The worst offender is the simple swipe up from the bottom to go home or to switch to a previous app. With gesture navigation turned on, the Galaxy A17 constantly thought I wanted to trigger Google's Circle to Search feature, which would cause the phone to freeze and stutter until it finally loaded the capability. It was so bad that I eventually had to turn Circle to Search off.
Forget trying to multitask. I'd be filling out a form or reading a story in Google Chrome, but if I switched to another app and then came back to what I was doing, the Galaxy A17 would often refresh the entire app again, causing me to lose progress and start over.
Even notifications came through slowly sometimes. When I'd try to log into a service and get a one-time password for security, the texts would never come through until I actually loaded up the Messages app. Notifications from Google Home for my security cameras came through at first, but over time, they became sporadic, and sometimes never arrived despite seeing them on my other devices. Sometimes when I hit “Delete” on email notifications, the notification just stayed there unchanged.
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
Even without juggling various tasks, performance is sluggish in general. You'll wait a full second or two after swiping down on the home screen just to see your notification drawer. App launches take a beat, and scrolling through Instagram is choppy despite the 90-Hz screen refresh rate. A lightweight game like Pako Forever was also very stuttery; playable, but not very enjoyable.
There are moments when performance is perfectly manageable—after all, I have used this phone for more than two weeks, and it's not at the bottom of a lake (yet). But those lag spikes make it very inconsistent, and if there was a moment when I really needed to do something quick on my phone, I wouldn't trust the A17 to handle it.