Do Samsung Galaxy smartphones still lag due to Touchwiz?

biggles

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It may not even be called Touchwiz anymore. But I recall noticeable lag back in the day on an S3. Since the hardware has improved massively over time then perhaps this has changed. Read somewhere that Samsung devices need 6 gb of ram in order to overcome the heavy software skin. Just wondering what people's experiences are with S8 and S9 devices. They sure sell well, but I am sensitive to lag and would not want a device if it is not snappy like a Oneplus or Pixel.
 
I've used the S7 and it was pretty bad. Maybe they are better now.
 
I'm on the GS9. And, yes, boy, does it lag. 4GB of RAM is simply not enough. It's like with TouchWiz, you'll need 6-8GB of RAM at the bare minimum; so perhaps the GS9+ wouldn't be laggy. Regardless I wouldn't recommend either Samsung flagships unless you have Jump or something.

I've disabled so many things manually, cause paying $7 on a 3rd party app to disable all Samsung crap is plain illogical. And the Bixby launcher must be replaced, cause that launcher lags by pulling info I don't need from the web. And with that you'll have to disable the Bixby button, cause it's tied to the launcher. I did pay $4 on a 3rd party app, which is indeed illogical, to remap the button to Google. I'm using Nova Launcher Pro, but I've paid for that years ago. Let's just say if you want a smoother Galaxy S9, you'll have to spend extra money. Out of the box, this phone is shit and proof that TouchWiz still lags.
 
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Yeah, my wife's S7 felt no faster than my S4. I'm looking to replace my S4 with a Pixel soon, because it's a much better design.
 
They still lag. My ex had a Galaxy S8+ and after about 6 months it turned into a laggy hot mess. It seems that they barely last a year, once that year mark hits after a couple updates they just slow down. It's a shame really, because Samsung could easily make the best Android phone if it wasn't for their craptastic TouchWiz.
 
My Galaxy S got worse after every update. Never bought another Samsung Android phone since.
 
My Galaxy S got worse after every update. Never bought another Samsung Android phone since.
My note 3 was turned into hot garbage after it’s final update and Samsung refused to give a fix. So I left them too.
 
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My note 3 was turned into hot garbage after it’s final update and Samsung refused to give a fix. So I left them too.
The official final (nordic) update left the Galaxy S in a state where lauching any GPU intensive app would cause huge battery drain (while doing nothing after exiting that app). It was pretty much unusable and lagged like crazy.

Funnily my experience with Honor/Huawei has been exactly the opposite... Especially with Honor 6. It shipped with KitKat and received Lollipop and Marshmallow. In the end it was noticeable smoother thanks to Android 5 and 6 improvements.
 
This is why it's frustrating when people tout the latest Galaxy S/Note phone as the greatest thing since sliced bread and predict doom and gloom for other brands. Sure, the specs and performance are impressive... but the software often lets it down. My girlfriend has an S7 with Oreo and you can tell it's weighed down by Samsung's cruft. She's looking at an iPhone as her next device, and I honestly wouldn't blame her for switching.
 
The new S9 has a slimmer version of it and works a lot better but I just use Nova Launcher. It's just far superior to anything out right now and has been for years.
 
The official final (nordic) update left the Galaxy S in a state where lauching any GPU intensive app would cause huge battery drain (while doing nothing after exiting that app). It was pretty much unusable and lagged like crazy.

Funnily my experience with Honor/Huawei has been exactly the opposite... Especially with Honor 6. It shipped with KitKat and received Lollipop and Marshmallow. In the end it was noticeable smoother thanks to Android 5 and 6 improvements.
Yup same thing with the note 3. The idle drain was so bad that after 8 hours of sitting it would go from 100% to dead.
 
I got my mom a new S9+ (she's on my account) and it doesn't seem too laggy to me yet, but its battery life is pretty mediocre compared to my Pixel 2 XL, esp. for standby time. It seems like it doesn't doze/sleep hardly at all, dropping like 3-5%/he with the screen off, compared to my 2 XL dropping like 1%/hr or so. This is with the always on displays disabled on both phones. I'm not sure how much of a difference the AoD makes on Samsung phones, but it at least halves my standby battery life on my 2XL, so I don't care for it much.

