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ZoFreX

> Project Volta focused on Battery Life

According to Google. According to independent benchmarks, battery life got worse on a whole slew of devices.

> They changed the entire runtime to ART for performance

But did it actually get faster? Not by much.

> Material design was a much needed solution to coherent UI across Google's properties

Are the UIs coherent across Google's properties? Half a year on the answer is still no: Implementation is spotty across the first-party apps, many of which directly violate the guidelines given to developers.

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"But did it actually get faster? Not by much"

It's a new runtime, and expected to get better and faster. If you don't like it that much, and you sound like you really HATE Android, maybe you should use something else. You'll feel better.

I think it's kind of unfair to accuse me of hating Android because I criticise it. I've been using Android since 1.6, always been a big fan, but as a power user and a developer I'm much more aware of Android's shortcomings than any Apple fanboy could possibly be.

Maybe I've conflated your response with others here who seem to have a huge dislike for Android and an obvious bias against anything Google. If that's not you then I apologize for the misunderstanding. I can understand being realistic about a platform and providing criticism, but a lot of the comments here can truly be characterized as hate.

More than likely, material design bloat ate any improvements in performance or battery life introduced by backend optimizations.

As I understand it, Material (and Microsoft's Metro, interestingly) aims to be better on battery compared to predecessors if only because it's a simpler UI with larger plain blocks of color, minimal decorations, and far fewer "expensive" effects like gradients or translucence\transparency. That doesn't mean said wins aren't immediately consumed by other parts of the system, even other parts of Material UI widgetry. Regardless, the simpler flatter design frees up some resources (battery, ultimately) which can then be used for other things, like smooth animations and transitions.

Compared to Holo, Material adds a lot of generated shadows and animated elements. Holo was fairly 'flat' already, and far simpler.

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