Saving Android From a Second-Rate Future

Saving Android From a Second-Rate Future(wired.com)

36 points by joshus 13 years ago | 50 comments

blinkingled 13 years ago |

1) True Android is the one that runs Android apps - difference in glow or purity not counted. They run, it's Android.

2) You cannot force your definitions of Android on people to get them to buy "the one true Android". People buy what they like. They like the S3 better than the Nexus. Talk about different priorities. S3 is starting to get the Jelly Bean update too.

3) There is something called emphasis in good designs. Android was designed to let people have choice. It was designed such that Samsung can ship TouchWiz and users can effortlessly install $ANOTHER_LAUNCHER to get the experience they want on the same phone.

4) Developers have dealt with complexity arising from diverse devices before. It is not a big deal. If you are crying about testing effort you aren't doing it right. If you care about reaching to 50% and growing number of Android users you are just going to have to do it right and invest in testing your app on most phones by releasing timed betas or buying your own dozen of phones. Remember it's been done before, done right and done by god knows how many developers that have good apps in the Play Store.

5) You can't crib about higher maintenance costs if you buy a big house. You similarly can't crib about differences in Android skins if you bought into a diverse ecosystem. Good news is you have a choice - care about purity, updates etc. - get the Nexus. Care about bleeding edge hardware, 2GB RAM, quad core CPU - get the S3. Care about iPhone-esque build quality - there is One X. As long as there is something I like there is no problem. If I don't like something in iPhone land - I have no recourse. That's their emphasis in design - less choice.

Android is working as designed - sure there are those upgrade issues that can be made better - but for the most part it is not the normal users who are complaining. As long as they can get things done with their Gingerbread phone they are happy. The next one down the line will get them a Jelly Bean phone that can still run the stuff they bought.

twism 13 years ago | |

Android isn't just about apps. From utilities like Google Now, to aesthetics like resizable widgets. The android experience isn't waiting for your carrier to update your phone when folks with nexus devices are getting updates a couple of days after the update is announced. S3 might be getting updates but I doubt US owners will see one this year.

Why can't we get iPhone-esque build quality of the One X with regular updates and purity of the nexus?

I say manufactures should leave the customizations to the users, focus on hardware, and getting timely updates to the phone.

blinkingled 13 years ago | | |

How do you think Google should do what you are asking it to do? Remember Microsoft is trying and going nowhere - their upgrades are still a fiasco - despite having a limited set of devices. It is simply not possible for Google to update those hundreds of SKUs out there to the latest version, all at once. The only way they could do that is by limiting hardware choices. People don't seem to like that.

There are rumors that Google will have as many as 5 manufacturers build a Nexus line that they will sell like they do the Galaxy Nexus today. May be that's as close as we will ever get to regular updates for a variety of hardware.

talmand 13 years ago |

I don't get it, is he complaining about the Android OS or the UI skins that manufacturers choose to install on their devices?

Does this mean that if I apply a custom theme to my Windows7 install it is no longer "true" Windows7?

Older phones not getting Jelly Bean is a silly complaint at this point, can't we get past this?

I just really don't get these type of articles, I can only assume they are link bait since they rarely make any sense. Then there's the entertaining comments as people argue over their phones as if it matters somehow in their lives.

And here I am commenting on it, argh, the cycle never ends!

Is this guy trying to convince me of something? What's the point of this article?

At least the author justified his stance by describing the devices he's purchased. This has become the tech industries "I'm not racist because I have black friends" statement that is starting to appear in so many places now.

ZeroGravitas 13 years ago |

Once they get the manufacturers to stop using different launchers and dialers, then they'll also have to stop users from selecting different apps for each intent to preserve the purity of Android as Matias and Andy intended it. Or they could just not bother and let people buy whatever phone they like and install whatever they want on it.

Is TouchWiz Angry Birds really that different from MotoBlur Angry Birds or CyanogenMod Angry Birds?

anigbrowl 13 years ago |

Android is second-rate because it's only in Jellybean that they've conquered the latency issues. People are using Android devices for passive consumption, rarely for any kind of content creation, because virtually all the content creators are and content creation software are already on iPad and have given up on Android, in much the same way that musicians almost exclusively used Macs for 10 years because nobody took audio seriously on the PC. That was OK because PCs had many other uses, but since tablets are more lifestyle than business devices, ceding all the early-adopter and tastemaker types to Apple was a huge mistake on Google's part.

Fragmentation is not that big of an issue among the Android users and developers I know. A craptastic multimedia stack was a much bigger negative.

I say this from a household with 4 Android devices and no Apple ones, incidentally.

mchusma 13 years ago | |

I run a startup, we do iOS and android development. I switched from iOS to android last year with the galaxy nexus, now back to the iPhone 5. I can tell you we spend a ton of time dealing with fragmentation. Here is the issue. It takes you something like 2x the front end time to test on some devices (40 or so, which we own some and use services and friends for others). After you finish and release, you get about 10x the support request for all kinds of random devices, and it is nearly impossible to debug without the device. Fragmentation is huge part of the effort in android. As a user, I found many of my favorite apps didn't work. I had to use my old iPhone 4 for music, as Spotify didn't work for bout the first 6 months I had my phone.

anigbrowl 13 years ago | | |

Totally - I only know a small subset of developers, and that was low on their list of complaints.

radley 13 years ago |

The author seems to be stuck in 2011 when device UIs were rough, behind the curve, and the promise of a pure Android device would save the platform. The "second rate" Galaxy S3 is now massively outselling the Nexus and is the only Android device to outsell iPhones last summer.

twism 13 years ago | |

It's just marketing. IMO, the GSIII is not a bad device, but pure nexus with Jelly Bean from google (hspda+ version, not the verzion nexus which should not be called a nexus device) is the best android (or any mobile OS) experience.

radley 13 years ago | | |

That's just opinion. I have 2 stock JB Nexus devices and yetprefer to use my GS3. If the sims were the same size I would use both since JB has the better voice stuff right now.