My son got her old GS7 and its battery seems to have lost at least 25% if it's capacity according to Accubattery (good app for battery stats and health) after 2 years. But it doesn't seem to lag too horribly either at least. It definitely stutters a bit while switching apps and stuff, but it's not distractingly bad to me. I just really hate these newer phones made of all glass and glue so that repairing anything on them (like the batteries that go to shit after 18+ months) is a complete pain in the ass.
 
I got my mom a new S9+ (she's on my account) and it doesn't seem too laggy to me yet, but its battery life is pretty mediocre compared to my Pixel 2 XL, esp. for standby time. It seems like it doesn't doze/sleep hardly at all, dropping like 3-5%/he with the screen off, compared to my 2 XL dropping like 1%/hr or so. This is with the always on displays disabled on both phones. I'm not sure how much of a difference the AoD makes on Samsung phones, but it at least halves my standby battery life on my 2XL, so I don't care for it much.

My son got her old GS7 and its battery seems to have lost at least 25% if it's capacity according to Accubattery (good app for battery stats and health) after 2 years. But it doesn't seem to lag too horribly either at least. It definitely stutters a bit while switching apps and stuff, but it's not distractingly bad to me. I just really hate these newer phones made of all glass and glue so that repairing anything on them (like the batteries that go to shit after 18+ months) is a complete pain in the ass.
The S9+ has 6 gb of ram. According to info I have seen over at xdaforums that is the magic number needed for Touchwiz to run smoothly.
 
my note 3 and note 4 dont noticeably lag very often and they are 4-5 year old phones with only 3 gig ram, but ive removed some bloat apps and dont install a ton of stupid worthless suspect apps, i only use a few that are from know legit sources. If you download suspect apps and a buncha dumb games then its probably gonna lag on you. Only issue i have is that every now and then the google chrome browser will lag for a second but i have over 100+ tabs open so im guessing thats why and i have no other lag issues anywhere else. Oh, also if you turn the animations off in settings it will speed them up also, by default they are set to lag a second or a second and a half to do the screen change animations, turn those to zero and they speed up. I do wish i had more ram though, i have a dji phantom 4 and every time they update the app it takes more power, im running a year old version cause the new one doesnt work very well with such low ram by todays standards, technology changes too fast, lol
 
Eh, I don't feel any lag on my Note 8. It's night and day coming from the Note 4.

Is it perfectly smooth? No, because that same Note 4 on LineageOS feels a bit more responsive, but then I give up nifty features like multi-windowing (instead of the half-assed split-screen and PIP that Google added decades later) and on-screen translation with the pen's hover cursor.

The main problem right now is that the S9(+) going forward may have Project Treble, but that doesn't mean a damn thing when Samsung still locks the bootloaders, making Treble GSI ROMs a non-option. Google really should've pushed for that years ago, making modern smartphones have a more standardized boot process and installation like what happened to the IBM-compatible PC market. Then we wouldn't be complaining about TouchWiz/Samsung Experience/whatever.

As for why other phones are a non-option? Wake me up when someone else finally slips a Wacom EMR pen and digitizer into their phone. Nobody else has. On top of that, a lot of them don't even have microSD card slots or headphone jacks. I hate compromises like that, but that's how the smartphone market is right now.
 
The S9+ has 6 gb of ram. According to info I have seen over at xdaforums that is the magic number needed for Touchwiz to run smoothly.
All I could say is that my S9 regular with 4GB of RAM, when it's coming from a fresh restart with all apps closed, gives me ~400MB of free memory. After a while, maybe the free memory will increase to ~700MB.

Quite frankly, I think some people never used smooth phone OS before in their lives. With nothing to compare it to, expectations are low.
 
All I could say is that my S9 regular with 4GB of RAM, when it's coming from a fresh restart with all apps closed, gives me ~400MB of free memory. After a while, maybe the free memory will increase to ~700MB.

Quite frankly, I think some people never used smooth phone OS before in their lives. With nothing to compare it to, expectations are low.
How they manage to do that? My Honor 8 has over 2GB free ram while having few apps (like this Chrome) open. 16 days uptime.
 
My S8+ is over a year old now and has not begun to lag in any significant way. My Note 2 before that lasted 5 years and was still a decent phone toward the end of that other than being stuck on an old version of Android. Sounds like a lot of user error going on. I generally don't load down my phones with tons of bullshit. I'm constantly using other people's phones as they ask me to help them do stuff like general maintenance, upgrading their SD card, etc. My S8+ is downright snappy compared to 99% of other phones I deal with.

