iOS Why is iOS home screen still laggy in 2021? (conspiracy theory)

[bearinthetown]

Hi guys,

I'm posting this in the Developers forum, because I'd like programmers to share their views. Today I played with the new iPad Mini and I was disappointed to find out that the home screen (where you browse your apps) is laggy on this device. To a degree of being an unpleasant experience.

I have a conspiracy theory that this is done on purpose by Apple, a trick they'd do for many years now. Normally, Apple prioritizes user experience by using neat tricks, like for example displaying the last state of the app on the launch to make it seem like the loading was immediate. But for some reason, such a simple thing like scrolling through several flat icons can't be smooth. It's a low FPS animation with microlags. It's much better on the iPad Pro and it's not just about the 120 Hz screen, but about the perceived hardware power.

Now, I've had some discussions with other people and most of them thought it was normal that a stronger device handled this better. But my question is - how come? Today's weakest Apple devices are much stronger than the strongest from several years ago, right? It doesn't make any sense from technical point of view to have this dashboard laggy.

I think Apple does it to justify buying a Pro device. Home screen is the first thing we see at the store and they want it to be a better experience on a Pro. It's really not a rocket science to make a butter-smooth scrolling of flat icons. Even iPhone 4S had this (until it was deliberately slowed down by Apple). If my theory is true, that's kinda lame of Apple to manipulate their customers that way, isn't it?

What do you guys think? Do you agree or am I trippin' here?

 

[casperes1996]

It's worth noting that when you're sitting on the Home Screen, the Springboard is not the only process running. I mention this because I really really really don't think there was any foul play with the iPhone 4s situation. It got slow by the end not because of some planned obsolescence or Apple mistreating customers - it got slow because Apple kept giving it feature updates that added the number of processes running on the system at any given time, and the chip in it just couldn't handle it - extra much so because memory requirements of course rose at the same time.

As for the iPad mini however, I haven't seen the device in action, but I don't think Apple's doing anything malicious. That said, I agree that the device should be able to render the Springboard at 60FPS 99.9% of the time; An occasional hitch may occur at times but generally you'd expect to have animations at the refresh rate of the panel there. As long as it can do all the work it needs to do within 16ms, the user will not see any speed difference whether it does it in 3ms or 10ms. That is, in a situation with a fixed animation. If we introduce variability from user input, we may have situations where it takes 10ms to draw a frame of animation, and it draws it smoothly at 60+FPS, but the user changes swipe direction 7ms into a render pass. It'll have to display one frame from before the user changed direction since it won't have enough time to draw an extra frame reacting to the input within the 16ms limit. In other words, input latency may be slightly better if you can process faster than the refresh rate, but it should be smooth as long as you can hit 16ms or below per frame.

But I've seen iPads (as in iPad. Not Air, not Pro, not Mini) clearly rendering at 60FPS on the springboard, so I'd find it incredibly odd if what you're observing is Apple purposefully gimping the smoothness of the mini to make the Pro look more attractive.

 

[Ethosik]

I too have not seen the iPad Mini so I cannot comment on that specifically. However, even a $2,700 custom build gaming desktop with 144Hz monitors Windows 10 sometimes lags on the start menu animations. Its just what is happening with the system at the time. Also, I am not as familiar with the background processes of iPads vs Macs since I have been with computers far longer, but if its brand new perhaps your phone is being indexed at the same time, that takes part of the resources.

There is a direct correlation with the storage space and fluid animations. My iPhone X was HORRIBLE....absolutely HORRIBLE a couple months ago, only did I realize I forgot to delete my unused 20GB of data so I was using 63/64GB of my storage. Immediately after I deleted the space, it got better. It took a few minutes to fully recover, but it was an immediate improvement. I have had no issues with the animations and UI performance of my phone since.