My point is numbers don't lie. The author laments the GS3 as second rate yet it's clearly the most in-demand device. The author is either deluded, had writers block (and dredged up an old premise), or hoped this might be a popular new link-bait topic.

tensafefrogs 13 years ago |

Google doesn't care if android is a "second-rate" OS. Google makes money from people using google. More smart phones = good for google, regardless of the OS the phone runs. Android has been hugely successful in getting phone carriers away from their antiquated systems (remember life before the iPhone?).

Yes, the iPhone is massively successful, but there's billions of people in the world who will never own one, and that's the market that Android is capturing so well. And to do that, they don't need to be perfect.

mirkules 13 years ago | |

Yes! People often lose sight of what is Google's goal compared to what is Apple's goal. The bulk of Apple's profit is in iDevices (hardware) and services (iTunes, AppStore, etc).

Google's core business is ads. They sell ads by getting as many people to use their services as possible. More devices running any Android directly translates into more money from ads, and I think this article entirely misses this point.

Zigurd 13 years ago |

The article contains a common error:

"Every iPhone comes with iOS exactly as Steve Jobs intended, which means developers know precisely what they’re getting."

On Android, that's not the problem. All Androids, as uglified by OEM add-ons as they might be, are highly compatible with applications. All Androids running the same API level of Android, even the Kindle Fire, run all the applications that use those APIs. There are optional APIs that some apps depend on, but those dependencies are also completely unrelated to OEM customization of Android.

The problem is that "customized" Androids are hard to upgrade. That means that, while all the iPhones that can run iOS 6 will be running iOS 6, there are many many models of Android devices that will never be upgraded to Jelly Bean. And that reduces the value of a lot of the Android installed base relative to Apple products in the field.

programminggeek 13 years ago |

Android was designed, I believe I read somewhere, to be the most carrier and OEM friendly OS possible for smartphones. It was meant to be skinned, loaded up with software by OEM's ad carriers, but still to act as a kind of compatibility layer between devices.

That alone solves the dev problem with Java ME that you would potentially need to do hundreds of separate builds for different devices and so on. With Android you have one version for all devices.

From that perspective, Android has gone beyond Google's wildest expectations and it solved at a basic level many of the Java ME problems, but that's not even close to the same goal that Apple had when they made the iPhone.

Why are people surprised that a system that was designed from day one to be what it is today isn't the same as iOS?

headShrinker 13 years ago | |

"It was meant to be skinned, loaded up with software by OEM's ad carriers, but still to act as a kind of compatibility layer between devices."

You are right, but this is definitely not understood by the masses or even tech-savvy users. iOS was built to separate the phone OS from the carrier, Android is some a bridge between carrier iterated phone OS and compatibility between the bunch.

mtgx 13 years ago |

As an Android users I agree with the article. The very least Google could do is get Motorola to use the "stock" Android. They really shouldn't care what the other manufacturers think about it. First off, they aren't using stock Android anyway, so why would they be upset about it? And second, they seem to be very willing to adopt a very "stock" WP8 OS on their phones, so again I see no reason for them to get mad over Google using stock Android on Motorola devices. Now, the hard part seems to be actually convincing Google to do this.

martey 13 years ago | |

One of the weirdest things about this article is the fact it does not mention wireless carriers once. If Motorola makes phones with stock Android, but no carriers decide to carry it in their stores and on their websites, it is no different from a Nexus phones.

Former Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha previously suggested that phone skinning and customization was heavily driven by wireless carriers, as well as phone manufacturers: http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/10/2697939/motorolas-sanjay-j...

drivebyacct2 13 years ago |

Has anyone seen the Motorola phones they're criticizing? The DROID line is really, really good. The newer DROID releases have a Blur that is even more minimal than the already very-minimal recent Blur. When I watched the demo of the RAZR I (with Intel), I was floored at how clean Blur was and how close to stock it was.

Turns out, the RAZR M that's available like, everywhere, is also the same way. Huge screen, smallest bezel I've ever seen, same form as the iPhone 5.

I was a lot, lot, lot more worried about Android a year or two ago. A year or two ago Blur was god damn awful. And irremovable. And there were NO phones on the market that offered an updated experience or an unlocked bootloader. Today, we have the Nexus line. We have Motorola and Samsung offering "Developer" edition phones that we can load our own OS onto.

tl;dr Android customization has been reigned in, though likely because of consumers buying in patterns and HTC/Moto/Samsung realizing that fewer and cleaner modifications in Android allow them to perform updates faster.

(also, I think Google would do themselves a favor in more than one way by accepting T-Mobile Theme Chooser into Android proper so that Motorola/HTC/Samsung could use that to provide visual differentiation instead of brewing their own theming jars.