Will Android Flavors Spoil the Platform? 405
rsmiller510 writes "Open source operating systems have a lot of upsides, but when you give cell phone makers and providers the power to customize the phones to whatever degree they like, it could end up confusing consumers and watering down the Android label."
The "choice is bad" argument (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the competitors don't have choice and can't get it they have to argue that "choice is bad". If you like choice though - if you prefer a less expensive phone or one with all the bells and whistles, or larger or smaller or whatever, Android is an obvious choice. If you like to choose the phone network based on pricing or features, quality of network, or how badly they restrict the phone's features to maximize your bill, again Android is a clear winner. If a single great design that's wholly integrated and secured by a single vendor is your preference, iPhone is a grand choice - and that's great! You get to choose that too.
Lack of choice as a feature though is in general a tough sell.
Re:The "choice is bad" argument (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the old fragmentation debate.
Choice isn't a bad thing. Too much choice is. What can Android 1.6 offer me that 2.2 can't? It's a little ridiculous. Why should cheaper phones be stuck on 1.6 when they're fully capable of running 2.2?
Re:The "choice is bad" argument (Score:4, Informative)
Many of Motorola's phones are marketed as "1.6, upgradeable to 2.x", but in truth there seem to be hardware issues that make this complicated, and it remains to be seen if 2.x will ever actually be distributed to owners of the lower selling phones.
We've already seen Motorola cancel the upgrade for non-US phones of the same models, to "ensure the best user experience".
Point being, advertised capability is not necessarily capability.
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Yep, I'm a Cliq XT owner too. I bought it with the understanding (as promised by the T-Mobile goon that sold it to me) that 2.1 was a month away. That was in May. Still waiting...
PSA (Score:4, Insightful)
I advise everyone to stay far, far away from their Android offerings. After this burn, I'm not buying anything from them again.
The phone was so locked down to start with, I should have done my homework and realized this was a trap.
It appears they care about the Droid series, but nothing else. Don't assume Motorola will live up to their commitments.
Run, don't walk, from Motorola.
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It appears they care about the Droid series, but nothing else. Don't assume Motorola will live up to their commitments.
Is it Motorola holding up the upgrade or is it the carrier? I have a Motorola Droid, and there were unofficial 2.2 Droid upgrades months before Verizon rolled out theirs at the first of September.
I have a friend with a Sprint phone (I think HTC) that is still waiting for 2.2, though not expecting to get it. His phone has run like crap since the 1.6 to 2.1 upgrade earlier this year.
All in
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Luckily, there seems to be a solution forthcoming [slashdot.org] as long as a new ROM becomes available.
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Reliability, that's what. Not that 1.6 is inherently more reliable than 2.2. It is that 1.6 has been fully verified by the manufacturer to run reliably on their hardware. There is a cost to doing such verification so for some phones, especially ones toward the end of life, verifying them for 2.2 will not happen. This is a large part of the reason why a new Android OS release isn't instantly available for your phone when Google releases to the general market.
Re:The "choice is bad" argument (Score:4, Insightful)
Not that 1.6 is inherently more reliable than 2.2.
Actually, its a fact that all devices prior to Android 2.x have a fundamental OS flaw and are inherently less reliable. Android 2.2 adds limited JIT capability to the platform, fixes various life cycle problems which still existed at the start of the 2.x series (which is one of the reasons why 2.x is fundamentally broken), and goes a long way toward improvement memory management.
In a nutshell, all devices running Android prior to 2.01 have fatal life cycle, memory and resource management flaws.
In fact, one of the reasons why task killers briefly became popular on Android is exactly because of these horrible OS flaws; which I previously blamed on applications. Task killers are not only no longer needed, but they don't even work on Android 2.2 and later. The fact of the matter is, while many of the problems I blamed on applications were in fact application problems, many were not or were a compounding of application and OS bugs/flaws.
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Right. Which is why the huge plethora of choices available in DOS-(and later Windows-)based PCs resulted in the DOS/Windows PC offerings failing to succeed in the market against the more focussed offerings from Apple, resulting in DOS/Windows becoming a niche market while there is an Apple computer on almost every desk in most enterprises.
