Has Android abandoned true multitasking?

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wrxdrunkie

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 23, 2007
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I know Android has not had full-blown multitasking like the PlayBook or a PC but I've had an interesting experience with my HTC One X.

I just picked up the HTC One X last week and the thing is awesome, blazing fast and has great battery life. One thing I noticed though is the multitasking isn't that great. I haven't had an Android phone since my Evo 4g and have been on WP for the past year.

Anyways the multitasking reloads the apps you were using constantly. Web-browser pages reload all the time. Apps can download in the background and continue network activity in the background and Nav apps can continue, but is that all WP is missing? My apps constantly being kicked out of memory annoys me more than anything, at least on WP you know that your 6 most recent apps are in memory and won't be kicked out without you opening another app.

Take a look at this video comparing my new HTC One X multitasking vs. my Omnia 7 running WP Mango.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12_iTfMEyVY

and then this video is of a Galaxy Nexus, the reviewer mentions the multitasking feature I am noticing and discusses it around the 6:15 mark.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiRuycMN5Wg

Thoughts?
 
My one X is the worst multitasking android device I have owned. Hopefully it can be fixed in an update.
 
MrCrispy said:
Obviously ICS has memory management issues.
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I've been suspecting this for awhile now, especially after a 4.0.4 update- "weird" behavior, slowdowns and the CPU kicking into high gear for no apparent reason- all of which is transiently corrected after a reboot, so clearly something is awry.
 
Android hasn't been a good multitasking os since my first Android phone, the Nexus One, which came with 2.2. After I switched to the Atrix, the first dual-core phone on AT&T,, with 1GB RAM as well, I thought, well, finally some true multitasking.

But that was not the case -- switching between apps, say Opera browser, email, messaging app was annoying because Opera would often restart when I switched to it (presumably because it has higher RAM usage than the others). Launching OS Monitor shows 300 - 400 MB of RAM free, not in use or caching phantom apps. Why have so much free RAM, but I can't switch between my last 2-3-4 apps and have them stay in memory?

I'm disappointed to read that ICS has the same/similar problems with multitasking. I was hoping they would have worked it out by this version.
 
I kinda expected more from Matias Duarte, though it may still get better with time. I really wished WebOS would've gotten more support as I still thinking their "cards" multitasking was the best.
 
It took them 4 major versions before finally implementing HA in Android, iOS and WP7 had it from day one. There is simply no excuse for this on devices that are twice as powerful as the other os's. Google simply doesn't care, they are more interested in apps and services they can get ad revenue from. The OS is just a delivery vehicle that makes them no money.
 
wrxdrunkie said:
I know Android has not had full-blown multitasking like the PlayBook or a PC but I've had an interesting experience with my HTC One X.
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Yes, it does. It has "full-blown" multitasking for every definition of multitasking - it's exactly the same level of multitasking as Linux on the PC. Well, except that Linux on the PC can swap to disk, whereas Android kills processes instead.

Take a look at this video comparing my new HTC One X multitasking vs. my Omnia 7 running WP Mango.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12_iTfMEyVY
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Honestly it looks like HTC broke something big time. Perhaps in their infinite stupidity they ran across the developer option that lets you set background process limits and decided to change the defaults for those. Do you have a "developer options" in the main system settings by any chance?

The Galaxy Nexus does not behave at all like what you show, by the way. I can switch between apps without them reloading just fine (well, depending on the app. Chrome, for example, is quite the memory hog so it tends to get evicted fairly quickly)

MrCrispy said:
It took them 4 major versions before finally implementing HA in Android, iOS and WP7 had it from day one. There is simply no excuse for this on devices that are twice as powerful as the other os's. Google simply doesn't care, they are more interested in apps and services they can get ad revenue from. The OS is just a delivery vehicle that makes them no money.
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WP7 had it from day one just like Honeycomb had it from day one. :rolleyes:

Alternatively, MS implemented some level of HWA in Oct 2010, and Google added some other level of HWA in Feb 2011 that improved on the level they had in Sept 2008, and Apple has had some other level since June 2007.

