Motorola CEO Blames Open Android Store For Phone Performance Ills 384
angry tapir writes "Motorola's CEO blamed the open Android app store for performance issues on some phones. Of all the Motorola Android devices that are returned, 70 percent come back because applications affect performance, Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility, said during a webcast presentation at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Technology conference."
Wow there is a first.. (Score:4, Insightful)
A company passing blame on another company for its failings...
"Top" needs to be standard on smart phones (Score:5, Insightful)
Because of the black box nature of smart phone, developers of smart phone applications are never held accountable for the resources their application consume. It should be standard to be able to see the amount of CPU, RAM and network I/O each application is generating so that hogs which cause performance, battery life or network overages can easily be spotted. As far as I can tell, neither Apple, Google or Microsoft has taken seriously exposing this type of data as a standard part of their phone software stack. Hence, we are left in situation similar to when the food industry was not required to put a break down of the nutritional information of the food The smart phone users have apps contributing "fat" and "sugar" into the smart phone's diet without any hard numbers to evaluate that impact.
Re:Then again... (Score:2, Insightful)
The people that care about openness are an insignificant share of the market. Android is ahead because of increased hardware choice and cheaper handsets. That's it.
Motoblur (Score:5, Insightful)
Does he mean things like motoblur?
Yep, the original Droid/Milestone was lighing fast running 2.1 and 2.2. When moto started to shoehorn in Motoblur they all of a sudden got really slow.
Same with HTC Sense but HTC are at least smart enough to chuck in lots of extra RAM to handle their bloated interface. I've been running Cyanogenmod on my Desire Z since 3 days after I got it and I've been more then pleased with how fast it is, Cyanogenmod uses ADW launcher which has a crapload of features (so much so it suffers from Kitchen Sink-itis) but is still very very fast.
I used to be a fan of Android on Moto, but between locked bootloaders and crappy social network based interfaces that slow everything down have completely changed my opinion on Moto. They are floundering because of bad design decision in using Motoblur, not because of Androids openness.
After HTC and Samsung, I'd rather buy a Huawei phone simply because they used the vanilla interface.
Re:He raises a valid concern and offers a solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong Direction!!!!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Top" needs to be standard on smart phones
I cannot emphasize strongly enough the horror and despair for humanity I see in this single phrase.
It's like saying back in the caveman days that what we really needed was a better rock to carve . No, we needed to move on from the cave and invent fire and dwellings.
We need to move BEYOND what we have have, what we know. We cannot keep producing computing devices for humanity that require as standard anything like Top. We need to have systems that actually exhibit some of the AI we've been working for decades on, and not have to have every user know what a process is, or indeed manage anything.
Sorry, but our baby cannot stay a baby forever, because a 50-year old baby you still have to treat like a baby is mentally damaged. We have to let computing be usable by everyone, not working fully only for the anointed and requiring mothering because we cannot tear ourselves loose from that model.
Re:He raises a valid concern and offers a solution (Score:4, Insightful)
How about getting RID of MotoBlur...it was one of the problems causing the performance issues to BEGIN WITH.
Re:Wrong Direction!!!!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to move BEYOND what we have have, what we know.
Sure, but that means something better than top, not some dumb-down interface that hides all the useful information.
We need to have systems that actually exhibit some of the AI we've been working for decades on
If we actually had any kind of AI that might make sense. Generally speaking, in my experience when you try to hide the details from users you end up with an interface that's Artificially Stupid, not Artificially Intelligent.
Re:Wrong Direction!!!!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Bingo. Apple is right on this one, you shouldn't need anything like this. The fact that you do says that something is broken.
That was one of their arguments for why multi-tasking took so long on the iPhone, and why it's not true multi-tasking like on a desktop (or Android). They wanted to avoid this exact problem. Of the people I know with Android phones, this is one of the things they complain about. They ship with crapware that can be very difficult to uninstall or just exit so it doesn't keep sucking up your CPU/battery. Just about a page above this comment is one from someone who rooted the phone on day 3 to remove junk and get it to perform smoothly.
