The storage and processing power of modern smartphones are touted to rival those of a typical laptop. Yet, my trash-picked testing system from over a decade ago with a bottom-of-the-barrel SATA SSD can still boot to the Linux desktop faster than all but one of my Android devices.
Understandably, this isn’t a huge priority since very few people are cold booting their phones every morning. But is it just plain unoptimized? How hard would it be to optimize? Do security features and checks bog it down? Is it that there’s many tiny files to load when booting? What gives?
your phone isn’t booting a linux desktop. it’s booting a java virtual machine and within it a whole stack and within it the stuff that behaves like a desktop environment and all that from shit-slow, unreliable storage.
honestly, with the whole chain it’s amazing that everything boots and runs so well.
I don’t know.
But it’s not all phones. I’ve had some android devices that take over a minute to start up, but my current Xperia 1V also only takes 20 seconds to ask for the pin, then another 2-4 seconds for the home screen to fully show.
I do want to point out that phones aren’t running blazing-fast ssds. Lots of android devices run fairly sluggish eMMC flash.
For a while now, I’ve been making sure the android devices I buy are running a recent standard of UFS flash, instead. The difference is noticable, just with stuff like opening apps and moving files around.
Ohhhboy, let me tell you about Blackberry startups. Everything is a gift compared to those boot times.
No joke. I used to work Tech Support and we would be forced to schedule callbacks for BlackBerry devices. The most locked down shit I’ve ever seen. The level of locked in would make a Nintendo Executive blush. Thankfully BlackBerry was on the way out in that time
you can get somewhat of an impression of it if after a reboot you get a logcat dump. for that, you need to enable ADB, and install the ADB tools on a computer. but disable ADB if you don’t use it
I swear phones used to boot fast but now I’m well over a minute of waiting. My laptop is like 14s, come on phone, keep up.
