Jeff Atwood’s complaint about JavaScript performance on Android got lots of attention:
It seems the Android manufacturers are more interested in slapping n slow CPU cores on a die than they are in producing very fast CPU cores. And this is quite punishing when it comes to JavaScript. This is becoming more and more of a systemic problem in the Android ecosystem, one that will not go away in the next few years, and it may affect the future of Discourse, since we bet heavily on near-desktop JavaScript performance on mobile devices. That is clearly happening on iOS but it is quite disastrously the opposite on Android. I am no longer optimistic this will change in the next two years, and there are untold millions of slow Android devices out there, so we need to start considering alternatives for the Discourse project.
I’m not sure why there is surprise over lower performance on many Android devices. The approach being taken by Apple vs. Android vendors has been clear for sometime. In general Apple pushes on the top end of the device market, with Android devices scattering across the board. Given that dynamic I’d expect the majority of Android devices to turn in lower performance numbers.
Then there is this line: “we bet heavily on near-desktop JavaScript performance on mobile devices”. That is a significant amount of control to turn over to several third parties ( Apple and Android vendors ). If you aren’t happy with the performance dynamics you get today, be very careful about assuming others ( with whom you have no direct relationship with ) will fix it for you tomorrow.