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Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

I wonder a little bit why this is slower on Android than iOS. On iOS I've never experienced this, and my phone is a couple years old now.

Not saying I have the answer, but it is a curiosity

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It's a good question! I've been hearing the joke for years that RN architects don't have any android devices to test on.

On our apps we consistently see a p50 3-4x speed difference between iOS and Android (though there are more lower end android devices). Hard to fathom if it's all due to variability in android devices vs RN being less performant on Android.

Pixel 9 Pro, or virtually all android phones apart from the recent snapdragon Elite and coming ARM Cortex X5 all have much slower single threaded performance comparing to iPhone.

The Google Tensor G4 in single thread and integer only is roughly in between iPhone 11 and iPhone 12. That is the performance between 2019 and 2020 on iPhone.

And Tensor G4 is already on the high end Android Phones. You can quickly see how all previous and lower end android phone are much slower.

Developing for Apple can be a PITA with their strict background processing rules, apps just terminate/stop working unless they fall under a special case. I get it but yeah.

edit: by terminate I don't mean crash, it just stops code execution an example is an active socket connection getting disconnected unless it's doing something like streaming audio

But as a user I appreciate the strictness much more. I don't have to worry about closing background apps or having a bunch of crap running when I'm not actively using it. The OS (mostly) handles that for me, as it should.

Absolutely. I’d rather have backgrounded apps unexpectedly closed from time to time than to find a big chunk of battery gone at a bad time because some app I don’t even care about has decided it needs to keep running and eating resources for some reason.

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