The reason I say "levels" is because everyone just sort of calls anything even partially using the GPU as "HWA", with no care given to how much it is accelerated. For example, from what I've read of iOS's drawing is that the rendering is actually done on the CPU, but apps can use view-level GPU compositing and off-thread animations (CoreAnimation). In Honeycomb, Google did that and then took a big step past that - Android actually does rendering on the GPU as well. We'll see how long it will take Apple to do the same thing. I have absolutely no clue what WP7 does, though. It could just be view compositing like iOS, or it could be rendering as well. Of course, to make matters more complicated just because it uses the GPU that doesn't mean it is actually *faster* (there are plenty of rendering cases where the GPU will be slower than the CPU, or the GPU actually just can't do it at all - such as path clipping). What would actually be interesting would be to benchmark drawing performance in Android, iOS, and WP7 - see who has the fastest rendering framework.

Of course, everyone also says that Android isn't HWA prior to Honeycomb, which is false. It has had GPU composting since 1.0 (the difference between that and iOS is that Andorid's only worked on the Window level, whereas iOS's is whatever the developer wants)

And Android's is the only one that supports more than one GPU vendor ;)
 
A few questions though:

How do you think ms keep pages from reloading? I go back to a page weeks later. I could have 4 open tabs on the verge, and they never reload.

Also, did you watch the galaxy nexus video I posted? The reviewer experiences what I am around the 6:15 mark.

and how come the app drawer still lags when you open it. It's only on the first try. Open it first time, laggy, open it again right after its ios fluid.

It's hard to gauge what's supposed to be normal in Android because some people say the video I posted is how android works others say its not normal. Just like people used to claim their g1 was fast.

The reason I didn't call it true multitasking like the playbook is becase videos don't continue to play in the background and that webpages reload on you so much you can't even load them in the background.

On a galaxy nexus can you run chrome looking at the verge and hardforum, Pulse, Twitter, messaging, and ESPN without the apps reloading? I'm trying to figure out when the best android phone software wise starts having to reload apps.
 
@ Wrxdrunkie, i use Dolphin, but never have the pages reload, unless I refresh them (to my knowledge), it keeps all my tabs open unless I force close the program or reboot the phone...
 
I have a Gnex running stock 4.0.4 and I do not have any multitasking issues. It works wonderfully. 623 hours of uptime. Chrome Beta for browser.
 
It looks like memory management settings are severely borked to me. HTC must have done something completely wrong. This should be adjustable though so someone will fix it soon enough.
 
wrxdrunkie said:
How do you think ms keep pages from reloading? I go back to a page weeks later. I could have 4 open tabs on the verge, and they never reload.
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Saves the pages to disk. You can do this in the stock Android browser on demand if you want, menu->save for offline reading. Chrome does something similar automatically, they just aren't quite as clever and polished about it so you visually see it happening instead of leaving the placeholder open for longer.

Or there's also the possibility that MS simply side steps the problem by not letting IE get killed in the first place (or rather, having it be one of the last things it will kill). Since 3rd party apps can't really multitask, they can do tricks like reserve more memory for system and 1st party apps.

Also, did you watch the galaxy nexus video I posted? The reviewer experiences what I am around the 6:15 mark.
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Yup, switching between memory hungry apps will kick other memory hungry apps out of memory quicker. Most apps aren't as heavy weight as browser and maps, though.

Oh, and for what it's worth even though it says "1GB RAM" on the spec sheet, that's not entirely accurate. For example, the Galaxy Nexus actually only has ~700MB of RAM available to the kernel. And that 700MB remaining is then actually shared between the GPU and the CPU. So it doesn't go quite as far as you might initially think.

and how come the app drawer still lags when you open it. It's only on the first try. Open it first time, laggy, open it again right after its ios fluid.
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Because it does.

The reason I didn't call it true multitasking like the playbook is becase videos don't continue to play in the background and that webpages reload on you so much you can't even load them in the background.
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Videos don't play because the stock video player chooses to pause them. Nothing is stopping you from writing your own video player app that plays videos in the background. I haven't used a playbook much, but I find it rather odd (and stupid) that it will continue to play videos in the background by default.