Windows Mobile had programs like top because the OS couldn't manage resources well. My Dell Axim x50v (which was WM 5.5, I think) came with a little program pre-installed by Dell to let you quit applications through a tap on a shortcut on the top menu bar. And do you know why? For convenience? No, because it was necessary. There was no other way to quit apps (except digging through settings to find the task manager and force-quitting them). If you didn't stay on top and manage them, programs would use all your CPU or memory, and things would slow down (or not open). It was terrible.
The fact that Apple can do basic tests to make sure your post-to-twitter app doesn't use 100% CPU all the time is a good thing in my book. I realize you can side load things, but I would like to see Google try to do the same. Certainly I think Amazon should. As a consumer using an appliance (which is the way I use my iPhone), I want to be able to buy apps without having to worry about that kind of thing. Ensuring "manners" from apps, that they generally function correctly... that's the kind of thing I want out of my app store. I hope some of the stores out there (Amazon, carriers, etc) decide to do that. It seems it would be in their interest (as the article attests).
We've been here (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:We've been here (Score:4, Insightful)
Shocking, the same third party issues that caused MS so many headaches for so many years also applies to phones. The difference is people can tolerate some complexity on their desktop. Apple figured out the vertical integration thing when it came to phones. People don't want a PC in their hand, they want a well-running appliance. The failure to grasp that will be Android's undoing.
Yes, I have an iPhone but I don't feel I'm a fan of Apple nor a critic of Motorola, Android, and all things NOT made by Apple.
What I do insist on is technology that works, out of the box, without RTFM.
I've been in IT 34 years, and in fact retired TODAY (takes a bow) and that has become my litmus test for tech. I was a senior IT manager, primarily networks, for a 20+ billion dollar company and the last thing I had time to dink with was my freakin' phone. That's the primary reason I chose an iPhone.
I don't think Android is going to fail...just too much inertia...but they may not do as well as they envisioned until they get some coherency in their OS and application development. Their blessing is indeed their curse.
Re:Wrong Direction!!!!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
The carriers would never allow it! The AI would kill all their shovelware and all the crap they add for no better reason than to let the marketing department and execs mark their territory (in exactly the way most animals do).
That out of my system, I don't think smartphones are up to any sort of AI operating system at this point, even if we had one to port. Beyond that, what would you have an AI do to keep the phone responsive yet not kill off the users favorite waste of cycles? How many meg of space should be granted to the AI in order to replace 4K worth of top?
Re:He raises a valid concern and offers a solution (Score:3, Insightful)
The Motorola CEO, while I disagree with the concern about the open market, is spot on about the performance issues. I don't want to pay for a more powerful phone, and I don't think I should have to. My Moto Droid with its 300MHz processor has actually had very good battery life -- several days outside the US in airplane mode, and two days with basic 3G use. I don't think a phone should need a 1GHz processor, and indeed the original iPhone had a "slow" processor and the UI is more responsive for basic UI tasks than my friend's Droid X (aside from the smooth home screen scrolling which is just a GPU hack anyway).
The battery issues I have dealt with are almost exclusively issues with the built-in OS, leaving no solution aside from restarting the phone. For example, "android.process.media" taking 100% CPU after rescanning the SD card or playing a song, and no visible feedback aside from the phone getting hot; or MediaService taking hours to update the list of photos in the Gallery app.
Aside from a couple apps that run as a service, I've almost never had issues with applications eating up battery life unless I'm using them -- and I'm fine with using battery in that case, because I want to use those apps. However, unlike iPhone, Android allows applications to run in the background, and with background tasks, Android has the responsibility to keep the Phone functioning when those apps are running.
Android should always have a usable UI (10 seconds to answer a phone call when CPU is busy is absurd), in addition to a way to learn about CPU usage and disable faulty background apps. A message like "Service X is consuming excessive battery life. Disable / Ignore / Don't notify me again about X" would probably solve half of the issues I have had. I put the blame on Android itself for not having put any thought into this problem--Every android release adds dozens of useless features but no innovation on solving these basic usability issues.
Re:Then again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice, I missed that.
The sad thing is the average slashdotter will still think Android has surpassed iOS, as far too many have been saying here for over a year now. Android isn't even *close* to iOS's market share, and as Android's growth has settled down, it's not certain that it ever will.
That won't stop the endless postings that somehow people are flocking to Android because of "freedom", as though the average phone buyer gives two shits.