For a company that made multitasking on smartphones a whole new ballgame with its Galaxy Note lineup of smartphones, Samsung's recent doings seem to suggest it is no longer interested in offering users even a good basic multitasking experience. Galaxy phones still have the same useful multitasking features today, but Samsung has messed up a couple of basic things on recent smartphones to make switching between apps an exercise in frustration.
It started with the Galaxy Note 4. We were never impressed by how Samsung's fourth-generation Galaxy Note performed, and one of the biggest issues with its software was the lag in the recent apps interface. 99 percent of the time the phone takes at least two seconds to show the app switcher, and for those who constantly switch back and forth between two or more apps, this basic form of multitasking is a time-waster on the Note 4. The Lollipop upgrade hasn't fixed this lag, and even the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge, which come with the most optimized version of Samsung's TouchWiz UX yet, take a second or two to react after you hit the recent apps button.
Then there is also the fact that the S6 and S6 edge have a memory management issue that makes them kill background apps too quickly, something that further botches a feature that has been a staple of Android for a few years now. Samsung hasn't fixed it with the Android 5.1 update, and since other smartphones with the latest version of Android don't have this delay in the recent apps screen nor an extreme case of task killing, it's becoming clear the company is ignoring the multitasking side of things on its devices.
The Galaxy Note 5 is on the horizon, and I can only hope Samsung will be fixing all of the multitasking issues that plague TouchWiz at the moment with what could be the most awesome Note device in the series' history. The Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge are two of the best flagship smartphones the Korean manufacturer has ever produced, but the last few months have been a sad indication of how Samsung devices might not be your best bet if you're a user that finds multitasking to be one of the most important features of a smartphone.
