Sencha Touch 2 s*cks on Android : am I the only one to think so ?

[mmullany]

Hi Joeri. Due to Android 2.1's rapidly vanishing device share (< 6%):

http://developer.android.com/resourc...-versions.html

Android 2.1 was never officially supported for Sencha Touch 2. We did a lot of work to make 2.2 and 2.3 fast, but nothing for 2.1. Note that we do need a minimum amount of horsepower to make Android work well, and we've seen some freebie Androids that just don't have the chip power to push screen bits around. The errr.. "good news" is that native Android apps are also pretty terrible on those platforms.

[joeri]

Can you give me a hint on how to disable the title animation? Setting the show/hideAnimation config to null in the navigationBar config of a navigationview doesn't seem to do anything.

I'm using this on my navigationview's config:

navigationBar: { animation: false, ... }

[joeri]

Hi Joeri. Due to Android 2.1's rapidly vanishing device share (< 6%):

http://developer.android.com/resourc...-versions.html

Android 2.1 was never officially supported for Sencha Touch 2. We did a lot of work to make 2.2 and 2.3 fast, but nothing for 2.1. Note that we do need a minimum amount of horsepower to make Android work well, and we've seen some freebie Androids that just don't have the chip power to push screen bits around. The errr.. "good news" is that native Android apps are also pretty terrible on those platforms.

Yes, I agree that 2.1 is not really a target anymore, but your story on what is and is not supported in the past was a bit vague. I'm glad that this is becoming a clearer message. I still want to know what devices you are targeting on a day-to-day basis so that I know what to recommend to customers (I'd like to recommend something a little lower-end than an SGS2, and especially something a bit more robust).

Similarly, the advice on how to architect apps to get optimal performance is also vague. I've had to piece stuff together experimentally to make my app behave. At one point it was even running slowly on the SGS2. It's most definitely not true that you can naively build your app using all the standard ST2 components following the standard MVC pattern and expect it to run as well as native apps on the same device. ST2 is slower, but much of that performance deficit is due to animation, which can be worked around if you know where and how.

Sencha doesn't necessarily need to make ST faster, but you do need to communicate better about how to tweak an app for lower-specced devices.

[SebasSP]

I'm using this on my navigationview's config:

navigationBar: { animation: false, ... }

This doesn't seem to work: http://www.senchafiddle.com/#eBrcm

[joeri]

This doesn't seem to work: http://www.senchafiddle.com/#eBrcm

Very odd. It works for me in my phone profile (even in desktop chrome), but doesn't work in the tablet profile or in the fiddle you sent. I'll have to troubleshoot what's happening.

[mmullany]

Joeri,

We have about 20 Android devices we test on internally. You can see a decent selection of what we test on here at the end of the page:

http://www.sencha.com/products/touch/features/