Android L Performance

Android Lo­vers remarkable battery life, but in our tests we found it no faster than Android KitKat.

Android L is Google’s biggest update to its mobile OS yet, and it’s claimed to o­ffer a host of new features and performance enhancements that we just couldn’t wait to get our hands on. So obviously we installed the Android L developer preview on our Nexus 5.

But does it really o­ffer those claimed performance enhancements? Project Volta and the new ART runtime built into Android L do indeed make for an impressive boost to battery life – for example, Ars Technica measured an increase from 345- to 471 minutes for the Nexus 5. That’s amazing but what about other aspects of performance, and is it worth upgrading your phone or tablet to a potentially buggy beta OS to benefit from those. Is it worth upgrading your phone or tablet to a potentially buggy beta OS to benefit from those enhancements now?

 From our own experience of Android L, we’d say probably not. Particularly given that some popular third-party apps, for instance Dropbox, just don’t play nicely with the OS right now (understandably, of course).  But it’s not all about the benchmarks, and as we’ve seen it’s possible for manufacturers to cheat these tests. We’ve also seen on a single device wildly di­fferent results from tests run concurrently, which is why we always publish an average figure.

The Nexus 5 running KitKat already lov­ers a very smooth user experience. It offers this with Android L too, however, and it’s doubtful that the average user would notice a di­fference in performance. Plus, Android L is still a developer preview, and performance may well change with the final version. In other words benchmarks should all be taken with a pinch of salt. Obviously we ran them anyway – on a Nexus 5 running KitKat and another Nexus 5 running Android L.

We ran our tests at exactly the same time and under the same conditions with the final version. And we found nothing to get excited over.  Graphics performance is the same, for example.  We use GFXBench 3.0 to measure a phone’s graphics potential, and the Nexus 5 measured 9fps in Manhattan and 24.1fps in T-Rex with both OSes.

 Geekbench 3 performance was actually a little lower with the Nexus 5 running Android L than it was running KitKat. For the Android L device the best results we were able to achieve were 759 points in the single-core test and 2,101 in the multi-core test.

 The Nexus 5 running KitKat put in a better performance, with 927 points single-core, and 2,744 multi-core.  Only in SunSpider did the Android L device show an improvement to performance. Here we measured 1178.6ms for Android L, and 1499.8ms for KitKat. However, it’s interesting to note that one day previous we saw 774ms in the same test for Android L, which proves just how reliable are benchmarks.