screen gestures, and animation effects, the overall visual effect is not as smooth, complete, and responsive as iOS. Therefore, the first impression is that Android phones are not as smooth as Apple phones. In fact, the reasons for this phenomenon are due to many underlying reasons, which are explained in detail below.

Shorter process, priority response level

When we use iPhone or Android smartphones, the first step is to unlock the lock screen and enter the desktop, then find the APP we need to use and click to enter.

This is the basic operation for most people when using mobile phones. At this time, the iOS system shows its smoothness, but Android products often give people a sense of lag, especially when there are more apps opened in the later stage of using the phone, Android is far less smooth than iOS. Why is this?

This is related to the response priority of the two systems. iOS has the highest priority for screen response, and its response order is Touch>Media>Service>Core architecture. Simply put, when the user touches the screen, the system will give priority to processing the screen display, that is, the touch level, followed by media, service and Core architecture.

The priority response hierarchy of the Android system is Application>Framework>Library>Kernal architecture, and the graphics and image processing related to display belongs to Library. That is to say, when you touch the screen, the Android system will first activate the application, call the framework, and then the screen, which is the core architecture.

So iOS can make people feel smooth and responsive from the very beginning, because iOS was designed for touch screen interaction from the beginning, while Android is different. Android was originally designed for software APP. However, it is true that priority has an impact on the fluency of the system, but this is not the main reason. There are other factors that cause the difference in fluency between the two systems, which we can continue to look at.

Hardware Acceleration

If we say that iOS is designed for smooth operation in terms of system-level priority response, then the iPhone is also different from Android phones in terms of hardware. The various special effects processing of graphics in the iOS system are basically accelerated based on dedicated GPU hardware. Instead of relying entirely on the CPU, it can be rendered through the GPU to achieve smoother control performance.

This is not the case with Android. On the one hand, Android needs to adapt to different hardware to meet various different configurations, and on the other hand, Android's design logic is not for touch services. Of course, in system versions after Android 4, GPU hardware accelerated rendering is enabled by default, but it is still impossible to achieve GPU acceleration for all special effects.

The priority of the screen's responsiveness and the iSO's own GPU acceleration feature make users feel that iOS phones have super high fluency and comfort during operation. Because the entire design process of iOS itself is to serve the ultimate fluency, whether it is the first impression of sliding the touch screen or the operation when you use the program. The responsiveness plus the GPU acceleration feature make iOS a combination of software and hardware, making the system fluency reach a level that Android phones cannot match.

Background mechanism

If iOS's combination of hardware and software on the touch screen is good, the difference in the smoothness of software running between iOS and Andorid is due to another obvious difference: the background mechanism.

iOS uses a background mechanism. When the user presses the HOME button to exit an app, iOS actually closes the app, retains only the image entrance of the app, and records the app's latest running data in RAM by default. When the app is opened again, the system will restore the previously saved latest running data to the app. At this time, the app restores its previous state, giving users the illusion that the app will run in the background.

So why can apps that have been killed in iOS also receive push notifications? Because after the user chooses to enable push notifications in the app, the iOS system will add several processes, which will receive information from Apple's servers and then send it to the user through the server. Apple's servers act as a transit point. It is precisely because of this series of mechanisms that even though the iPhone's "surface" RAM configuration is lower than that of Android phones, iOS still gives people a smoother feeling.

Android is different. It uses a background mechanism to keep the application in RAM. When the user presses the home button to return to the desktop or exit the program, the program is not completely exited, but is hung in the background by the system. This is why even if the chat software is turned off on Android, you can still receive message notifications, because it is resident in the system memory, including the junk advertising push that you usually receive, which is also because the background program is running.

