As I said in the other thread, there are two patterns, one is a Delegate pattern (IOS) where draw method lookup per pixel coordinate is trivial, and the other is a listener pattern, where view layout, composition and superposition is trivial. One is easy 98% of the time and super hard 2% of the time (iOS) and the other is relatively slow all the time but with much more potential for cross-process interactions.
In Android, you can have a translucent popups from App#1 appear on top of any sort of screen of App#2. You can't have this on iOS. At all.
On the other hand, animations and scrolling are blazing fast on iOS without any need for superior hardware.
I honestly believe that this alone explains the "lacking" in performance that Android suffers from: it targets super high-end multi-core devices, with JIT compilers and optimizers that don't exist yet, in order to allow functionalities that are unclear to everyone of us.
Shameless plug: I made an app (1) that illustrates what iOS will never be able to do. The question is, will anyone ever need that sort of app on their phone?
What keeps you from having a translucent popup from App #1 appear on top of any sort of screen from App #2 is not iOS's rendering architecture: it is that you are not allowed to, as one application, do any sort of computation while another one is happening.
To be clear, we do this all of the time on jailbroken devices (where we have access to write apps with true multitasking, and can also just add code as required to SpringBoard itself, which is acting as the window manager): you just create a transparent UIView and put it in a new UIWindow; there are seriously no issues doing this.
In the end, every UIView is backed by a CoreSurfaceBuffer (I think "Core" got renamed to "IO" at some point, if you look this stuff up), which are managed by a kernel driver that allows processes to pass these buffers (which may be backed by video, not system, memory) to each other, and in the end they mostly composited (with alpha blending) in hardware.
In Android, you can have a translucent popups from App#1 appear on top of any sort of screen of App#2. You can't have this on iOS. At all.
On the other hand, animations and scrolling are blazing fast on iOS without any need for superior hardware.
I honestly believe that this alone explains the "lacking" in performance that Android suffers from: it targets super high-end multi-core devices, with JIT compilers and optimizers that don't exist yet, in order to allow functionalities that are unclear to everyone of us.
Shameless plug: I made an app (1) that illustrates what iOS will never be able to do. The question is, will anyone ever need that sort of app on their phone?
(1) https://market.android.com/details?id=com.fairyteller.linkpr...