Scroling application on Volla Phone is very sluggy

saveurlinux · 19 Oct 2021, 08:24

@stanwood Thanks for answering, any way I find it really uncomfortable as daily devices. Is it hardware limitation or software one ? If it's the second we can expect improvement in the feature.

Keneda · 19 Oct 2021, 09:16

@saveurlinux
I doubt it's hardware power as i don't have this on my 6 years old phone.

TotalSonic · 19 Oct 2021, 15:59

Hmmm.... it might be specific to your device. My Volla sometimes stutters once or twice when doing a full scrolling on the App Drawer, which I believe is due to the limitation of the Mediatek P23 soc, but it is not otherwise in any way what I would describe as "sluggish" with UT - it's not the fastest, but I never have had problems with scrolling in Morph with it, and most certainly nothing that prevented me from using it as a daily driver (which I used it as for close to a year). I have moved on to using a OnePlus 6t which has a definitely snappier Snapdragon 845 soc, but it has a couple of issues which the Volla doesn't have as well.

Best regards,
Steve Berson

saveurlinux · 19 Oct 2021, 21:22

@totalsonic said in Scroling application on Volla Phone is very sluggy:

App Drawer

Yes manly affect the app drawer, otherwise it's a pretty good phone ! It has a very good GPS fix for example.
The things that surprised me is that using waydroid, the app drawer look smoother.

domubpkm · 19 Oct 2021, 23:00

@saveurlinux you can try to change the grid unit : with a grid unit of 22, for me the scrolling of the app drawer is relatively smooth on the Volla.

saveurlinux · 21 Oct 2021, 14:28

@domubpkm Thank, i will try. How do you change that option ? throw UbuntuTweak ?

domubpkm · 21 Oct 2021, 14:32

@saveurlinux Yes : yes with UTTT : behaviour / scaling

s710 · 5 Jan 2022, 07:53

My overall impression on the Volla Phone is also that is somehow laggy in general.

E.g. typing the password for unlocking the device already lags a bit for me. It might not be noticeable for some people, but compared to e.g. my iPhone, the keys definitely lag behind the touch. Its not unbearable, but it adds to the non-fluent overall feeling for me.
Same is true for the long swipe from the left, which shows the opened apps. It will open in a slow/laggy way
Scrolling in the browser also a bit of stuttering. You can best see it if you "push" the scrolling a bit then let go with your finger (so it continues a bit to scroll). The animation will not be fluent.
Opening the settings app takes 4-5s
Opening teleports takes around 3s
Opening the gallery app takes more than 30s (although I must confess that I have copied several hundres of photos over from my iPhone)
Opening Dekko 2 takes around 3-5s
Opening the calendar app takes around 3-4s
Opening the notes app (with no notes saved) takes around 3s

In general, the app drawer seems to react only after a short delay; e.g. when your finger touches an app icon, there is no immediate reaction for about 0,5-1s, which already results in a rather non-fluent/laggy user experience.

I have only 2 other devices to compare: my iPhone 11 pro, and a Sony XPeria 10ii which runs SFOS.

On the iPhone, all apps will open almost instantly, and I am unable to measure any delay for most apps. If, at all, the general pattern on iOS seems to be that the UI of the app is presented instantly/as fast as possible, so that the UX feels quick and responsible, but then the app may start loading content (e.g. Telegram shows the locally cached apps, but then connects to the network and loads updates).

On SFOS, some apps open really quickly, others also have a short delay, but overall it seems to open quicker than on UT/Volla Phone. The browser on SFOS is unusable, both on the performance side and on the tech side (outdated, does not support many websites), so I cant compare. Other stock apps however seem to run decently.
The overall handling seems to be rather fluent/okay-ish though. Swiping to close apps is fast, switching apps and opening the notification screen is good.

As for the app opening times, I have just measured them on my Volla Phone, maybe someone can add their respective opening times on other devices. I have no other Ubuntu Touch device to compare, so I don't know if those times are to be expected.

I have chosen the Volla Phone back then because the hardware seems to be decent, and the design is pretty, and I would love to use it (and I am going to start once waydroid makes it way to a stable release, and BT/Wifi works), however I would really love to see the Volla Phone perform better.
Since I have no other device to compare, I can't judge if my above user experience is to be expected on Ubuntu Touch in general, or if in fact there is performence issues on the Volla Phone. It the latter was the case, I would love to see the situation improved in the future.

nero355 · 5 Jan 2022, 17:05

@s710
Interesting!

