IssueTracker

I don't have this particular smartphone anymore, the layout inspector just showed higher dimensions for views.

So I tested it on a real device (Pixel 4a 5g w the latest updates to date) as well as in the emulator (Android 12) and had that huge keypress slowdown on both.  In the emulator, older Android versions did not have the issue, though I did not try this on a live machine.  I tried a bunch of things to make the issue go away-- adding a filter to block emojis for example seemed to cut down on the delay by a bit, but it was still there (sorry for being unclear-- above I said it was in a "responsive usable state" but I realized later this was in the older version of Android, not Android 12).  Still, the filter was the best solution I could come up with until I read the instructions for stopping the initialization completely, and doing that made the edittext normal again and immediately responsive.  It's as if something that was supposed to be in the background was on the main thread or something.

I want to emphasize that this was a fairly large edittext (wrapped by a scrollView in a LinearLayoutCompat, which in turn was in a RelativeLayout fwiw) used as a text editor.  It had just under 150K of normal plaintext in it and if I remember right, it had a slightly longer delay as opposed to when the ET was empty-- but don't quote me on that.  It also has its own TextWatcher, but eliminating that completely made no difference-- the only complete fix I found was to stop the emojiCompat from starting in the first place and boom, instant fix with the performance I had before.

Strangely, typing INTO the document was EXTREMELY slow.  But hitting the backspace was maybe 130% of normal speeds, as if adding to the document was requiring a lot of measurement or something but subtracting from it returned faster.  Both were delayed, but hitting space bar a few times was noticeably slower than hitting backspace a few times.  I thought somehow this might have to do with undo/redo, but eliminating that also didn't seem to affect anything

Other observations-- I hadn't done a build in a couple months where I had tested the EditText responsiveness, so I'm not sure when this became an issue.  I am using Android Studio Chipmunk / 2021.2.1 Canary 7, Jan 5 build, on Linux.  As mentioned, adding/removing emoji2 to the dependencies in build.gradle made no difference.  I also tested with the Google IME as well as a 3rd party one just to make sure this wasn't some kind of delay in the keyboard.  No difference, and typing with a physical keyboard into the emulator also had the issue.


Hope this is helpful.

To address #3 directly-- it didn't matter what type of character was typed.  Any text entered (spaces, random letters, or pasted text) would sit a moment, then stamp out slowly.  Sometimes groups of text would be processed together.  So you'd tap out "HELLO" and with a pause between letters it would be H... E... L... L... O on a 1/2 second delay.  Or if you typed them quickly you might see the HEL and then LO in a clump after the delay.  Carriage returns behaved the same way, but as I mentioned, backspaces would be much faster.