Because the problem isn't technical, it's political.
I presume the author used the Bharat 2 Q402. I dug out some specs:
- Android 6.0
- 4" 24-bit 480x800 TFT LCD (capacitative of course)
- Quad-core 1.3GHz Spreadtrum SC9832 (Cortex-A7)
- Dual-core Mali-400 MP2 (512MHz)
- 512MB RAM
- 4GB of storage
- 2MP rear camera (1600x1200 photo, 640x480 (!) 30fps video)
- 300k (haha) front camera
That's kind of all over the shop, but 4 cores at 1.3GHz, ARM notwithstanding, is fundamentally decent from a bare-metal standpoint.
512MB RAM is also not entirely terrible - I could limp (albeit badly) with ~70 tabs in Firefox (back in the memory leak days) on a machine with 512MB RAM many years ago.
So really this is entirely the Android ecosystem's fault. When I say "ecosystem" I'm obviously looking sideways at app developers, but the OS core could probably be designed a little better too.
But neither are. I strongly think this is due to precedent: nobody is penalized for making apps that perform well on non-flagship devices. Indeed, app development on Android seems to strongly mirror (to the point of there really being no dividing line) iOS development - and in the Apple camp lots of websites are only tested on Macbooks nowadays, so it seems that designers/architects are increasingly getting away with not doing the grunt work to test.
Maybe this is because of simple bubble-sheltered designer snobbishness ("that kind of work is below me"). Maybe there's a bit of "and a lid for your coffee cup will be $3" (where the coffee cup lid, representing adequate testing, was previously included for free) in the mix as well.
If only phones were a bit more standardized (think x86 ISA), we could bring the demoscene over to them. Rip Linux out, show what the hardware can _really_ do, generate some popular demand, and actually set a standard for OS vendors to meet.
Because right now the only standard is "next year's phones will have more X, so build in a way that will need so much of that the current device is really straining".
I presume the author used the Bharat 2 Q402. I dug out some specs:
- Android 6.0
- 4" 24-bit 480x800 TFT LCD (capacitative of course)
- Quad-core 1.3GHz Spreadtrum SC9832 (Cortex-A7)
- Dual-core Mali-400 MP2 (512MHz)
- 512MB RAM
- 4GB of storage
- 2MP rear camera (1600x1200 photo, 640x480 (!) 30fps video)
- 300k (haha) front camera
That's kind of all over the shop, but 4 cores at 1.3GHz, ARM notwithstanding, is fundamentally decent from a bare-metal standpoint.
512MB RAM is also not entirely terrible - I could limp (albeit badly) with ~70 tabs in Firefox (back in the memory leak days) on a machine with 512MB RAM many years ago.
So really this is entirely the Android ecosystem's fault. When I say "ecosystem" I'm obviously looking sideways at app developers, but the OS core could probably be designed a little better too.
But neither are. I strongly think this is due to precedent: nobody is penalized for making apps that perform well on non-flagship devices. Indeed, app development on Android seems to strongly mirror (to the point of there really being no dividing line) iOS development - and in the Apple camp lots of websites are only tested on Macbooks nowadays, so it seems that designers/architects are increasingly getting away with not doing the grunt work to test.
Maybe this is because of simple bubble-sheltered designer snobbishness ("that kind of work is below me"). Maybe there's a bit of "and a lid for your coffee cup will be $3" (where the coffee cup lid, representing adequate testing, was previously included for free) in the mix as well.
If only phones were a bit more standardized (think x86 ISA), we could bring the demoscene over to them. Rip Linux out, show what the hardware can _really_ do, generate some popular demand, and actually set a standard for OS vendors to meet.
Because right now the only standard is "next year's phones will have more X, so build in a way that will need so much of that the current device is really straining".