Google’s Nexus smartphones are known for the pure Android experience. Almost every one in the world of Android says that pure Android OS is faster than anything else. And given that Nexus phones comes with absolutely pure Android, they are the fastest droids on the planet, right? I believed this, but not any more!!
I have been using the Motorola Nexus 6 for a while. I have tried the stock Marshmallow, i have used it by rooting and installing ElementalX kernel and even tried the Android N beta. The Motorola Nexus 6 is powered by a Snapdragon 805 and has 3GB of RAM. Ideally, on a phone with this kind of power, a pure Android ROM will be extremely fast.
But it lagged and sometimes it lagged like hell! At first, the lag only used to be there when switching between applications but then as days passed, the lag was pronounced and everywhere. It was really surprising to see a Nexus lag like this. Given the extremely limited number of devices that Google has under Nexus and given that Motorola too does not develop more than half a dozen phones, this was surprising.
Even a full reset did not help, which means that the lag is here to stay as long as I use a factory ROM. Then I tried ElementalX which improved battery life but the lag wouldn’t go. If you search on internet for ‘Motorola Nexus 6 lag’, you will find a lot of posts that say that this phone lags after ‘certain’ updates that came out late last year.I did test the Android N earlier and you should see the amount of lag in that (though it is beta). You can read more about it here.
When a friend of mine purchased a Huawei Nexus 6P, I tried the phone for few minutes and kind of did stress testing by opening a truckload of applications. There are more than 30 apps open and there was absolutely no lag. We should really commend Huawei for superb job in fine tuning the build and also keeping the Snapdragon 810 from overheating.
I thought that enough is enough and installed CyanogenMod 13 nightly. I have been using this ROM for a week and guess what, there is ABSOLUTELY NO LAG. The phone is working as if it is on steroids. CyanogenMod 13 is also (almost) pure Android experience. I chose to install ‘nano’ Google Apps packages which will not install truckload of Google’s bloatware. This could be the difference or it could be that Motorola/Google were not really interested in optimizing the OS on Motorola Nexus 6.
It was shocking to see that a third party ROM developed by developers with limited time and resources could run way way faster than a stock pure Android ROM on a Nexus 6.
Till recently, I had this belief that the lag in Android was induced by adding unwanted bloatware and overlay UIs like Touchwiz, LG UI etc but then I understood now that the problem is with the OS itself and the OS needs massive amount of optimization and fine tuning to run without lag. I have used iOS for few months and then moved to Windows Phone for few weeks and I have been using Nexus for past month or two.
I strongly believe now that, whether it a Nexus or a non-Nexus, an Android smartphone can never match the optimization and fluidity of iOS and Windows Phone. For those who say that Nexus 6 is more than a year old phone, do note that given the powerful hardware, this phone is supposed to run even the next version of Android without lag. I do hope that Google fixes the issues with lag on Nexus 6 in upcoming Android N build. What do you think? Do you think that this is just a one off issue or did you face similar headaches on your Nexus phone?
