Android users who have a keen eye for design and detail, how is the whole stutter/lag situation? Esp. after a few years of use?

I been using android since version 2 and never encountered this. I guess it depends on the device a lot, as I've worked a lot in the mobile industry I've tended to have the more powerful devices.

Which makes sense, smart phones being small computers and all, the slower ones are slow sometimes and the faster ones tend to be faster.

Androids diversity has always been it's strength and weakness

This will really, REALLY depend on each device and manufacturer.
I have Poco X3 Pro. It also has 120Hz so almost everything seems fast, but there's some components that just seem to run at lower frame rate. For example per-app dark mode settings menu. And it's also really buggy. But that's expected from MIUI.

I've had Moto G5s Plus (2017) that was extremely laggy on Android 8.1. Then I put PixelExperience 11 (Android 11) on it and it was mostly smooth. Some manufacturers are just shitty with optimizations.

I'd imagine quite a bit of the stuttering and lag on Androids was/is a result of all the bloatware phone companies insist on putting on their phones. I've a 2018 OnePlus 6 that doesn't lag or stutter because the only apps on it are the ones I choose to have on it and allow to run - it's a degoogled phone running Lineage OS (Android 14) with zero bloat and zero ads and as a result a six-year-old phone is still buttery smooth. Phone companies have a lot to answer for... it's lucky they don't sell cars; they'd sell you a Ferrari and then weld a mobile home to the back of it to make it incredibly difficult to disconnect.

I've had Samsung androids for over a decade, and they've had smoother animation and less loading lag since about iPhone 4 (which I've used for work in the same period). They've also had comparable feedback on presses.

Then again, the HTC androids I've tried occasionally have been real bad, so I get the question.

You shouldn't have to rely on the words of Internet random though, go try one out.

Have big games and office apps not given you the same problem on iOS?

Tbh, I never noticed this on android 🤔 But maybe I'm just less perceptive.

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I've always been on android, so take this with a grain of salt. In my opinion Samsung phones have come a very long way. They used to be slower and bloated in comparison to other brands, especially while the market was still moving fast. I used to have a Sony, a ZTE, a Motorola, an Umi and a Jiayu - I tried quite a few over the years.

The recent generation are all fast enough and performance wise last 4+ years before they get noticably slow and an upgrade becomes necessary. Software support on Samsung is now phenomenal. I had so many bugs and hitches on other vendors' phones and they were rarely fixed - the absolute opposite has been the experience on my Samsungs. Updates are frequent, smooth and stable.

I know this reads like an ad, but I was honestly positively suprised after I bought a Samsung tablet a few years back and have slowly switched over to Samsung devices. The same happened with all other members of my family. Samsung simply won.

I suppose the iPhone is very similar in that regard, both simply work and are great for everyday use. It's almost boring!

I do advice you to look at the upper end though, they simply have more performance reserves. If you are a display menace and battery destroyer though, you won't notice any significant slow down from the cheaper range in the 2 to 3 years you have before it becomes uneconomical to repair the device anyways.

I've had a pretty smooth experience with both the Pixel 6 and the Pixel 7 Pro.

The first thing I do on any new phone is go to developer options and turn all 3 animation settings to off. It's a night and day difference. I've probably saved a collective hour of my life not waiting for animations lol

in iOS the UI thread is split from the rest of the compute, and runs at elevated priority if i recall correctly. this used to not be the same case for android. having said that, my android devices run just fine as long as they have plenty of ram. so, if you buy a flagship samsung it usually comes with 12gb ram. the current minimum I'd say is 8gb. used to have the pixel 4xl with 6gb which kept lagging... how the situation develops in 2 to 3 years and if 12gb is still enough remains to be seen. in general apple is better with long-term device support (up to 5 years). all this is of course very subjective and depends on ur usage and if u game a lot on ur device.

The only time I've noticed issues like this on an Android phone was the device I had before my current one. This was a phone that was great when I got it, and I started to notice issues after about 4 years of use. The reality was it was a mid-range device when it was released, it was already a year or two old when I got it, and after a couple of years, the hardware was just not powerful enough for the stuff I was asking it to do.

So I'm inclined to agree with the others who've said it really depends on exactly what device you're using. If you're buying a budget phone that's not particularly powerful when it's brand new, then it's definitely going to be having issues 2-3 years later, because apps get more demanding as hardware improves, so if your hardware is subpar, you're going to have issues.

While the allure of getting the cheapest possible phone is strong, if you use your phone for a lot of things, you may have to consider spending a bit more money. One consideration is instead of getting a brand new budget phone, get a second-hand model with higher spec: the price will be similar, but you'll get better performance for longer. I'm actually trying to think now if I've ever had a brand new Android phone, and I can't remember any of them being new, but they have all served me well, with only one notably having performance issues by the time it was ~5 years old.

I've had this issue with Samsung phones and tablets I owned in the past. Working as an app developer I still see this kind of problems on heavily oem-customized versions of Android.