I don't know much about the Playbook having never worked on it, all I can tell you is that Android is absolutely, 100% real, true multitasking at a technical level.

On a galaxy nexus can you run chrome looking at the verge and hardforum, Pulse, Twitter, messaging, and ESPN without the apps reloading? I'm trying to figure out when the best android phone software wise starts having to reload apps.
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Depends entirely on which apps you mean. So first, Chrome is extremely memory hungry - much moreso than the stock browser. If you care about task switching, stop using Chrome until they fix that. All that multiprocess sandboxing stuff is great for security, but terrible for memory usage.

For what it's worth I can switch between calendar, mail, launcher, and browser without any of them reloading just fine on a Galaxy Nexus.
 
The problem isn't Android or the OneX itself. It's the other stuff HTC (and other MFRs) layer on top of stock Android that causes multitasking and memory mgmt problem.
 
using galaxy s2 with v 4.0.3 android. I have yet to see the low memory message. most times i run 3-4 programs, and they switch to one another just fine. may be the problem you are facing is a handset specific issue.
 
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Is it strictly an HTC issue? I don't have much hands on time with ICS devices yet but on my EVO 3D with a Gingerbread Sense ROM I can leave half a dozen tabs open on the browser (modded so it opens more than 4) and switch between light apps without having the browser closed or tabs reloaded... I can swap between calendar, Tasks, mail, the browser and a PDF all day long without issue.

HOWEVER when the browser does get kicked out of memory it just closes the tabs with absolutely no reload or recovery of any sort, Froyo was the same thing, taking stock browser here obviously. Games and heavy Gmail use tend to kick the browser out of memory.

OTOH on my ASUS tablet which mostly runs stock Honeycomb (their ICS update is still very unstable) I get CONSTANT tab reloading on the browser whenever I've got more than 10 tabs open, every single tab tends to reload at even a hint of multi tasking if I'm maxed out at 16... Heck they even reload when I'm just switching from tab to tab within the browser. However the tabs are always there unless the browser outright crashes, UNLIKE my phone.

Are there other hardware/HC limitations at play there or what? I think on the tablet's ICS update there's even a tab recovery setting for browser crashes, which would be handy to have as my tablet's browser cashes way more than my phone's. ASUS made a mess of ICS for the TF.

I can't speak too much about other apps reloading, I mostly notice it or get bugged by it on the browser due to the nature of tabs. FWIW, my phone usually has around 100-150MB free, with the browser eating between 100-200MB, and other apps (minimally)/the OS/Sense taking up the remaining half gig of the reported 800MB by HTC's memory tool. Haven't really taken a good look on the tablet.
 
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Impulse said:
Is it strictly an HTC issue? I don't have much hands on time with ICS devices yet but on my EVO 3D with a Gingerbread Sense ROM I can leave half a dozen tabs open on the browser (modded so it opens more than 4) and switch between light apps without having the browser closed or tabs reloaded... I can swap between calendar, Tasks, mail, the browser and a PDF all day long without issue.

HOWEVER when the browser does get kicked out of memory it just closes the tabs with absolutely no reload or recovery of any sort, Froyo was the same thing, taking stock browser here obviously. Games and heavy Gmail use tend to kick the browser out of memory.

OTOH on my ASUS tablet which mostly runs stock Honeycomb (their ICS update is still very unstable) I get CONSTANT tab reloading on the browser whenever I've got more than 10 tabs open, every single tab tends to reload at even a hint of multi tasking if I'm maxed out at 16... Heck they even reload when I'm just switching from tab to tab within the browser. However the tabs are always there unless the browser outright crashes, UNLIKE my phone.

Are there other hardware/HC limitations at play there or what? I think on the tablet's ICS update there's even a tab recovery setting for browser crashes, which would be handy to have as my tablet's browser cashes way more than my phone's. ASUS made a mess of ICS for the TF.