Most of the people who love to say that Samsung phones are laggy are doing so in order to pat themselves on the back for not having one / justify not purchasing one; probably haven't owned one in years. People love to jump on the anti-Samsung bandwagon.
 
How they manage to do that? My Honor 8 has over 2GB free ram while having few apps (like this Chrome) open. 16 days uptime.
Samsung likes to recreate the same processes Google does, most likely to have the same/similar level of user data tracking. So you have Samsung Crapware and then Google Services on top of each other.
 
My S8+ is over a year old now and has not begun to lag in any significant way. My Note 2 before that lasted 5 years and was still a decent phone toward the end of that other than being stuck on an old version of Android. Sounds like a lot of user error going on. I generally don't load down my phones with tons of bullshit. I'm constantly using other people's phones as they ask me to help them do stuff like general maintenance, upgrading their SD card, etc. My S8+ is downright snappy compared to 99% of other phones I deal with.

Most of the people who love to say that Samsung phones are laggy are doing so in order to pat themselves on the back for not having one / justify not purchasing one; probably haven't owned one in years. People love to jump on the anti-Samsung bandwagon.
fixing other folks crap phones with SD cards make you think TouchWiz doesn't lag... When is the last time you tried an iPhone or a Pixel? (None of those phones have SD cards.) Once again, the only people who don't think TouchWiz lags are people with no experience using a smooth phone for an extended amount of time. Samsung flagships perform at best like other manufacturers mid-tier phones.
 
fixing other folks crap phones with SD cards make you think TouchWiz doesn't lag... When is the last time you tried an iPhone or a Pixel? (None of those phones have SD cards.) Once again, the only people who don't think TouchWiz lags are people with no experience using a smooth phone for an extended amount of time. Samsung flagships perform at best like other manufacturers mid-tier phones.

Upgrading SD cards was one example I gave, not the only example. I deal with all kinds of phones, yes, including recent iPhones and pixel phones. Though I think it's funny you believe a phone has to have all external storage options removed or it's a "crap phone".

Perhaps you could give an actual example of what you consider "lag"? There is nothing in the actual usage of my S8+ that is slow. There is no time when I touch an icon and it doesn't pop up instantly, etc. I have an open mind, so educate me. Or are you just talking about a 0.01 second difference?
 
Though I think it's funny you believe a phone has to have all external storage options removed or it's a “crap phone”.

The only person who said this is you.

Perhaps you could give an actual example of what you consider "lag"? There is nothing in the actual usage of my S8+ that is slow. There is no time when I touch an icon and it doesn't pop up instantly, etc. I have an open mind, so educate me. Or are you just talking about a 0.01 second difference?

Examples were already given.
 
Examples were already given.

I'm looking for actual examples, not vague rants, something I can potentially re-create on my S8+ to show me this "lag". If this "lag" is so apparent, it shouldn't be too difficult to come up with a simple, re-producible example, right? But it's okay, i'm not expecting any examples, because this "lag" is bullshit.

There are plenty of ways to make a phone laggy and slow, but when you have your phone loaded down with buggy 3rd party apps and malware, don't blame Samsung.
 
I'm looking for actual examples, not vague rants, something I can potentially re-create on my S8+ to show me this "lag". If this "lag" is so apparent, it shouldn't be too difficult to come up with a simple, re-producible example, right? But it's okay, i'm not expecting any examples, because this "lag" is bullshit.

There are plenty of ways to make a phone laggy and slow, but when you have your phone loaded down with buggy 3rd party apps and malware, don't blame Samsung.

Again examples were already given, don't expect people to keep repeating themselves because people with deaf ears don't want to listen.

As for 3rd party apps, these issues aren't arising with "3rd party" apps, they are happening with Samsung's app's and Samsung's choice of skin and how it interacts with Androids OS animations. As for app's downloaded through the App store, those shouldn't bog down any phone (especially once with 6gb of ram...) as Android has killed off most, if not all, of the worst background offenders. Not sure of the last time I heard of someone downloading malware through the app store either...
 
Again examples were already given, don't expect people to keep repeating themselves because people with deaf ears don't want to listen.

