The Android 5.0 Lollipop Review

23 Dec 2014 • anandtech.com

With Android Lollipop, I’m actually confident in saying that many areas where jank was still a problem are now actually running at a consistent 60fps. There is a caveat, which is that I don’t know exactly how many devices this is going to end up applying to. For whatever reason, the Nexus 6 has performance issues in areas the Nexus 5 has none. During the writing of this review, I looked over several 240fps videos of animations on the Nexus 5 and Nexus 6, both running Android Lollipop, and I analyzed the time between distinct frames shown on the display. It was clear to me that in any area the Nexus 5 still has issues, the Nexus 6 performs even worse. For that reason, I’m going to limit my impressions to Android Lollipop on the Nexus 5, as I don’t think it’s fair to judge Lollipop based on whatever poor implementations were made on the Nexus 6.

What’s very exciting is that there’s actually not much to say, as it can be summed up by saying that Lollipop is really the first time where basically everywhere on my Nexus 5 feels smooth, or “buttery” as it was supposed to be with Android Jellybean. It almost feels uncanny for an Android device. Using Android’s onscreen GPU profiling confirms that there are few, if any stutters.

So finally buttery smooth scrolling has truly come to Android… Unless you’re using the latest, flagship model - then you’re still stuck with “jank” for some reason. Sheesh. My first gen iPhone might not have been able to surf the web and play a song at the same time reliably but all these years later I’ve never seen”jank”.