Interestingly, Apple are really pushing this now. They've just demonstrated new predictive tech to get response time down to ~ 30 ms from ~ 60 ms on iOS devices (if I remember correctly, this is based on a publicly available WWDC talk).
That said, 30 ms is still far too much. Microsoft made a good demo showing just how noticeable 30 ms of lag is compared to none at all (linked on this page by sosuke). But it really just goes to show how poor this current generation of capacitive touch-based devices is. And Apple's software-based approach, though it helps, is not sufficient without new hardware too...
I really wish that Android would also strongly push in that direction (and I hope that Google has some internal branches where the View system is rethought).
The design direction of the platform is astoundingly great, but the implementation lags far behind the vision.
https://play.google.com/music/preview/Tgvzffz3io7iw6zwczbul5...
/s
Apple hardware and software still prioritizes this.
Glad to see Microsoft finally caught up ;)
Back in the days, people wanted tools to do serious things, expensive tools. And computers were nothing yet. Easy to dismiss. Now, computers are used for entertainment mostly, cost 400$, so who cares. Most of this industry is driven by the shiny, so it's easy to overlook lowly basic details.
Even when people care (Android Project Butter etc etc) it seems a bit too late, the culture shifted a bit and there are too many layers.
It appears to be a hard habit to break.
Then again, that'll have to change with the advent of VR. Variable framerates can induce nausea.
As an Android user, this is one of my biggest gripes. Android just hasn't figured this out, yet, or doesn't care.
I just hope that the experiments made by the Dart team (they are aiming at a 120 fps lag free framework on Android) are also conducted internally in the Android team (not necessarily with Dart, but preferably not with Java).
So few people get that. Alan Kay once wrote in the 1970s that it was as unacceptable for there to be a delay between user action and response on a computer as it was unacceptable on a piano. Now we have several gigaflops on every desktop and still can't get that right.
We really need this in web browsers. Especially on phones. When you click or touch something, something should happen right now, even if more will happen later. Touch a link in Firefox for Android and see what happens, or rather what doesn't happen.