Is Choice a Problem For Android? 361
New submitter mjone13 writes "Dave Feldman, in a blog posts, says that the problem Android faces is giving consumers too much choice. He cites several studies which state that consumers generally are unhappier when they have too much choice. 'Catering to all individual preferences creates a bloated, bland product. Not to mention a UI that’s impossible to navigate. Furthermore, people are notoriously bad at identifying what we want. And what we do want is influenced heavily by what we know — our expectations are constrained by our experience.' He then goes on to talk about Android fragmentation, app developer problems and bug issues. Finally he says the people who general prefer the choice Android provides are tinkers similar to gear heads who love tinkering with their car. 'I think many who extol Android’s flexibility fall into the tinkerer category, including some tech bloggers. They love all the ways they can customize their phones, not because they’re seeking some perfect setup, but because they can swap in a new launcher every week. That’s fun for them; but they’ve made the mistake of not understanding how their motivation differs from the rest of us.' Is choice really a problem for Android?"
Whether it's a problem depends on what the goals are. Providing a satisfying experience to a bunch of tinkerers is a very different thing from providing a satisfying experience to the multitude of non-tinkerers who buy smartphones.
Re:what I want to say is, (Score:5, Informative)
"Dave Feldman is a product designer with a background in user experience, product management, and front-end development. Heâ(TM)s the co-founder and chief product officer of Emu. Heâ(TM)s held positions at Yahoo! and AOL. Check out his website Operation Project and follow him on Twitter @dfeldman."
aka mr. "I configured my configurable system to act like crap and by the way I love iPhone".
now, of course if I can make a plugin to handle file saving.. then of course I can install a dozen apps to do it. just because I install two different homescreens for example doesn't mean that I have to choose between the two each time I press home.. I could though, if I wanted.
basically the answer to his problems is to not install extra apps. I don't know what the fuck is his actual suggestion on how to remove the problem of choice. maybe he is working on his own android variant where you can't install anything... more likely he is trying to troll some buzz and score a new gig. that's what his writing looks like. only made more obvious by him submitting these pieces on different blogs to gather maximum buzz since nobody gives a shit about his blog and the product he is promoting(emu.is, some kind of sms frontend where you can attach your position easily. how novel, for 2003).
and the other problems? android phones are so BIG! well fuck buy a smaller android phone.
(oh and he doesn't really seem to understand android multitasking, only sort of).
Re:choice doesn't *require* bad defaults (Score:5, Informative)
Why is everyone talking like there even is a problem? In August Android had almost 80% of the market [techcrunch.com]. Yeah, it must be incredibly boring and horrible to use if so many people want it.
Re:choice doesn't *require* bad defaults (Score:5, Informative)
It's not the users that are the problem its the dev teams because if you're writing for Apple you only need to test on few handsets & tablets. However, if you're writing for Android you need to test on fucking hundreds of different hand sets because each manufacturer has fucked with the OS. So either apps don't get written for android or if they do they normally get approx 100th the testing apps get on Apple.
Except if you were actually a developer working in the real life world (I am, on an app with 2 million daily active users) you'll know that that is not at all necessary. There are device-specific bugs, but they're rare, and in the most part we rotate testing on about 6 devices, and use bug reporting libraries to catch the rest. Our crash-rate is a tenth of the iOS team's crash-rate.
Re:The iPhone's pretty reasonable... (Score:4, Informative)
I tried android for a couple of weeks to see what I was missing. I asked all my android owning friends "OK, what should I check out that I can not do on my iPhone". About the only useful response I got was wifi scanning tools. That was it. Which i don't use my phone for anyway.
Then your friends either aren't very smart, or are simply happy with their stock Android and have never wanted to change it.
Homescreen widgets, a decently-sized screen, NFC file sharing, third party keyboards (or a physical one [bestbuy.com] if you prefer), custom launchers [google.com], completely customizable app icon placement (including whitespace where you want whitespace), ability to add a huge micro sd card to double your storage size (or swap it if you're bored with the media on this card and want something different for a road trip), ability to add and remove arbitrary files directly to/from the phone over cable without having to use iTunez spyware to do so, ability to go to pretty much any store and pick up a replacement charger/data cable for $5, support for a pointy stylus (on some models) instead of trying to use a marshmallow-on-the-end-of-a-stick capacitive stylus, etc., etc., etc.
Not to mention being able to take a video in any orientation and have it display correctly (i.e., not rotated 90 degrees [apple.com]) on any system...but from your comments, I'm guessing you partake of the entire apple pie, so you may not have seen this particular defect before if you only view your vids in your phone or on your Mac or via your Apple TV box. Oh, I didn't even know this one: apparently you can't email anything but a photo or video [csmonitor.com] using the stock iPhone email app...huh. Guess you'll have to use the GMail account for business stuff, then...other Android advantages such as haptic feedback are pretty 'meh' for me, as I just turn them off anyway.
Looks like Apple is finally allowing homescreen widgets (?er, maybe? looks like you still need to buy an app [lifehacker.com]?), so that's *one* thing off the list...once developers catch up and start providing more widget types, that is.
All that without having to root or 'jailbreak' the phone. If you root it, sky's the limit. True, most of the things you can do if you root the phone are things that your average Joe won't care much about (custom ROM's, complete bit-wise phone backups, ability to software-switch more system settings, ability to remove the stock apps instead of just disabling them, etc.), but to the tinkerer, they are delightful :)
Re:choice doesn't *require* bad defaults (Score:2, Informative)
You realize what you are saying is equivalent to saying a new windows app needs to be test on every version of windows, and on every machine combination, right?
Actually, in a way, yes.
Windows and Linux are a generic operating system designed to run on many devices and be easy for developers to make it and it's applications work across many machines. It's designed to compensate for different screen resolutions, processors, memory, and more.
Android isn't.
While people think of Android as being similar to Windows or Linux, it's not KDE versus Gnome or Win7 versus Xp either. Android is more like a very specialized motherboard bios/operating system/custom interface and each is hand made for that particular circuit board with little or no overhead for compatibility. It's a specialized embedded system, not a generic operating system. It's compiled not just on a per phone model basis, it's compiled and customized specifically for each carrier and frequency band as well, and it even goes beyond that. Android can't settle on how to handle storage, wants to boot, or even how to update itself. Then you have manufacturers trying to distinguish their phones from others... I like to tell people, take the worst parts of Windows (security), Linux (usability) and Apple computers (upgradability) and you get Android. It's too many people arguing about where to go, but with no one actually steering the ship.
Ask yourself this, how many updates a week does your computer get? Several a week? How about an iphone? Iphone 3's can upgrade all the way to IOS 5 (possibly IOS6). Now how about Android? Many Android phones are lucky to get a single security update before being end of life'd, much less an OS update, and if you do, there is a very real chance the update breaks something. Why is that? Manufacturers cannot write an update to all of their phones like Apple can, each has to be made for every specific model and carrier, which is expensive. This was a known issue with Android from the very beginning, but Google chose to ignore it (they have only recently started to address it), and don't even get me started on Android security (which is attrocious). While Blackberry understood modularity and looked professional on top and underneath, and Apple builds their phones from a traditional computer OS perspective (a generic system to cover many models), Android is pure anarchy, anything goes and ultimately users suffer, even if they don't know it.
So why is it popular?
Well that's easy, it's cheap. You can buy (without subsidies) an Iphone for $500 or an Android for $50 and let's be honest, they do the same things.
Before you start saying I'm biased, I'm actually an Android Developer (I work on roms mostly) and I use Android on a daily basis. I know several app developers, and one of their biggest complaints is compatibility.