I agree that latency is terrible, but this is bad design that actually makes the situation worse. Now instead of a constant, learnable latency, you have latency that varies wildly depending on what page you are on.
This is the wrong solution, in that it makes things more complicated and results in a generally poor experience even after the change. But that is what Google does all the time in UI, so I guess I have no reason to be surprised by this.
The proper solution: Do not make double-tap be a UI action. Done.
Or, if you insist on double-tap, make it only be an action that stacks transparently with single-tap. For example, in touch controls for The Witness, single-tap makes you walk toward the target. Double-tap makes you run. So as soon as we read a single tap, we can start doing the action without delay, and if we see the second tap we just kick up your target speed. It works great.
In short, hey Google, please stop doing band-aid solutions that make things worse, and hire some people who really have solid design vision, and give them the power to get things done.
This is the wrong solution, in that it makes things more complicated and results in a generally poor experience even after the change. But that is what Google does all the time in UI, so I guess I have no reason to be surprised by this.
The proper solution: Do not make double-tap be a UI action. Done.
Or, if you insist on double-tap, make it only be an action that stacks transparently with single-tap. For example, in touch controls for The Witness, single-tap makes you walk toward the target. Double-tap makes you run. So as soon as we read a single tap, we can start doing the action without delay, and if we see the second tap we just kick up your target speed. It works great.
In short, hey Google, please stop doing band-aid solutions that make things worse, and hire some people who really have solid design vision, and give them the power to get things done.