What you are basically saying is that the loading times on a Volla Phone are pretty much just as slow as they are on my BQ Ubuntu Phone

My SFOS phone however is basically flying through everything so it can be done/should be possible to have a snappy Linux based phone!

arubislander · 5 Jan 2022, 18:10

@s710 said in Scroling application on Volla Phone is very sluggy:

I have copied several hundres of photos over from my iPhone)

I can't help but wonder if the sluggishness you experience has anything to do with the amount of photos you copied over. This is not to excuse the performance of course, just looking to explain why not every volla phone owner has the same experience...

saveurlinux · 5 Jan 2022, 22:09

@arubislander I've got almost same times as @s710. The swip from left to right, to display apps is ok but scrolling down is slow. However, using 'Laucher Modular' app, does not have this problem. Also using waydroid is fast.

aarontheissueguy · 6 Jan 2022, 18:31

@saveurlinux I can confirm many of the issues and it bothered me in the past. I wonder why lomiri behaves rather sluggish on Volla. It is weird.

domubpkm · 7 Jan 2022, 09:21

In addition to this, multi-tasking is still quite catastrophic on the Volla. Not normal for such a smartphone. https://github.com/ubports/morph-browser/issues/495

s710 · 1 Oct 2022, 08:50

@arubislander said in Scroling application on Volla Phone is very sluggy:

@s710 said in Scroling application on Volla Phone is very sluggy:

I have copied several hundres of photos over from my iPhone)

I can't help but wonder if the sluggishness you experience has anything to do with the amount of photos you copied over. This is not to excuse the performance of course, just looking to explain why not every volla phone owner has the same experience...

Yeah, definitely! I have copied over a crapload of photos. I think the thumbnailer does not cache, and thus results in a really slow behaviour.

On the iPhone, I have never seen any kind of loading/missing thumbnails at all. I just checked, I have 6.500 photos on the iPhone. I can scroll through them as if it was only 10. No stuttering, slow loading whatsoever. Of course, hard- and software performance of some iPhone 11 pro cannot possibly be compared to a VollaPhone running UT.

On SFOS, the gallery also performs much better, albeit it does not reach iPhone performance.

On UT, it seems like the gallery just does ls ~/Pictures and then allPictures.forEach(p => p.generatePreview) (pseudo-code). That is, there does not seems to be any intelligent/proper handling for a bigger amount of stored pictures/photos.

I admit that copying over 28GB of photos to the VollaPhone is not exactly the standard use case for most users. However it points out that UT is having issues with a large number of pictures, which other users may experience also sooner or later.

I have no clue how android performs, since I never use android phones. However I remember from my old Sony times that the gallery back then also had some drawbacks in terms of missing thumbnails / stuttering while scrolling the gallery, and I have seen similar on android phones of friends. Maybe it is indeed only possible to deliver good gallery performance on top-tier hardware, no matter what the OS is.

[edit] And I might add that I am aware of the fact that my iPhone had the ability to create thumbnails one by one for all the 6.500 photos, while other phones (be it UT or SFOS) where I copy those photos to must stem the efforts of creating thumbnails for all 6.500 photos at once.

arubislander · 10 Jan 2022, 09:19

@s710 might be worth reporting an issue for this on GitHub

s710 · 10 Jan 2022, 16:28

@arubislander said in Scroling application on Volla Phone is very sluggy:

@s710 might be worth reporting an issue for this on GitHub

You mean this thread in general? E.g. the overall weak VollaPhone performance?

arubislander · 10 Jan 2022, 21:59

@s710 No, I meant the poor performance of mediascanner in particular.

The overall subject of this thread is way to general for an actionable issue report.

AppLee · 11 Jan 2022, 18:41

@s710
Have you tried to change setting in the gallery app so the picture are not separated by dates ? In my past experience it was a bit faster, but do not solve the issue completely.

s710 · 29 Jan 2022, 14:00

So as I don't have any other device to compare, I was looking at some videos on youtube, specifically for the Oneplus 6.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y3DWyB5gN4

And the UX shown there just looks so much more fluent and smooth than on the Volla Phone. Is the OT6 hardware so much better, or is Volla just having issues? Can those performence issues be reported somewhere, so that Hallo Welt can actually investigate, or are they even on it already?

Really thinking about getting a OT6/6T, but according to UBports devices website, the state is shown as beta.

aarontheissueguy · 29 Jan 2022, 22:36

@s710 I am not sure if anyone ever contected Hallo Welt directly about it but ive read about it many many times and always wondered what was the issue. I really cant Imagine that the VollaPhone is to slow for acceptable scroll speeds and the situation on Android is way better.