In 2020, are Android phones still lagging? This long article tells you the answer

Can an Android flagship phone that costs more than 5,000 yuan be used smoothly for 2-3 years?

Going back a few years, from manufacturers to users, few people dared to answer you: Yes.

But after 2020, someone will definitely answer: Of course.

And you don’t have to spend 5,000 yuan. I think it’s not difficult to achieve this goal if you spend more than 2,000 yuan.

Of course, "smooth use" is a difficult standard to define. If you insist on 100% zero lag and that it works wherever you point at it, even an iPhone cannot be so stable.

There are many factors that affect the smoothness of mobile phone operation, including hardware and software reasons. Let’s talk about hardware first.

A big leap forward for SOC and storage components: Android phones are improving in hardware capabilities

Taking the Huawei mobile phone that I have used for a long time as an example, Kirin 980 and Kirin 990 are two generations of flagship SOCs released one year respectively. They are installed on different models of mobile phones in the same series (such as P30 Pro and P40 Pro). When downloading and installing apps, there will be slight differences in the speed of progress.

The phones that are usually compared together in terms of fluency are the iPhone and Android phones.

Compared with Apple's A series, the SOC of early Android phones was really crushed, and the kind of despair that could not even see the taillights of the car. The following is a comparison of the scores of Kirin and Apple's A series processors in "3dmark Sling Shot Extreme Unlimited" provided by my friend.

The accuracy of the data cannot be guaranteed. Friends with accurate numbers are welcome to correct me.

Apple's A series' status as "the most powerful U on the planet" is still unshakable, but Kirin is constantly catching up, and is ahead of Snapdragon and A series to become the world's first SOC with an integrated 5G baseband chip, which also proves the diligence and wisdom of Chinese engineers.

Thanks to the leap in storage technology, Android phones have also seen huge improvements in memory bandwidth and flash memory speed.

Before 2016, except for a few flagship models, most of the flash memory in the Android phone camp still used EMMC. The read and write data is ugly, and 4K is even worse.

In 2020, the Android mobile phone camp has low-end ufs2.1, mid-range ufs3.0, and high-end ufs3.1. In terms of the speed improvement performance of storage components, Android is close to the iPhone.

But Apple is Apple. It has been using NVME technology for many years and has been waiting for Android to surpass it, but it has never been able to do so.

SOC, memory (RAM), and flash memory (ROM), as the three main hardware to ensure the smooth operation of mobile phones, have all seen significant improvements in technology, which also provides basic support for the smooth operation of Android phones.

Data comparison of EMMC and UFS specifications

Why is Android slower than iOS?

I read an article before, analyzing the main reasons for the lag of Android mobile phone system:

1. Too many apps are installed, occupying too much system resources.
2. Too many files accumulated on the disk slow down the system operation efficiency.
3. App is restless in the background
4. Hardware performance aging mainly due to hardware particle aging
5. The inherent shortcomings of the Android system mechanism.

The first problem is probably a common problem for computers and smartphones. Even iPhones will experience lags when the storage space is full. This is why many 64G iPhone die-hards often delete photos and apps.

Now the minimum living standard of smartphone ROM storage is 128G, and this problem has been basically solved. However, we still want to remind the "lazy" party to remember to clean up some meaningless videos and photos regularly, and try to ensure that there is more than 25% of storage space remaining in the phone.

The second problem is also easy to solve now. Now all brands of mobile phones come with a mobile phone cleaning management app, which is called "Mobile Manager" on Huawei phones. The main function of this app is to kill viruses and clean caches, junk files, etc.

The third question needs to be discussed in conjunction with the fifth question, and iOS is also involved.

People who use iPhones always say that iOS is smoother. In their opinion, iOS is more advanced than Android. Rather than saying that the technology is more advanced, it is better to say that iOS has a stricter management system.

Every time there is a discussion about iOS and Android systems, iPhone users scolding Android phones for being full of rogue software has become a must-have skill and standard for Apple fans, just like some fans will inevitably diss other manufacturers for being unscrupulous whenever there is an argument.