This mechanism directly leads to low memory usage when Android is just turned on. If the memory is not cleaned up after a day of normal use, the memory usage will increase, resulting in a decrease in the fluency of the Android system. The most intuitive feeling is slowness. Therefore, Android machines need more RAM to improve user experience;

Different development mechanisms

The programming language of iOS is Objective-C, which uses the compiler GCC. The code compiled by GCC is optimized to the utmost by the iOS architecture. There is no need for a virtual machine to intervene during the operation, and the execution efficiency is very high. Moreover, GCC allocates and recycles the memory it uses. In simple terms, when GCC wants to manipulate the pointer and finishes using the memory, it releases it at that time. This results in the memory usage rate of iOS not being particularly high. Therefore, iOS does not require a particularly large amount of memory.

Android's programming language is Java. Java's memory management is done through the JVM, which manages memory in the background, so the program does not need to pay attention to memory. When a certain amount of memory is occupied, it will trigger GC, which will stop the world and stop the user thread. Therefore, it may affect two aspects, *** the lag during GC, especially long GC. The long GC may reach several seconds or even minutes.

Second, Android itself is not built for touch screens. All Android applications run in a virtual environment. Data is transmitted from the bottom layer to the virtual machine, and then from the virtual machine to the user UI. Any program can easily access other program files. At the same time, GC is post-processed, and memory is not reclaimed until the memory usage reaches a certain level, which leads to a high memory usage rate in Android. Of course, Google is also aware of this, so in versions after Android 4.0, the programming language and mechanism have been improved by Android, and the jamming phenomenon has been significantly reduced.

App development, closed App Store

App Store is an extremely important symbol of iPhone and iOS. App Store not only enables Apple to make profits from software, but also sets a standard requirement for applications in iOS, so that each application is only adapted to one or two CPUs per year, greatly improving hardware utilization efficiency and software development speed.

Android is different. It is open source and based on the Linux kernel and multi-threaded development platform, so the development cost is low. In addition, Android does not have a fully closed App Store like iOS, which gives developers a high degree of development freedom. It is also compatible with a variety of hardware, allowing software to be unconstrained and unfettered.

iOS and Android have their own characteristics in application development, but it is precisely these characteristics that make Android also suffer from the persecution of "rogue" software, making the system far less smooth and clean than iOS. Of course, there are also many conscientious software in the Android system. In the foreseeable future, the Android system will become more and more strict in software regulations, and the detection and elimination of "rogue" software will be improved again and again.

iPhone gets slower as it's upgraded? Android gets slower as it's used?

In fact, Apple phones are not always free of lags. In short, there are two reasons for iPhone lags: the first is that the hardware is too poor and the level is not up to par, which means that the performance of the phone has been released for many years is far behind the current performance, so it will be lagging when used; the second is that the system has been updated. Upgrading the latest iOS system will bring certain pressure to the operation of the phone, especially the iPhone that has been released for many years.

The reason why Android becomes slower and slower as it is used is not only due to the development mechanism problem, but also more to APP, mainly because of memory occupation, insufficient optimization, and the influence of rogue software. Since it is an APP problem, the ultimate solution is to try to download more standardized APPs to avoid some rogue software's built-in permissions such as mutual wake-up, self-start, and messages.

Summarize

Different reasons such as response level, hardware acceleration, background mechanism, development mechanism and application development have led to the phenomenon that iOS is smoother than Android system. Many Android phones will almost always experience lag if the background is not cleaned up and the hardware is not updated, especially when opening software to load resources, opening larger games, and switching between multiple applications. They will more or less experience lag or even reload applications.

Fortunately, with the hardware configuration far surpassing that of iPhone, Android phones have already provided an experience that is not inferior to iOS in terms of software running smoothness and aesthetics. Especially after Android O, Google has also realized the improvement of system smoothness on experience, and is gradually improving the design of system UI. Domestic companies that deeply customize Android UIs also have convenient operations based on Android and aesthetic designs that are not inferior to iOS.

In the future, with improved system design and powerful hardware, Android will surely be the only knight to shake the dominance of iOS. Currently, iOS is still the smoothest and most excellent mobile phone system.