Android 50% Faster than iPhone on the Web?

Today I came across a blog post that tested load times between iPhone and several Android devices.  As written: (see original post on Wired)

"Android phones whisk users across the web more than 50 percent faster than the iPhone, according to a study that compared the two top mobile OSes performance when downloading web pages.


The study, conducted by mobile website optimization company Blaze.io, involved more than 40,000 downloads of web pages belonging to the Fortune 1000 companies. Android loaded pages 52 percent faster when rendering full web pages than the iPhone. On average, Android phones took 2.1 seconds to render non-mobile optimized web pages, while the iPhone took 3.2 seconds.


Android bested the iPhone on site loading time a whopping 84% of the time."

Having run Gingerbread (a.k.a. Android 2.3) for two weeks now on a Nexus One, my general observation is that it is indeed faster that both FroYo (Android 2.2) and iPhone iOS for loading pages but I am pragmatic.  I would urge everyone to be pragmatic about these results.  They only show a single test (loading a web page) and the environment did not appear to be properly controlled.   The headline is hence somewhat misleading and sensationalistic.   What would be better is to do these sorts of tests in a closed environment and break the results down into HTTP request creation, transfer time, request bandwidth, server processing time, response transfer time, response bandwidth and client side parsing and display (assuming HTTP get).  Isolating the actual HTML/JavaScript parsing, processing and presentation is the real critical factor in making such claims in my opinion.  This test should not be done by loading a Fortune 1000 company's website on the open web as this represents a large an uncontrolled factor for the tests.  A counter argument would be that 40,000 loads does establish a fairly reasonable chance that the test results are somewhat accurate but no one can guarantee that the server itself was not busier when the iPhone requested the pages.  Let's look at what is behind each side of this competition.

iPhone's Safari also uses the WebKit open source browser engine, the same code base as Google Chrome and the Android browser (according to Wikipedia).  To me this seems somewhat relevant information.   WebKit's JavaScript engine, JavaScriptCore, based on KJS, is a framework separate from WebCore and WebKit, and is used on Mac OS X for applications other than web page JavaScript.  Unlike iOS, Android is open so anyone can add a browser to the marketplace.  I can write a basic web browser that supports CSS, AJAX, JS, and some HTML5 features in about ten lines of code using Adobe AIR, which in turn uses the Webkit implementation so if I choose, I can have the same browser as the iOS more or less.  Nevertheless, Android offers many different browser choices.  Some of these are:

Dolphin (hardware acceleration for Honeycomb (Android 3.0+))
Opera Mini (claims to be fastest)
Skyfire (supports Flash, 2,000,000 downloads)

and many more.  Here is an article on an Android browser shootout.

My second phone, the Samsung Galaxy S, runs Android 2.2 and is very stable.  The ability to view Flash is an important factor for me for both of these devices, which is why I gave my iPhone to my sister.  The one item I do miss is the iTunes Synchronization however I am debating getting out of the iTunes/Appstore altogether and find a replacement.  Any recommendations for  OS X music management software would be appreciated (please leave a comment).

The long and short of this is that while my perception is that Android is indeed faster at loading web pages, the key thing that wins my approval is multiple choices.  YAMMV! *

* Your actual mileage may vary  

Flash - iPhone announcement.

So today at Adobe MAX a huge announcement came out. We now have special tooling that allows you to use the Flash Platform to build applications for the iPhone. Flash developers will be empowered to use their existing skills to construct applications for iPhone that can be distributed through Apple’s App Store. No promises but the betas of this (CS5) should be available by the end of this year.

This caps a long running stealth like program code named "notus" within Adobe. While we just announced this today, there are several apps available today via the App Store. There are details published at adobe.com/go/iphone.

Does this mean iPhone supports Flash? No. Apple has not yet announced support for Flash on the iPhone. So what does this really mean? It means there are hundreds of thousands developers who can use their existing skills to build iPhone apps via CS5. From a consumer/user perspective, these applications appear and work just like any other iPhone application. Users cannot easily determine which applications were built with CS5, native objective C code, or even using something advanced like Nitobi's PhoneGap.

Will we use this exclusively? No. Many developers use whatever makes them productive. Another major announcement today was the addition of an iPhone mobile client for Adobe LiveCycle ES. This was built using objective C. Developers who have ActionScript skills though will be able to build applications using a language and IDE they are familiar with and not be forced to learn another application programming language. This is huge IMO and will help both the Apple and Adobe developer ecosystems.

Adobe has not yet made any breakthrough WRT to getting Apple to put the Flash player natively on the iPhone. I don't work with the people who are having the talks but I get the feeling (mine - not necessarily the truth) that Apple and Adobe haven't made much progress on this front. I do know there are tons of people who want this so I am not sure what is going to happen. I have heard that much of the issue is licensing. By the same token, PhoneGap also ran into issues with licensing. I hope Apple listens to their developers.

I am going to build an application later this month to try it out. In the meantime, if you go out and build one, please leave a shout here to tell others.

Flash on the iPhone?

As reported by the Alley Insider, Flash is coming to the iPhone. An article posted today reads:

"More than half a year after its launch, Apple's iPhone is set to get an app it should have had from the beginning: Adobe's Flash plug-in." You can read the whole article here:

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/2/adobe_flash_coming_soon_to_apple_iphones

Gearbox also reports the same but I am skeptical having not seen either Apple nor Adobe issue any statement. The rumor buzzmill is running at half capacity. Once again, we have to wait and see if there is any truth behind it.