I read the thread again just to make sure I didn't miss anything, and no, no specific examples were given. I saw a complaint about bixby, but my solution is to not use bixby, and thus it doesn't cause me any problems. Funny how that works.

Not sure of the last time I heard of someone downloading malware through the app store either...

Did you say something about deaf ears?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/andro...pps-sneak-back-into-google-play-after-tweaks/
https://gizmodo.com/google-pulls-60-apps-from-play-store-after-malware-expo-1822030418
https://www.wired.com/story/google-play-store-malware/
https://www.techrepublic.com/articl...turbing-trend-of-multi-stage-android-attacks/
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...nfected-with-judy-malware-off-the-play-store/
 
I read the thread again just to make sure I didn't miss anything, and no, no specific examples were given. I saw a complaint about bixby, but my solution is to not use bixby, and thus it doesn't cause me any problems. Funny how that works.



Did you say something about deaf ears?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/andro...pps-sneak-back-into-google-play-after-tweaks/
https://gizmodo.com/google-pulls-60-apps-from-play-store-after-malware-expo-1822030418
https://www.wired.com/story/google-play-store-malware/
https://www.techrepublic.com/articl...turbing-trend-of-multi-stage-android-attacks/
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...nfected-with-judy-malware-off-the-play-store/
Ok
 
Here are a couple of articles with evidence of Samsung lag. The first for the Note 7 (before the devices started blowing up of course):
https://www.xda-developers.com/with...delivers-embarrassing-real-world-performance/

And this second one mentions that the Note 8 is the first Samsung device to not lag and guesses this is due to the extra ram:
https://www.xda-developers.com/note-8-real-world-analysis-performance/

I have seen some other people discussing Samsung lag in forums like these (lots and lots of random folks, actually). But the above articles appeared to be more scientific and evidence based. TBH though some of the techno speak is beyond my understanding in the xda articles.
 
Ignorance could be bliss. I wish I had never used iPhones for several years, and I wish I've never had used Nexuses or even HTC Sense UI for years. Then maybe I wouldn't think TouchWiz is laggy as fuck, and instead it's just a beautiful thing!
 
I've been using a Galaxy S6 for a few years now and I've had no noticeable problems with lag. It was my second Android phone but probably my third or fourth Samsung phone over the years. I have no practical experience with any iPhone because I don't use Apple products but I've also had my hands on non-Samsung Android products in the low to mid range. If anything those low to mid-range phones have been "laggier" than my S6.

As for the battery on my S6, I'd say I'm doing well. After a few years I can still go 2-3 days between charges assuming small amounts of screen on time. Having the screen on is by far the largest drain on the battery. The second largest drain is when I get a really bad signal which is quite easy to do since I live out in the middle of nowhere. When I have a bad signal it will drain 2% of the battery per hour. The fix for that is simply a phone restart which forces a connection to a better tower and puts the idle drain to well under 1% an hour and probably close to 0.5% an hour.
 
The second largest drain is when I get a really bad signal which is quite easy to do since I live out in the middle of nowhere. When I have a bad signal it will drain 2% of the battery per hour. The fix for that is simply a phone restart which forces a connection to a better tower and puts the idle drain to well under 1% an hour and probably close to 0.5% an hour.

I typically just disable mobile data or put the phone in airplane mode in low/no signal areas to keep excessive battery drain in check. It's crazy this is still an issue on Android (maybe on iOS and other platforms too, I dunno), as it seems like the phone should know when it has a bad connection and slow connection attempts or something to keep from killing the battery.
 
When I have a bad signal it will drain 2% of the battery per hour. The fix for that is simply a phone restart which forces a connection to a better tower ...

LTE Discovery will restart your cell radio and reset your data connection. No restart of phone is required and the process takes around 9 - 10 seconds. ;)

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I have a 930f that I recently bought, and other than it having a 2 year old battery I have no issues with it.
 
Don't know because Samsung phones are not Apple phones. You can change the launcher you know, effectively removing TouchWiz. I've been using Nova since forever. Don't even know what TouchWiz looks like anymore.
 
Don't know because Samsung phones are not Apple phones. You can change the launcher you know, effectively removing TouchWiz. I've been using Nova since forever. Don't even know what TouchWiz looks like anymore.
Running Nova does not eliminate Touchwiz or its lag.
 
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