I can't speak too much about other apps reloading, I mostly notice it or get bugged by it on the browser due to the nature of tabs. FWIW, my phone usually has around 100-150MB free, with the browser eating between 100-200MB, and other apps (minimally)/the OS/Sense taking up the remaining half gig of the reported 800MB by HTC's memory tool. Haven't really taken a good look on the tablet.
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Personally I think it's Sense and not HTC themselves. Sense is a pig. Even the "slimmed down" 4.0 is still a pig so HTC needs to make changes to make sure Sense runs correctly. I'm back to a Sense ROM on my Thunderbolt (although I may install Thundershed in an hour or so) and it's nowhere nearly as multi-tasking friendly as a CM7 based ROM is.
 
Woofer00 said:
The problem isn't Android or the OneX itself. It's the other stuff HTC (and other MFRs) layer on top of stock Android that causes multitasking and memory mgmt problem.
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I agree with this. My Gnex seems to run a lot smoother than my buddy's GS2 with AT&T. I wish manufacturers would just stick to vanilla version of Android.
 
Stock/AOSP/AOKP/any vanilla-ish ROM without UI enhancements runs 100% better than Blur/Sense/whathaveyou. The manufacturers fiddle with the memory mgmt to make sure their UI feels smooth (even though it's overly bloated) at the expense of any other apps.
 
samsung-galaxy-s-iii-ram.png


2012-05-16_07-32-19.png


This says it all. Out of 980MB Ram available for the OS and Apps, with Sense 4.0 <300MB is available. If you replace the launcher with Nova, ~500MB is now free. A lot of it is of course Android itself.
 
MrCrispy said:
This says it all. Out of 980MB Ram available for the OS and Apps, with Sense 4.0 <300MB is available. If you replace the launcher with Nova, ~500MB is now free. A lot of it is of course Android itself.
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That doesn't tell you what you think it does. Free RAM is wasted RAM, something HTC quite clearly doesn't understand when they started dicking with the memory parameters.

Oh well, just another lesson in "buy a Nexus device and/or run a custom ROM"

Impulse said:
Is it strictly an HTC issue? I don't have much hands on time with ICS devices yet but on my EVO 3D with a Gingerbread Sense ROM I can leave half a dozen tabs open on the browser (modded so it opens more than 4) and switch between light apps without having the browser closed or tabs reloaded... I can swap between calendar, Tasks, mail, the browser and a PDF all day long without issue.

HOWEVER when the browser does get kicked out of memory it just closes the tabs with absolutely no reload or recovery of any sort, Froyo was the same thing, taking stock browser here obviously. Games and heavy Gmail use tend to kick the browser out of memory.
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That sounds like an HTC bug. I've used Froyo and Gingerbread heavily, the browser never closed tabs when it was kicked out of memory. I mean, when it was relaunched the tabs would have to load again, of course, but it didn't forget what tabs were open.

I think on the tablet's ICS update there's even a tab recovery setting for browser crashes, which would be handy to have as my tablet's browser cashes way more than my phone's.
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That is in stock ICS browser, it will recover tabs on a crash now.

Oh, and Honeycomb does have pretty high memory usage. Hardware acceleration increased RAM usage across the board by a lot, especially for the browser - situation is definitely better in ICS, though.
 
Huh, so the stock Froyo/GB browsers always recovered tabs when loaded back into memory? Guess I've been suffering over that with HTC phones for no reason whatsoever... Sigh, I've never really had a problem with Sense as far as performance goes, even after being briefly exposed to AOSP ROMs, but this kinda functionality disparity (that NO ONE talks about) is a much bigger deal imo.

I wish reviewers would stop talking about how fluid home screens look and how subjectively faster phone X feels (seriously, unless it's a dud it's probably fast enough, leave low level architecture analysis to a site like AT) and they'd instead focus on stuff like this.

At least HTC's ICS browser seems to behave much closer to the stock one (tho they still capped tabs at 6, wtf). My tablet's browser/multi-tasking experience is still crummier tho so I dunno what to make of the whole situation, my tablet on HC basically behaves like the worst case scenario that people are complaining of on the One X.

I was looking forward to experiencing it all first hand this week but then the HTC customs fiasco happened, ugh... At least initial reports of SVDO lightened up my day, hope it pans out.
 