Re:The "choice is bad" argument (Score:5, Informative)
The issues on the iPhone you linked to are for a model that is over two years old. I had a 3G until two weeks ago, with iOS 4 it could get slow at times launching certain apps but it wasn't a big enough issue to warrant reverting back to iOS 3.x and it's not a big enough issue that my fiancee complains about it.
It's not like there are any iPhone 3Gs sitting on shelves across the planet with the slow ass iOS 4 while a iPhone 4 is sitting next to it for sale. The fragmentation chart you linked to comparing iOS to Android is flawed in that the 3.x flavor fragmentation isn't because of Apple, its because users just don't update their phones. The Android fragmentation is the fault of the vendors, so apples and oranges for that argument.
So really its 44.54 iOS 3.x, 34.05 iOS 4.x and 21.42 running jailbroken or iOS 2.x and are never going to patch anyway or get apps anyway so who cares? At least in early August
The Android issue being discussed here is fragmentation of current phone models. Apple is shipping iOS 3.x for iPads and iOS 4.x for iPhones and iPods, so mobile wise Apple is shipping one flavor of the iOS, 4.x
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Well, I'm comparing Apples to Androids actually ;) Where was my 'apples to oranges' argument? I'm talking about the difference of OS versions in the wild (which seems to be what really matters, not how things got into that state). I'd agree with you if that chart was showing versions of Android *currently being shipped*. It's not, it's comparing versions *in the wild*, same as the iOS figures, so I think it's fair to compare them. I agree that there is a difference in how the two situations came about. Som
Re:The "choice is bad" argument (Score:5, Insightful)
What? you just totally contradicted yourself, and in the same sentence. So you are saying that iOS fragmentation is a user issue, not a device issue, so um, how do you upgrade the original iPhone to the latest version of iOS? There are the same issues here too, so get off your fanboy bus and try to be a bit objective.
Support has ended on the original iPhone. It had 3 major OS updates from 1.0 through to 3.1.3. That's a pretty good run considering some Android phones haven't gotten any new major version. Furthermore because Apple tightly controls the API backwards compatibility for apps should be easy to maintain for developers for the foreseeable future, especially because the iPad is still on iOS 3.x. The difference is mostly in games pushing the envelop in hardware use and apps otherwise dependent on newer hardware but then that's the game isn't it ?
Re:The "choice is bad" argument (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. The notion that iOS is more fragmented than Android is laughable. All iPhone models short of the original are fully capable of running the latest iOS, if some *users* choose not to upgrade for whatever reason that is *their* choice. Unlike Android where even newly purchased lower tier models don't ship with the latest version, and may very well never be able to upgrade to it.
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When I bought my iPhone 3G it came with iOS 2.0. Now it isrunning iOS 4.1. I didn't have to pay anything(that's only iPod touch devices). I didn't have to wait 2-12 months for the updates after they were announced.
I am looking at andriod phones and one that I was interested in, onethat was released new in June is still running 2.1 with no plans by the company to upgrade it to froyo. That is market fragmentation. When officail updates are withheld on products only a couple of months old when it was release
Re:The "choice is bad" argument (Score:4, Insightful)
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And if you go to a Verizon store and look at the current Android offerings, you can see the crappware is already becoming a problem. The original Motorola Droid looks vanilla compared to the Droid X, 2, etc.
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Re:The "choice is bad" argument (Score:5, Insightful)
you can remove pc crapware. we really do own complete control (even bios) over our pc's.
do you really think you can totally re-program a phone from open source code?
really?
when you buy a phone and it comes with icons and features you want to remove and can't, how is this OPEN again?
its not open. its open on some areas but not in the ones we need. when ATT comments out the software sources menu option, this is a prime example of what we are complaining about!
locking boot code is also evil and yet allowed by the android system or architecture.
really bad move, google. google just bad much worse deals than apple did with the carriers. apple DEFINED what was ok and what was not. google said 'hey as long as we can insert ads, we don't really CARE what you do mr. vendor.'
very different models in how to reign in your carrier. google had as much control as apple did but chose not to flex their powerful muscles. they made bad judgement call when they let the carriers run wild with THEIR codebase.
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You could argue that Google is allowing this while they build up critical mass. You would hope that once google is firmly entrenched in the market they would start to dictate what defines the Android brand better.
