Samsung has been quite serious about bringing new camera features from its latest flagships to existing devices. AR Emoji, which debuted on the Galaxy S9, is now supported on the Galaxy S8, Galaxy Note 8, Galaxy A8 Star, and the Galaxy A7, just to name a few. It also made its way Samsung’s budget lineup with an update to the Galaxy J7 Duo, and we can rest assured we will see AR Emoji on new Galaxy devices across various segments in the coming months.

I just hope Samsung plans to optimize AR Emoji to make it less cumbersome than it is at the moment.

AR Emoji has too much lag and stutter

On the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy Note 9, AR Emoji works great. It doesn’t work great in terms of how well the emojis it creates look like your real self, because it’s only a software trick that doesn’t take long enough to make realistic digital avatars of the user. But the process of creating AR Emojis is a quick affair on the S9 and Note 9, with even real-time mapping possible. On devices like the Galaxy A7 or Galaxy J7 Duo, however, there’s an enormous amount of lag when an emoji is being created. The same goes for the Galaxy Note 8 as well.

Even the general interface itself has stutter when it’s playing out animations, like zooming in on the face after you have gone through the initial process of clicking your picture and selected your gender. Perhaps the feature requires considerable processing power despite being just a software trick, which might be why no existing device got the ability to change your facial expressions in AR Emoji in real time. But as it stands, AR Emoji is simply too slow on non-flagship devices.

And I know AR Emoji is a gimmick, that some of you will point out that it’s not worth any serious discussion. But if Samsung is bringing the feature to more and more of its devices, especially existing ones and those in the budget range, the company needs to optimize the underlying code. It’s great to see the latest update for a device bring AR Emoji support with it, but it’s no use if the actual procedure of using it is slow enough to turn people off from ever trying it again.

Do you use AR Emoji on a Galaxy phone that is not a flagship device? Do you agree with my opinion that it is too slow and unoptimized?