I just read HTC's statement concerning the multitasking issues, which of course they see as a non-issue. To them I say: This is 2012! And with Android, nobody is forcing you to only put 1 GB or RAM into a phone. If HTC Sense doesn't work well with only 1 GB, then by all means go ahead and put in another one. It would be a marketing opportunity as well.

At least Samsung is apparently going to do it very soon on some S3 variant. But I forgot how HTC is always so tight with memory. I always liked HTC Sense, but this is ridiculous. They come out with so many different phones and a new HTC Sense version every few weeks. That can't be good. Why can't they stick with what they have for once? Why can't they improve that instead of reinventing the wheel all the time? It's sad to see HTC what it has evolved into since 2010.
 
Impulse said:
my tablet on HC basically behaves like the worst case scenario that people are complaining of on the One X.
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You really need to upgrade to ICS already. It is *sooooo* much better than Honeycomb.
 
kllrnohj said:
You really need to upgrade to ICS already. It is *sooooo* much better than Honeycomb.
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I wish I could, but ASUS has completely screwed up the ICS update for their original Transformer... They were the first ones out the door with an ICS update for tablets I think, and they've been very timely with updates in general, but by all accounts on XDA the ICS update is terribly unstable.

It seems something in NV's kernel code might be the root of it, maybe they're working off old code, but they've released three ICS OTAs now and they all result in random reboots (which oddly happen only when idle/asleep) and screens of death (what they're calling when the tablet won't wake up).

Pretty frustrating, particularly because Acer and others have now released stable updates for nearly identical Tetra 2 tablets. Custom user dev'd kernels and other stuff seem to help a little but nothing fixes the random reboots entirely (short of inducing a wakelock and tanking battery life).

Its a damn shame cause they're making some of the best priced tablets too, I hope this isn't something that continues to plague ASUS.
 
Impulse said:
I wish I could, but ASUS has completely screwed up the ICS update for their original Transformer... They were the first ones out the door with an ICS update for tablets I think, and they've been very timely with updates in general, but by all accounts on XDA the ICS update is terribly unstable.

It seems something in NV's kernel code might be the root of it, maybe they're working off old code, but they've released three ICS OTAs now and they all result in random reboots (which oddly happen only when idle/asleep) and screens of death (what they're calling when the tablet won't wake up).

Pretty frustrating, particularly because Acer and others have now released stable updates for nearly identical Tetra 2 tablets. Custom user dev'd kernels and other stuff seem to help a little but nothing fixes the random reboots entirely (short of inducing a wakelock and tanking battery life).

Its a damn shame cause they're making some of the best priced tablets too, I hope this isn't something that continues to plague ASUS.
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Have you tried running it yourself? Do you personally hit those issues? It might be a fairly small affected population. It might also only affect the types of stuff XDA users do - like rooting.
 
People seemed affected by it whether rooted or not, there were accounts of people with two or three TFs in the house all suffering from it (all manufactured at different dates). Seemed pretty wide spread tbh, and once you update to ICS theres no way to go back to HC (even rooted apparently), so nah, I'd rather not deal with the hassle until they figure it out.

They've got an official ASUS rep on the boards trying to help and running info to the engineering team but he's a CS guy, not muchhe can really do at the end of the day. I'm just annoyed they've gone thru two additional ICS updates and the issues are still lingering.
 
Impulse said:
People seemed affected by it whether rooted or not, there were accounts of people with two or three TFs in the house all suffering from it (all manufactured at different dates). Seemed pretty wide spread tbh, and once you update to ICS theres no way to go back to HC (even rooted apparently), so nah, I'd rather not deal with the hassle until they figure it out.

They've got an official ASUS rep on the boards trying to help and running info to the engineering team but he's a CS guy, not muchhe can really do at the end of the day. I'm just annoyed they've gone thru two additional ICS updates and the issues are still lingering.
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TF Prime devs figured out a way to revert to HC from early revisions of ICS, but I don't know whether that's possible anymore. The TFP ICS launch was very wonky at first, but it's been stable if you ignore the GPS uproar.
 
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