As we all know, Android's success stems from open source, and its criticism also stems from open source.

As long as you install an app on an Android phone, this app will inevitably do the "three rogue things": read the address book, read the location, and scan the phone space... It would like to become a worm in your phone and know everything in your phone.

Once you start the app, or even if you don't start the app, they are busy doing little things in the background. And compared to iOS's ruthlessness towards various apps, Android apps can be said to be arbitrary. For example, they call various permissions at will and occupy more resources.

It is obvious that he only needs 10k resources to start Zhihu, but he wants to use 100k to feel that he has a sense of existence. What's more hateful is that he eats more and occupies more. It would be fine if he spits it out after using it, but he occupies the space and refuses to leave after eating it.

Many people like to say that Huawei phones like to kill background processes, but that is also a last resort. If you don't kill the background processes, power consumption and hardware occupancy will increase. You think the apps are sleeping, but in fact they are dancing. The impact of these continuous small actions will inevitably drag down the operating efficiency of the phone, causing problems such as phone freezes.

When Huawei engineers were working at a service outlet, they once encountered a woman in her 70s whose phone almost froze when she turned it on. Later, they found that the entire launcher of her phone had been tampered with by a third-party software, and she had to use the third-party software to send text messages and make calls.

Apps in the iOS ecosystem do not have such free rein. Apple has the final say. Read contacts, read location, scan phone space... I'll slap you in the face, and stay in the black box.

Apple treats users extremely arrogantly. There is only one entrance for all app installations, which is the App Store. Not to mention how they treat app developers. Do you still want to capture data in the background? Do you still want the background to start automatically?

Either get out or put up with it; this is Apple’s consistent attitude toward App developers.

Why can Apple ecosystem do what Android ecosystem can do? The reason is simple - users!

Although Apple is currently the third largest seller in the world, the price of its products is a powerful filter, and it has a large number of high-quality customers. Judging from the overall situation of the global market, the comprehensive competitiveness of the iPhone in terms of the number and quality of users is still far above that of Samsung and Huawei.

You can make money working for Apple, so you have to be a timid person.

However, due to the large number of brands in the Android ecosystem, there is still a helpless mentality towards the rogue behavior of some apps. Brand A does not allow app A to behave roguely, but brands B and C will not care about it. When everyone can take care of something, it will eventually become a situation where no one cares.

If you let App A act like a hooligan, why can't App B and App C act like hooligan? To put it in Ah Q's words: The monks can do it, but I can't?

Root permissions are gradually disappearing, the first step to keep Android phones running smoothly

As the Android mobile phone market continues to concentrate, the remaining leading players are also beginning to learn and try Apple's model, with increasingly strict restrictions and management of system permissions and apps.

Take Huawei as an example. In the past few years, Huawei users could easily root the system. Later, they needed to fill in a lot of information and actively declare that they would give up the warranty. Now Huawei has directly blocked all root permissions. If you buy our products, just use them honestly.

From the manufacturer's perspective, the benefits of doing so are obvious: reducing the workload of after-sales service caused by flashing the phone and improving their own work efficiency.

After all, there are only a few users who know how to flash their phones and need to flash their phones. Because these few users have a bad experience with their phones due to flashing their phones, they will spread the word that there are problems with the manufacturer's products, which will also have a negative impact on the manufacturer's marketing. Rather than letting these few uncles cause a bad reputation, it is better to give up on them and win over a larger group of users.

It's best to seal it in one go!

Many enthusiasts are dissatisfied with the increasingly common blocking of root permissions on Android phones. Many people originally switched to Android phones because they didn't like the watertight permission management of iPhones, but now everyone is strictly controlling it. Smartphones are not outside the law!

This is just like how motorcycle gangs don’t like traffic lights, which is a very normal thing. But the mobile phone is ultimately a large-scale industrial product, and it still needs to return to its original intention of serving more people.

At the same time, Huawei also launched the Green Alliance to address the bad habit of apps that like to "eat more and occupy more", and worked with various manufacturers to formulate rules to strictly control the apps listed on Huawei's App Market. However, even so, the Green Alliance still cannot restrict developers outside the organization, and users can also download and install third-party apps from various channels.

