Does Lollipop Truly Deliver?

With all the benchmarks now out of the style, we're getting a good wait at what Android five.0 brings to the table from a performance and bombardment life perspective.

2 of the devices I tested -- the Galaxy S5 and Moto G 2022 -- saw functioning gains on the CPU side when upgrading to Android five.0. On boilerplate that improvement was around v%, although individual results varied from no comeback to 10%+ gains.

I would expect that anything in the 5-10% improvement range represents a all-time example scenario for an Android 5.0 upgrade, and unless 64-bit support was of a sudden enabled on a supporting device, I'd be surprised if overall gains would be larger than that.

Google actually claimed at the launch of Android 5.0 that some benchmarks and applications would see performance improvements upwardly to 2x from switching from Davlik to Fine art. Across the benchmarks that I utilize, which I believe test fairly real-world apply cases, improvements weren't nearly as high. In some specific cases you could run across gains this high, like when a JIT compiler was particularly inefficient for the code base of operations, though I'd expect these would be few and far between in everyday usage.

The Moto X was an interesting example in that it saw no gains on the CPU side. Performance was already quite good when I tested the device running Android 4.four, and it remains and then with Android 5.0, performing slightly better than other flagships with similar hardware. Theoretically nosotros should have seen extra operation from the switch to Android v.0, though Motorola might take decided to tweak power management to keep operation flat. The device already gets quite hot nether load, so carefully managing thermals might take been a priority for Motorola (and with good reason).

The LG G3 saw performance reduced across the board by ~4%. Although LG hasn't officially confirmed this, I doubtable the reduction is due to a change in SoC thermal direction aimed at providing better sustained performance. The G3 did thermally throttle under some weather condition, and the effects of this seem to have been reduced after the update to Android 5.0. Although functioning reductions are never ideal, if it's to achieve ameliorate sustained performance in real utilise cases (east.g. games), information technology's probably for the better.

Equally for GPU performance, unsurprisingly we saw no gains on any of the devices we tested. Android 5.0 wasn't designed for improving GPU efficiency, equally Art focuses more on CPU-specific optimizations. While some GPU-limited applications saw slight jumps, this would exist from CPU optimizations merely.

Battery Life Results

Battery performance remains mostly the same after upgrading to Android v.0. Unless you have the LG G3, which saw some unusual reductions in battery life, you should expect roughly the same life from your device during video playback and web browsing. Intermittent loftier performance workloads are the only areas you can expect to run into whatever real gains; I recorded 20% gains on boilerplate in PCMark for Android's battery benchmark.

At the end of the day it'due south hard to say exactly what improvements y'all tin look from an Android 5.0 update equally OEMs may choose to tweak many aspects of operation at the same fourth dimension. Nonetheless, looking purely at Android 5.0-related gains, a performance improvement of v-10% on the CPU side - with better battery life in functioning intensive tasks to get with it - would be a good effect.

As developers brainstorm to harness the new battery APIs in Android 5.0, and as we starting time to see more 64-scrap capable devices on the market place, I'd expect both performance and battery results to improve once again purely from enhanced software. And even though gains are relatively small today, they're still pretty impressive considering nothing has been altered on the hardware side.

As for what the hereafter holds, it's unclear how much more efficient you lot can make Android, and whether we'll see like gains from a new major revision to the operating arrangement. At that place are probably yet tweaks to be done here and there, but the switch to Fine art with improved garbage drove will likely exist one of the biggest performance-focused updates to Android for a few years, aside from continual improvements on the low end.

Nearly chiefly, I hope we start to encounter more manufacturers roll out Android 5.0 equally soon as possible. While four of the handsets I had on paw happened to receive Android 5.0 updates (later on weeks of waiting) not all devices get this treatment, and peculiarly products that aren't flagships. Choosing an OEM with a good update record, like Motorola, can be key to getting the latest software as chop-chop every bit possible, even on budget devices.