Personally I "solved" this by switching to Pixel phones which in my experience don't slow down even after 3-4 years of usage and updates. I believe this is true in general for phones that stay as close to AOSP/stock Android as possible.

My pixel 7 pro is perfectly smooth and seamless. Oh and voice assistant is far faster than anything on iPhone thanks to the on-board Tensor chip.

Scrolling is fucked up in most apps than it should be, change my mind.

To be honest I don't really care about this at all.

I also owned an S8 which I used for years until they dropped support way too early. It's been my best phone ever. I have an S23 now (which was a unique chance to get a real Snapdragon in a Samsung here in Europe). It's smoother but I'm not sure if it will be acceptable to you.

I still loved my S8 more though. With its 3,5mm jack, Notification LED, flat camera (nothing sticking out), curved display and higher resolution than the S23 has today.

I have a galaxy s21 that I've been using for the last 3 years. I haven't noticed any difference in performance from the day I got the phone, and I don't feel I'll need to upgrade for another couple years. Full disclosure, I did use adb to remove a ton of Samsung bloat when I got the phone, and that definitely improved performance, so I'm not sure how different my experience would be with all the extra Samsung stuff added.

OK, so you have the opinion of people with flagship or even midrange phones, now here I come with my budget phone, a Redmi Note 8.

I've used budget phones all my life since, well, they're cheaper. The truth is that yes, you do notice some animation stuttering and some delayed responses, especially as the years go by and you have more apps installed (probably doing stuff in the background) and the apps you do have keep updating to be more bloated.

This phone in particular makes it very hard to multi-task, as it's very liberal with killing apps in the background to save RAM. This is annoying. But I'm using MI UI instead of stock android, and I'm sure I could change this.

Honestly, I do feel like I'm being left behind and that I'm going to have to switch phones more often than if I had a more expensive model. But so far I haven't encountered any apps I could not run (or even that I could run but only with too much stutter, making for a terrible user experience). So I'll keep using it until I truly feel left behind, which can take a surprisingly long time. My usage time tends to rival that of people with flagship android phones and iPhones (maybe I even come out ahead)

But you specifically asked about animation stutter. It does happen but it simply doesn't bother me at all. It's not constant, only happening when the phone is doing something else at the same time, and even when it does I can wait a few seconds and it'll be fine. You also mentioned lag when opening an app, so much that you thought it didn't register your input. It doesn't happen to me since, while the app itself can take some time to open, the icon has feedback so I know I pressed it.

Overall, I don't think any of these issues are enough to bother me significantly for a good few years.

It depends on the app in question and how powerful your smartphone is. On flagship smartphones and well optimised apps there's zero lag. On midrange smartphones and lower you may notice that on some heavy apps.

So, you should be fine as long as you get a current generation upper midrange or flagship smartphone.

Been running Lineage on a Pixel 2 xl and Pixel 5 for about 2.5 years and its buttery smooth

I've got an older s10 and the animations are smooth 99% of the time then I'll see a stutter when I'm loading something like a heavy webpage and scrolling.

I've never noticed lag issues on my £250 Motorola G73.

Delay after starting an app is essentially not a problem anymore. Most apps now come with a splash screen, so you get at least some feedback.

Lag while scrolling is still horrid. This has to do with Android apps generally being written in Java or Kotlin, which use a Stop-The-World Garbage Collector for memory management.
So, you shouldn't expect this to be fixed any time soon.

I have a pixel 8 and it has a 120hz mode which I of course turned on, but I still see a lot of stutter when I scroll things. Which really just confirmed what I was thinking with my previous phone and it's not the age of the hardware, but the OS itself just sucks now because it's only started to show visible slow down in the last few years and still has a lot of the same random issues. Plus new ones because the square button constantly stops working to switch apps.

I had problems with my Pixel 5 crashing all the damn time but haven't had any issues with the 6 (or when I had the 4).

Hmmm, I've never noticed what you mentioned on my recent phones. That said you should test a newer android yourself before making a purchase!

More of my personal experience... I have a Pixel 7 XL and a work Iphone which (edit) is an Iphone 12. Generally they are the same in terms of having no scroll lag or input lag at all. But, there is some lag on both when they are overheated, especially on the Iphone if I put it on a higher power charger (I trickle charge both when I can).

From a design perspective the biggest difference I notice is that my Pixel feels significantly smoother because of the 120hz display, and just the larger display in general. While I said neither of them have much lag, the Iphone feels noticeably less speedy. That said, I'm sure if you compared my Pixel to a high end Iphone results would be flipped. My work isn't shelling out for whatever pro max stuff they sell (and neither would I!).

Beyond that, I can't offer guidance. In my personal experience the Iphone UI is so frustrating that I can't judge which one performs "better" or not, because only the Android feels comfortable to me. Between that and the lack of labels in some places (like the pull-down settings menu) it is impossible for me to daily drive the apple.