Why Smartphone Speed Tests Don’t Tell You What You Think They Do

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Every time a hot new phone comes out, you will inevitably run across videos seeking to show that it’s faster or slower than some other phone. Sometimes these videos get a lot of views, and are held up by fanboys of all stripes as proof positive that their preferred phone is better than the other. These arguments aren’t going to stop happening, but the new phenomenon of speed test videos isn’t adding much to the conversation for several reasons.

The latest example of this trend is seen with the release of Samsung’s Galaxy S8. There are videos, like the one below, that pit the GS8 against the iPhone in what would appear at first to be a useful comparison. The two phones open the same apps one after another to see which one gets done first. You can learn some things from this, but not which phone is faster in daily use.

Let’s be clear, synthetic benchmarks also don’t tell you what it’s like to use a phone, but these “app races” aren’t much better. For one, no one uses a phone like this, opening 20 apps in a row without using any of them. So, this isn’t exactly a useful metric. People actually care about things like how fast the camera launches, or how easy it is to switch back and forth between two apps. This is the sort of thing that makes a phone feel “fast” and pleasant to use.

Another reason this test offers little valuable data is that even seemingly identical apps on two different platforms can operate differently. For example, the above test includes both Facebook and Snapchat, apps that are famously sluggish on Android. This isn’t Samsung’s fault, or even Android’s. This is the fault of Facebook and Snapchat, which have produced apps that don’t perform as well as myriad similar ones.

What we can ascertain from a test like this is that memory is managed differently on different platforms and devices, so it’s not completely without merit. A similar test several years ago with the Galaxy S6 and other Android devices revealed how terrible Samsung’s default memory management was—apps would close in the background far too fast. It was such an obvious issue that Samsung had to change the behavior in an update.

So, what does this test show? The Galaxy S8 runs Android, which allows apps to run in the background with fewer restrictions than iOS. When memory is needed, heavier apps are killed. A background app in iOS is suspended with very limited background refresh functionality, but it can be resumed quickly. Both approaches have their advantages, though. Samsung is particularly careful to optimize for battery life compared with other Android OEMs (other Android phones still feel a bit snappier). It does tend to dump heavy apps out of memory faster, but the app race tests exacerbate that problem by imposing an unnatural scenario.

There’s no easy answer in your YouTube queue to the question of which phone is faster. It all depends on how you use it and what you expect a smartphone to do.

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