Strengthening the supervision and restriction of apps is an inevitable choice for the Android ecosystem to continue to develop. The flashing circle is destined to reach a day when it can no longer be played.

From F2FS to EROFS, the secret of Android phones becoming less and less laggy

We have said before that hardware improvements provide the basic guarantee for the "smooth use" of mobile phones, but what determines whether a mobile phone can be "smoothly used" is the improvement and enhancement of the operating system.

When a new mobile phone is first launched, it is equipped with the latest hardware and system software, and it is normal for it to run smoothly. However, after running for 2 or 3 years, the software and apps are constantly updated, the data packets are getting larger and larger, and the number of installed apps is increasing, and the hidden danger of lag begins to appear.

At this time, the hardware is still the same as it was 2 or 3 years ago. Since the hardware cannot be changed, the software must have the ability to ensure smooth use of the new running load.

Among the more important software updates on Android phones, in addition to regular system upgrades, the birth of the F2FS (Flash Friendly File System) file system should be considered to be of great significance.

After long-term use, the fragmentation of the mobile phone will lead to performance degradation, and F2FS is specially designed to cure such problems. After testing, compared with the Ext4 file system (the original file system of the Linux system), the access fluency of the F2FS file system after long-term use is improved by 20%.

Huawei first applied the F2FS file format on Mate9 and conducted a lot of preliminary technical exploration.

Later, at the launch of Huawei Mate10 in 2017, Mr. Zui promoted the Huawei phone as “18-month free of lag”. In fact, Huawei’s software technology team had accumulated a wealth of experience based on F2FS technology and achieved a significant technological breakthrough.

Huawei's software team continued along the technical trajectory of F2FS. In June 2018, Huawei engineers demonstrated a new Linux-based read-only file system EROFS (full name: Extendable Read-Only File System. Chinese meaning: Extensible read-only file system) in the open source community.

Later, at the P30 Pro launch conference in 2019, EROFS officially debuted as the center.

What is more positive than the F2FS file system is that if F2FS is the organization of the computer's D drive, then EROFS is equivalent to the transformation of the C drive.

When performing random reads of data, EROFS has an overwhelming advantage, and the smaller the file compression rate, the more obvious the advantage: when the file compression rate is 4% (that is, a 100MB file is compressed to 4MB), the improvement is as high as 172%.

Another advantage of the EROFS file system is that it saves more space. Taking the initial space occupied by the P30 as an example, the space occupied by the EROFS file system is 2GB less than that of the Ext4 file system, which is equivalent to the user being able to store 1,000 more photos or 500 more songs.

There is also some controversy about EROFS.

However, I found an article written by a great programmer in the United States. Although I couldn't understand it very well, from his words, I felt that this file system is still worth studying.

It was also because of this information that I understood what a Huawei engineer said:

• The so-called optimization is not to create a few more beautiful UI icons or make the switching animations cooler, but to actually improve the smoothness and maintain this smoothness for a long time.

In recent years, Huawei has launched a number of optimization technologies based on the Android technology framework, including EROFS, Ark Compiler, Link Turbo, GPU Turbo, etc. These technologies have not only refreshed consumers' perception of Chinese manufacturing, but also improved consumers' experience of Android phones worldwide.

Since the second half of 2019, Huawei has attracted countless fans based on its multi-device collaboration technology among ecological products. With the improvement of software experience, it has promoted the rapid growth of ecological products such as notebooks, tablets, and large screens.

Back to the original question, will an Android phone costing more than 5,000 yuan become stuck after using it for 2 or 3 years?

Knowing that Android phones have done so much work in recent years, and have been actively working to improve product strength from hardware to software, I believe that many of your doubts should be eliminated.

It is undeniable that due to its ecological architecture, the iOS system definitely has many advantages over Android.

But are Android phones so bad that some people say, "I'd rather have a second-hand Apple phone than an Android flagship?" I think this is actually a manifestation of a closed-minded mentality and narrow cognition!

Times have changed, my Lord!

Android is also very smooth, Apple fans!