Latency testing reveals Apple iPhones are far more responsive than any Android phone tested

13 years ago

“We decided to measure and reveal the minimum response times of flagship smartphones from top manufacturers,” TouchMarks reports. “Are Apple’s touchscreens more responsive than Android devices as Apple lovers claim? Or does Samsung save its best displays for its own use?”

“Using a combination of high frame rate cameras capturing at 240fps and custom Agawi hardware, we can accurately measure the App Response Time (ART), which we define as the latency from the time the user feels that they’ve touched the device’s display to the time the user sees a response on the screen,” TouchMarks reports. “For TouchMarks I, we wanted to measure the minimum response time an app developer could expect on various devices. We built simple, optimized apps to flash the full screen white as quickly as possible in response to a touch. The apps contain minimal logic and use OpenGL/DirectX rendering to make sure the response is as quick as possible. Since these are barebones native apps doing nothing more than filling the screen in response to a touch, this benchmark defines the Minimum App Response Time (MART) a user could experience on a mobile app on each device.”

Here are the results:

“As you can see, the results are remarkable,” TouchMarks reports. “At a MART of 55ms, The iPhone 5 is twice as responsive as any Android or WP8 phone tested. All the Android devices’ MARTs fell in the same 110 – 120ms range, with the WP8-based Lumia 928 falling into that bucket as well”

“There are several possible reasons for this. Since touchscreen hardware has significant latency itself (check out this video from Microsoft Research for a visual demonstration), our best guess at Agawi is that Apple’s touchscreen hardware is better optimized or more sensitively calibrated for capturing and processing touch. Another possibility is that while the Android and WP8 code are running on runtimes (Dalvik and CLR respectively), the iPhone code is written in closer-to-the-metal Objective-C, which may reduce some latency,” TouchMarks reports. “Regardless of the reasons, the conclusion is clear: the best written apps on iPhones will simply feel more responsive than similar apps on the current gen of Android devices. (We speculate this might be a major reason why the iPhone keyboard generally feels better than the Android keyboard to many people.)”

Read more in the full report here.

MacDailyNews Take: Why settle for a laggy, malware-prone knockoff when you can have a real iPhone instead?

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Brawndo Drinker” and “farkas” for the heads up.]