Lag/whirling circles on page load on Android devices

  1. 5 years ago

    I'm currently doing an xpub to be used on Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 android tablets. I appreciate these are old tablets (2014) but I'm seeing the same issue on a Huwaei P Smart, a phone which was released over the past 12 months. By contrast, all iOS devices (iPhone 6s, 10.5 iPP and one other iPad whose spec I don't know) work very nicely.

    The problem is one I've seen mentioned in these forums before, which seems exclusive to Android. It's the measurable delay as each and every page loads, together with a spinning wheel. I can understand that the specs of the SG4 could explain the lag when dragging items (this is NOT present in the Huwaei, so I'm assuming it's a side effect of the poor specs), but the delay in page loading and the spinning wheel appears regardless. As I said above, neither of these issues present on the iOS devices, even the comparatively old iPhone 6s, which was itself released in 2015.

    Is there anything I can do to reduce this lag?

    I've tried:

    -adding a 'fade' screen as a top layer on pages that's set to fade. Yes, this helps with the lag, but annoying wheel still shows and makes the thing feel even slower than it is!

    -compressing pngs. That might have been marginally faster, but it resulted in white screens flashing during the load time, so I disabled it again.

    -reducing object transparency (no difference).

    Any thoughts? This project is intended for families to use at a local museum, and whilst I know some of the lag is spec related, I worry it could put prospective users off and give them a negative perception of the whole experience. Is there ANY way to eliminate the circles altogether on Android devices?

    Hoping for a swift reply,

    Lisa.

  2. STILL WAITING FOR A RESPONSE!

    Sorry to shout, but it's extremely frustrating when I post for help here AND email support and get no reply from either. I've seen from other posts that this is not an issue unique to me. Surely with all the Android users out there it's in your interests to get the best performance possible on that platform, or at least tell us how to achieve that...

  3. Hi Lisa T,
    I have had a similar problem that was somewhat improved by firstly making sure my xpub output image render was set to low quality Jpegs and for an android screen resolution. Are you also using an android specific rendition setting when you build your content?

    I think the pubcoder team are on a short break so you may not get a response till end of August.
    Kind regards,
    Andy

  4. Hi,
    Meant to reply yesterday and forgot, so apologies! Yes, I've tried reducing image quality and have seen some improvement; I can't go straight to jpegs because I need some transparency which that setting doesn't seem to permit. I've had some success by merging non-interactive elements into single background images, and that seems to help. Oddly, I've found Android devices handle individual complex pages reasonably well- it's the transition from one page to another that seems to cause the hitch, regardless of specs. Very irritating when an iPhone 6s from several years ago can still outperform an mid-end Android phone from this year!

    And yes, using Android specific settings and resolution. Were you able to eliminate the spinning wheel altogether?

    Thanks for replying!

    Lisa.

  5. Hi Lisa,
    Yes i could eliminate spinning wheel but only when i lost a lot of interactivity (swipe or touch down to start animations) and i had jpegs rather than png. Out of curiosity how big are your Png files in size mb???
    Cheers,
    Andy

  6. Hi again,
    I checked and they do vary quite a bit, size wise—from a few kb to 10+MB, . I can replace some of the pngs with jpegs and have done so as a trial, but I'm not sure the improvement (very marginal at best) is worth the degradation in quality. I can't eliminate any more interactivity, that's what I'm being paid to produce! Is there a size I shouldn't go beyond for images? For instance, keep all pngs at less than, say, 2mb?

    ETA: just double checked and the vast majority of all my images do fall below 2mb, and most below 1!

    I suppose I just want to know WHY the performance is so poor even on very recent reasonably high end Android devices vs comparatively old iOS - it just doesn't make sense. Is it because the Pubcoder itself is Mac first? Are they prioritising Apple APIs? So odd!

  7. Hi again, the experts from pubcoder might disagree but i think that if you are trying to load 10 mb pngs its probably a bit heavy for the graphics processing to get rendered quickly. I would try loading only a few images and see if you get an improvement and add more until the lag is too much. When i did some game work with a program called “gamesalad” i was told by a developer to make your png resolution size divisible by 4 to optimise the processing. Not sure if that helps in this situation but might be worth a go.
    All the best:-)
    Andy

  8. That's really interesting re the pngs. Does it apply to the jpegs too?

    I've seen a lot of improvement simply by exporting to epub3 instead of xpub. There's still lag, but now it's in the form of a momentary white screen between each page instead of the more irritating flickering and spinning wheels. Interactivity is a bit smoother too, but then given how much I've tried to optimise the images it's a tad disappointing the performance isn't better with xpub. Epub3 apps for Android don't seem to be great! Infinity works well, ads don't get in the way while using, and tapping the screen doesn't invoke the page thumbnails. Only issue was that many multi-word text elements appeared with extra characters which doesn't happen with any other reader, so I've had to render all of those as images and it's better now.

  9. Well its great to hear you are having some success. Hope your end users batteries keep on chugging in them old samsungs for a while given the effort you have gone to.

    With regards to optimisation of images i would think that the rule may apply to jpegs as well. I found the old link that lists how to speed up image load times.

    https://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/46652/31-optimization-tips
    11 to 16 may be of some relevance for png optimisation in your case. I am hoping that the pubcoder team re-emerge soon as there seems to be a lot of questions on the board.

    Cheers,
    Andy

  10. Thanks! I'm nearly there now and tearing my hair out over a variety of minor issues. Such as the Pubreader app on both my test iPhone AND android refusing to load the latest version via wifi (or maybe that's coming from my mac, but how when it's all up to date and worked just fine before today?!). Or the fact that 'start at first page' absolutely REFUSES to work on Android, but is fine on iOS...

 

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