I have similar issues on my Nexus 5 & 7. The biggest is the screen re-draw time. Sometimes I have to wait quite a while before any icons show up, during which time the device is essentially useless.

I miss the responsiveness of KitKat. The new Lollipop design doesn't do much for me.

Fortunately most people don't have to suffer this. Lollipop is still such a small percentage of Android users that it barely registers.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2393360/lollipop-claims-just-16-percent-of-active-android-devices [theinquirer.net]

Lollipop claims just 1.6 percent of active Android devices

Android 5.0 Lollipop in its monthly distribution figures for the first time, revealing that the software has been installed on a mere 1.6 percent of devices.

I upgraded on my nexus 7 2012 and it was terrible. So slow, so sluggish. I finally gave up and reset nexus,cleared caches etc and installed it again. This time I didn't auto redownload all the apps I had installed before. Another important thing: Somehow update 5.02 was available for my nexus 7 so I downloaded that too OTA. I do not have this new fancy Google now launcher and I have to say it's been smooth for over a month. It's like kitkat with few new cool features. Incomparably better than when I just upgraded it and kept all my data and apps.

5.01 was never available for the Nexus 7. They went straight to 5.02. I'm looking forward to 5.1 to fix a lot of these issues. I even had to do a complete factory restore the other day to get my tablet back into some semblance of working order. Even then the lag is quite noticeable.

My wife is happily running Lollipop but she has the later Nexus 7. I've still not installed Lollipop and it's downloaded 5.02 which is just sitting there.

I'm afraid to do it as everyone complaining all appear to be running the Nexus 7 2012 edition like I am.

What to do, what to do ;)

I have a Nexus 7 (2012), after Lollipop I would rate it from slow to useless. A huge performance step back for that device.

I had to rebuild some of my native apps, Lollipop would glitch the action bar and break one library.

I also find that the user experience on my nexus phone is not as enjoyable as it was with kitkat.

<tangent>
iBill, I hope you appreciate that every time this thread gets rebooted, I have the Chordettes running through my head for the next 24 hours
</tangent>

<arc>
Millie Small's
[youtube.com...]
remake of
Barbie Gaye's
"lollipop"
</arc>

5.1 factory images are out for Nexus 5, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10, there should be OTA updates soon.

New features: [i.imgur.com...]

I can't help but thinking that Android has the same problems in one respect that Windows users face: OS upgrades require hardware upgrades.

This happened with my first smartphone, way back when I was one of the first adopters of Android. The phone was fine, until the upgrade. After the upgrade it became slow as a slug: A dumbphone! It was well documented by users online, with all kinds of ideas to improve it, but none of the ideas worked and it was impossible to take the phone back to it's previous working performance.

I ended up upgrading the smartphone.

Perhaps we should come to accept it that whenever you hit that upgrade button you're taking a chance, and Android is no different.

Watch and wait for others is a good move, imho.

Does lollipop support the option to turn off all menu animation and fades like KitKat does?

go to settings - turn on developer mode (Settings> About > press the build number 7 times and you'll see something like “You are now a developer!”) - now go to settings>system>developer options and turn off all the window and transition animation (speeds up android 2x).

For those that want Google's announcement "Android 5.1: Unwrapping a new Lollipop update" [officialandroid.blogspot.com...]

Watch and wait for others is a good move, imho.

That's an important wisdom, we've all been burned. Usually they fix one thing on early releases and you get many new problems.

Google also issued a big update for Android studio, based on intelliJ 14. We are getting a better debugger, with lambda evaluation.
[tools.android.com...]

Does lollipop support the option to turn off all menu animation and fades like KitKat does?

Yes, you can define the animation scale, and select Animation Off there
[i.imgur.com...]

The phone was fine, until the upgrade. After the upgrade it became slow as a slug

Part of it is pure software bloat.
Back in the day we'd complain if a program in C that just printed "Hello World!" was more than a few hundred bytes. Now the "Hello World!" program in Android is something on the scale of 1MB in size and it doesn't do squat. Plus all these object oriented programming languages make all the code and data bigger and bigger every release. There's no concept of optimization anymore, you just get a faster processor and more memory.

I've witnessed this phenomena since I was a CP/M-80 developer, then MSDOS, then I was always in early Windows beta from 2.x to XP when I finally gave up desktop software for web applications. I can tell you the first C++ compiler I ever encountered took 100K of C code and turned it into a 500K bloated disaster that barely ran. I didn't do the upgrade, our in house PhD did it which was probably the root cause of the bloat, but it's been going that direction ever since. Then came Java and more bloat, and now the world runs PHP which is the fattest, slowest, most bloated buggiest language I've ever seen and it's the standard. Mind >BLOWN!< but I digress.

The problem you have with earlier phones is the hardware wasn't quite there yet, the CPUs and RAM was just OK as my HTC Hero also bogged down and died. It had nothing to do with the upgrade, turned out earlier Android had some critical flaws and when certain things filled up, it just choked the CPU, which wasn't that fast in the first place.

Anyway, the newer phones and tablets finally have enough power that they've survived multiple upgrades without slowing to a crawl yet. I'm pleasantly surprised that the Nexus 7 and Samsung G2 that I've got both still perform admirably. Compare it to my wife's first tablet I bought her, a Nook, which got sluggish over time and was at the end of it's like when I got her a Nexus 7 as well which is still purring away.

Similarly, my desktop machines, and I buy fast computers, had yet to be challenged by the latest Windows software and barely exceeds 20% CPU utilization as there's way more horsepower than the tasks I run could possibly use unless you do some high end gaming or something.

That's why I laugh at all the town criers that claim desktops are dead, laptops are dead, sales are in the tank, tablets are dead, it's because for the first time in history we can upgrade from Vista to Win 7 to Win 8 to Win 8.1 on the same hardware and it still performs like a champ. Back in the day I'd have gotten a new machine with almost each Windows upgrade which is no longer the case.

Sorry hardware vendors, you finally outpaced software. Suffer.

Okay, you asked for it. Lollipop is a POS. I will take the few modest tweaks, but design wise, I say piss off. I went through the process of removing the update from my Nexus 5 and simply decided that road was bumpy, and sketchy. Thus, I live with an ugly environment. Looks is a lot. Looks and feel on a device that I use constantly is important. The design is not my cup of tea, at all. I looked at skin apps to at least return to KitKat, but overall, these things are cumbersome. What it means though is I'm far less inclined to give a S about future updates. That is, unless they give me the option to beat the ugly out of their choice in design, look and feel. I can say one thing, I would never tell anyone at this point that pure Android is the nirvana. That part is lost for me. Improve features, but to F with feel and cosmetics for a OS in this way, it's far far too drastic. One friend of mine says he likes it and wants it. That says to me he hasn't "experienced" it. Oh yes it's ugly and that's apparently how they designed it.

I finally got it a couple weeks ago. I can barely tell the difference between the old (4.4.4) and new. The email actually works better for me than the old. (note 4)

Well I had to do a factory data reset before Lollipop would run with any speed on my Nexus 7 (original) which I've heard happened to others. The only thing that really sucks now is Skype, it's obviously a port or some crap and it's a real dog, but after resetting all the data, whatever gummed up the works is fixed. It's a bit sluggish compared to kit kat, but it works now and it didn't before.