The Battle for Android Smoothness: How Can Domestic Mobile Phones Surpass iOS?

The Battle for Android Smoothness: How Can Domestic Mobile Phones Surpass iOS?It's hard to imagine that "smoothness" has become the keyword for flagship phone systems this year. With the Realme GT7 Pro launch concluding, the flagship series of major Android manufacturers have basically completed their iteration

The Battle for Android Smoothness: How Can Domestic Mobile Phones Surpass iOS?

It's hard to imagine that "smoothness" has become the keyword for flagship phone systems this year. With the Realme GT7 Pro launch concluding, the flagship series of major Android manufacturers have basically completed their iteration. Looking back at these new product launches, we can notice that they are different from previous years, such as AI being integrated into every part of each system, with smoothness becoming the main talking point. (Image source: OPPO) A few years ago, user understanding of smoothness was limited to "the phone not lagging," but now "smoothness" has become a key indicator of user experience. But what exactly does "smoothness" refer to? Were phone systems from the past two years not smooth? The intricacies involved are actually more complex than we imagine.

What Are We Discussing When We Talk About "Smoothness"?

Most users' impression of Android is that it's often not as smooth as iOS, but this is actually related to historical legacy issues. As an open-source system, Android often needs to support more hardware devices with varying configurations. Whether it's a model equipped with the latest Snapdragon 8 flagship chip or an entry-level phone priced at 1000 yuan, it must meet the standard of running a relatively new version of Android. This is not the case with iOS. Google has not strictly limited hardware and does not have enough leverage over customized hardware, which has resulted in slow progress for Android for a long time, in order to support more devices.

For higher compatibility, Android has chosen to use a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) to adapt to different devices. However, this type of standardized abstract design is not as efficient in system call efficiency as Apple's, leading to inefficient resource allocation, especially in scenarios with high performance requirements. (Image source: Google)

In terms of multitasking management, Android implements preemptive multitasking based on the Linux kernel, which allows background tasks to run in parallel. However, this mechanism requires very high resource allocation granularity. When device hardware resources are insufficient or certain high-resource consuming applications continue to run in the background, the smoothness of foreground applications can be affected. For example, Android's OOM (OutOfMemory) mechanism automatically closes processes with lower background priority when system memory is insufficient, freeing up resources to ensure the smooth operation of foreground tasks. When certain applications frequently restart in the background, the frequent triggering of the OOM mechanism not only fails to truly solve the problem of insufficient memory but also brings additional burdens on system resource management, leading to more serious lag.

Speaking of memory management mechanisms, one cannot ignore the garbage collection mechanism, which is the most controversial aspect of Android. While this mechanism frees up memory, it also increases CPU load. When running large applications, frequent garbage collection can cause noticeable lag, especially in usage scenarios requiring high real-time performance. While this garbage collection mechanism reduces system load, it also incurs a certain performance loss, becoming a major bottleneck in improving smoothness. Additionally, Android's memory management exhibits fragmentation issues when dealing with large memory applications, causing allocated memory to be inefficiently utilized, resulting in reduced actual usable memory space and further impacting system fluidity. For users, the decrease in Android device smoothness after a period of use is often directly related to this memory fragmentation phenomenon. (Image source: Qualcomm)

Although Android has many inherent flaws, with the continuous improvement of hardware performance, many manufacturers can fully utilize the high performance advantages of SoC, memory, and storage chips to compensate for these shortcomings. For example, Android phones in the past two years have generally started with 12GB of memory, and storage specifications have already entered the UFS4.0 era, which has brought optimization for improving system multitasking management and fragmentation performance loss.

While simply stacking hardware can ensure a "phone doesn't lag," there is still an unbridgeable gap between "not lagging" and "smoothness." For example, OPPO ColorOS14 and vivo OriginOS4 are considered by many users to be not "natural," or Xiaomi's Pengpai OS only provides "premium materials" features that support real-time animations and frosted glass effects for high-performance models. These are ingenious solutions to the issue of lagging, but they are not the root cause of achieving "smoothness."

How Can Android Be Made More Smooth? The New Battleground for Domestic Mobile Phones

Earlier, we mentioned the issues arising from Android's overly open and high compatibility. However, it's also this openness that provides a space for numerous customized Android systems to modify the underlying code.

