jQuery Forum

It sounds like all these comments are related to performance with scrollview on Android. It's worth noting that is an experimental plugin that hasn't been under development for 6+ months so this isn't production ready.

Thanks for taking the time to respond Todd.

Not just the scrollview, but responsiveness in general is slower on Android. I have read that the Android browser is not taking advantage of the GPU hardware. Maybe that will change in Ice Cream Sandwich?

You've confirmed my findings: we found some serious deficiencies in Android devices when applying certain CSS3 transforms on pages with form controls. (And it turns out that it's a CSS3 transform which is used by the scrollview component too.)

We found the scrollview so useful in our iPhone app for a layout with a permanent footer and fixed header, that we cannot do without it. Our iPhone App rocks and I believe it is a showcase of what you can do with HTML5/CSS3 and jQuery Mobile.
Imagine our complete disappointment when we discovered the 'very serious issues with forms in Android' you mention. (I suspect you've experienced the same emotion, Todd.) Our only option was to branch our code for Android - something that grated against every fibre of my idealistic cross-platform architecture strategy. :(

(I'd really like to know what Sencha did, whether it's reliable, even in Android forms, and if it can be applied to jQuery Mobile. They say they're going to be blogging about it soon.)

I am so very disappointed with Android right now, that I feel that developers of the world should know what a minefield they're stepping into. So I'm blogging about it: http://red-3.blogspot.com

Google cannot change the past, but they had better make the future much, much better.

I agree. We spend a huge amount of time working around Android's bugginess. If you only need fixed toolbars, both iOS5 and android 2.3+ support this natively so it might be worth trying to go with CSS and nixing the scroller. My impression is that all JS scrollers all cause issues with forms in Android, but maybe Sencha is doing some serious finessing, not sure.

..............................................
Todd Parker
jQuery Mobile & UI design lead
Partner, Filament Group Inc.

todd@filamentgroup.com

It's hard to tell, but I did note in the Sencha video there are no fixed bottom toolbars, only on top, and I don't see any forms in the demo.

Update: (And it's not good news) We recently got our first ICS phones in (Samsung Galaxy Nexus Prime) and the verdict is not great:
- The one good thing is that Android's overlaid HTML form controls now scroll with the page, but scrolling quickly there is lag, and the overlaid control is seen 'catching up' with the underlying HTML form control.
- We experience rendering issues and flickering with the ICS browser.
- Graphics hardware acceleration in the browser is still not being fully implemented. For an example, go to Bing maps on an ICS phone using the browser. Note how it is not optimized for mobile and the map mapping is not nearly optimal.

Looking forward to jQM 1.1's fixed headers and footers - this is our only hope, Obi-Wan!