As computing power grows, smartphones should theoretically encounter fewer and fewer stutters. However, at least on the phones I've used, which are iPhone8 Plus and Pixel 7, stutters still exist during music playing (even with the phone put in sleep mode). And I don't think it's only the case for the phones I've used.

The sources of the stutters I can come up with are:

1. all available LITTLE cores are busy and at least a task wake up in the meantime. 2. the CPU scheduler doesn't schedule properly (from the user experience perspective). 3. music player doesn't advice itself as latency-sensitive app.

It's easy for modern smartphones to have ready_to_run_tasks (daemons) > available_cpus, and a CPU scheduler which ignores latency-sensitive apps can easily preempt the music player.

To sum up, user experience is probably the utmost thing that modern phones care, how can things like "stutters during music playing" happen? Can't we just defer those daemon tasks?

(maybe this is why my collegue got a MP3 player instead)