First, address the performance scheduling problem. Currently, Xiaomi's Pengpai OS, vivo's OriginOS, OPPO's ColorOS, and Honor's MagicOS all have self-developed performance optimization frameworks to optimize the performance scheduling of the underlying system. Pengpai OS2's newly self-developed micro-scheduling architecture can reduce CPU idling time by 19%, enhance IPC in high-load scenarios by 16%, and reduce the maximum scheduling delay of key threads by 46%; OriginOS5 upgrades to unfair scheduling 3.0, focusing on identifying the performance requirements of CPU and GPU in different scenarios, enhancing instantaneous response speed and improving responsiveness through resource tilting. OPPO's ColorOS15 and Honor's MagicOS9.0 also respectively feature Tidal Architecture and TurboX for rational allocation of performance resources. (Image source: vivo)

OriginOS can be considered one of the earliest customized Android systems to restructure resource allocation from the system's underlying layer. Before vivo introduced this framework, most manufacturers were considering how to improve instantaneous performance to address high-load scenarios such as multitasking switching, small windows, and launching applications. Unfair scheduling essentially involves tilting performance resources, which can both improve CPU resource utilization and reduce excessive calling leading to high power consumption and wasted power.

Restructuring the system's underlying layer is only one part of this major surgery. The key to customized systems lies in how to utilize these idle resources after rational allocation to perform tasks that benefit user experience. This brings us to the subject of animation. Animation is one of the souls of UI interaction.

A key reason why iOS is so popular lies in its smooth animation. In this year's launches, almost all manufacturers have highlighted animation as a key upgrade. For example, OPPO has debuted Aurora Engine in ColorOS15, which enables multi-interrupt, parallel, and real-time blur effects. OriginOS5 and MagicOS9.0 have also introduced Atom Animation 5.0 and a new animation engine, respectively, also bringing parallel animations and a natural animation flow.

Besides animation smoothness, Honor's Vulkan engine first launched in MagicOS9.0 is responsible for loading smoothness. Loading speed has always been a persistent issue in the Android system. For example, system albums, files, etc., often cannot be previewed instantly due to their fragmented and information-dense nature. However, with the addition of the Vulkan engine, the overall loading speed has been improved, enabling the Magic7 series to quickly complete fast preview of tens of thousands of images, a feat previously only achievable by iOS. (Image source: Lei Technology on-site filming)

While customized systems can enhance system performance through underlying architecture restructuring and animation optimization, Android's high openness still presents certain challenges. A simple example is that the openness of the Android system grants users the freedom to install third-party applications, but this also leads to inconsistent application quality. Numerous applications have not followed system optimization standards and have not optimized resource consumption during development, leading to increased resource competition as these applications continue to run in the background. Some developers, in an effort to improve application retention rates, design processes and background services that continuously run, which increases application activity but negatively impacts system smoothness.

Therefore, in recent years, we have seen almost all manufacturers starting to prevent the installation of risky and unknown third-party apps by users, and providing clear risk warnings before installation. In this aspect, Xiaomi's Pengpai OS is relatively rigorous, requiring users to undergo multiple verifications and repeatedly confirm risks before installing risky applications, which brings advantages to both system security and resource consumption optimization.

Currently, while the customized systems of different mobile phone manufacturers have different tuning directions, the overall trend is the same:

First, increasing more performance allocation details at the underlying layer and expanding the scope of performance scheduling adaptation scenarios; and second, introducing more animations to give users a smooth visual and tactile experience.

AI and Deep Customization: The Two Essential Tools for Achieving "Smoother" Mobile OS

The reason why iOS can be considered the benchmark for smoothness lies in Apple's comprehensive allocation across its ecosystem, hardware, and software, such as Apple being able to customize the SoC based on its requirements for iPhone, including aspects like cache and bandwidth. Therefore, Apple can essentially control every aspect of the operating conditions for iOS smoothness.

We have mentioned that phone manufacturers have already implemented deep "modifications" to customized Android. Is there a way to use the SoC for their own benefit? Of course. At the X200 series launch, vivo emphasized its deep cooperation with MediaTek, making customized adjustments to the latest Dimensity 9400 mobile platform based on its needs. This allows the chip to work with OriginOS5 to achieve stronger performance with lower power consumption compared to previous generations. Not only that, vivo even integrated the image capabilities of the V2 chip into the Dimensity 9400 customization, enabling the X200 and X200 Promini to deliver computational power comparable to the V2 chip even without a