Play nice with the carriers until they have to play nice with you or risk losing their Android users.
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Google doesn't give two shits about being open.
Google cares about ad revenue. They needed an "open" OS because they couldn't force other phones to always funnel things their way. Verizon needs an "open" phone, because THEY want to ensure they can control it (rather than the phone vendor or user)
Best to remember that, when thinking about Google and Android.
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You could argue that Google is allowing this while they build up critical mass. You would hope that once google is firmly entrenched in the market they would start to dictate what defines the Android brand better.
Play nice with the carriers until they have to play nice with you or risk losing their Android users.
That's BS, the carriers would just keep on using their outdated versions with a new theme slapped on (plenty of precedents with PalmOS and WinCE not changing for years.) Face it, Google caved and gave in to the carriers going as far as compromising their stance on net neutrality for a lucrative Verizon deal. It's a missed opportunity and let's just hope they didn't slam the door that Jobs forced open with the iPhone.
Re:The "choice is bad" argument (Score:5, Insightful)
The users, not so much.
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If you like choice though - if you prefer a less expensive phone or one with all the bells and whistles, or larger or smaller or whatever, Android is an obvious choice. If you like to choose the phone network based on pricing or features, quality of network, or how badly they restrict the phone's features to maximize your bill, again Android is a clear winner.
Yet none of these things (hardware and network) have anything to do with Android (software).
Regardless of what us the technically inclined think, mo
Re:The "choice is bad" argument (Score:4, Interesting)
As a developer this is exactly the reason I've moved to iPhone development, and away from Java on mobile devices. Nokia, Samsung etc ruined it for themselves by introducing conflicting extensions and quirks to their platforms, along with expensive certification schemes in partnership with the carriers that made distribution as a small company or sole developer prohibitively expensive and time consuming. Apple smoothed this out no end with its single store and platform.
I'm no fanboy of Apple, or anyone else, but increased fragmentation, and the "embrace and extend" attitudes of phone manufacturers could well end up frustrating Android developers in much the same way.
Yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
No! (Score:2)
You compare apples to oranges here. When I need a phone, I first look out for the phone itself then the service provider. Others may look at the carrier first. Can you say Android has done miserably so far? No!
On the other hand, when I am looking for a computer system, I look at the applications available, ease of use then the support. In this department, Linux is still wanting.
Google should stay the course with its Android licensing regime. It gives us choice...much deeper than anything otherwise. Just rec
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Re:Yes... (Score:4, Interesting)
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you don't see the point.
the point is that with 'gnu linux' you really CAN own your own pc and do anything you want.
cell phones are NOT the same no matter how much the vendors want you to think so.
each phone has its own way to do things, upgrade, change, etc. its as fragmented as it can be!
if you're in the middle of it, you probably won't see it. as a non-owner (but looking, every so often) I do have to say that the market is quite insane and unless you invest a LOT of time researching it (boring...) you e
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What's going to spoil the Android market is carriers addin
Re:Yes... (Score:4, Insightful)
I would not be surprised at all if the sheer profusion of dists have scared off a lot of people unsure even where to start.
pfft (Score:5, Insightful)
I love the fact that there is such a wide variety of Android phones. Different features are important to different people, and being able to choose between different phones gives them the opportunity to buy one that caters towards whatever the find most important (good screen, good keypad, good camera, etc.)
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The problem is not the fact that there's choice, but that there are distributions that lock you in and give you no choice (which is most of them). The Android distributions available, currently, are not very good and are actually very poor representations of Android as a platform. If we had a choice of device as well as a choice of Android distribution without the lock-in, then it would be a Good Thing.
You are not the average demographic (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry to say, but you (and me) are not exactly the primary buyer of these phones anymore. It's "normal" (i.e. non-geek) people. When they see some phones on AT&T running android and offering features XYZ, and some others on Verizon running android and offering features ABC, there is going to be some serious confusion. Is it the phone? Is it the carrier? Is it android? They don't care, they just want the best stuff.
This is part of the reason why android also keeps being shunned (in articles) for business
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All that said, I personally prefer android, but that's probably because of customization and choice, which is exactly what you stated :).
Absolutely! I can't stand leaving gadgets stock, I always HAVE to do SOMETHING to them. Android is the perfect platform for just such a thing :-)
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having a wide variety is good.
we don't have that.
if we want THIS hardware and THAT software, can we really do that?
no!
this is a misleading argument. you cannot just install any 'distro' to YOUR phone. carries are sort of hoping you think that way and plunk down money with that misunderstanding but its just not true.
fragmentation WITH FREEDOM is great. we don't have the necessary ingredient to make fragmentation work for us; it works entirely against us as its locked to this and that hardware model!
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...it takes a few minutes of research to find out what hardware features and which Android version a phone uses. That's all.
If you have enough knowledge to want a specific Android distro, you certainly have eough knowledge to do a little research before spending hundreds of dollars.
its a valid point (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not a smartphone owner, not yet. I don't have a company paying my way for me and I'm not about to foot a $100/mo bill on my own. not yet and not with the current level of phones.
a few weeks after you buy a 'smartphone' some other model makes yours a POS. well, almost. how can anyone buy in that kind of market and retain sanity?
vendors are destroying the 'beauty' of the system. apple (I hate apple, btw) had it almost right when it controlled the carriers. the carriers are little children that run wild if not controlled. apple controlled them; android simply let them run even MORE wild.
google fucked this up. and I think its too late now, the market is SO fragmented its actually damaged. fanboys won't agree but who cares what they think; its the rest of us middle-guys who simply want something stable and something SUPPORTABLE for a few years. the throw-away model every few months is not do-able for me, for this pricepoint.
if there is ever a 3rd choice, I hope they learn from the 2 that 'came before'. apple model is too extreme but actually so is the android model. a middle ground needs to be there, really; and is not. we have the walled garden and the wild wild west where vendors can fark up YOUR phone and mostly get away with it.
I'm still on the sidelines and not willing to fund this insanity until it levels out.
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Oh, by the way, I pay about 70 USD/month for my phone, hav
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$70 is still very close to the general $100 point.
plus, many carriers are FORCING this $30/mo '4g' fee just, well, because THEY CAN.
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In anticipation of how you might respond to that: Does your big box manufacturer support your OS when you upgrade to the latest linux kernel? If not, why do you have to
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a few weeks after you buy a 'smartphone' some other model makes yours a POS.
I agree with your points and I think the quote above illustrates the Android fragmentation problem. My 3GS is still going strong and I'd likely buy an Android device, if that phone could sustain itself with updates for awhile, like NexusOne has done. Instead, they'll just come up with an an X and a 2 version...
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"a few weeks after you buy a 'smartphone' some other model makes yours a POS"
That happens with all computer hardware
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My only requirement when buying an Android phone was a reasonable expectation I'd be able to get root and load whatever android flavor I wanted. I have a low end phone (Eris) that still makes me happy almost a year on. Sure there are faster, prettier, and more expensive phones. Mine is still quite fast thanks to 2.2 (which actually extends the useable life of old phones, likely why many companies aren't upgrading to it) and does the job significantly better today than it did when I bought the phone. I c
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The Carriers' lock down, the hardware mfr's lock down (Motorola) and permanent crapware are the reasons I am now leaning towards an iPhone 3GS.
At least I can JailBreak the 3GS and do what I want.
If I could get an Android that I could control with a good camera, I would jump.
Unfortunately the Carriers want to treat all their users the same way: like idiot users.
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apple had it almost right when it controlled the carriers. the carriers are little children that run wild if not controlled. apple controlled them
Apple was like a little kid who thinks he's telling the elephant he's riding where to go. AT&T showed them pretty quickly how much control they had regarding tethering, bandwidth, etc.
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Hm. Yeah, not really seeing it. I've been using the same apps on my EVO 4G that co-workers and friends are using on their Droid, Droid Eris, Droid 2, Galaxy S series phones, Hero, Cliq, etc. Oops wait a sec, my turn on Wordfeud with a friend on a Droid X.
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if there is ever a 3rd choice, I hope they learn from the 2 that 'came before'. apple model is too extreme but actually so is the android model. a middle ground needs to be there, really; and is not. we have the walled garden and the wild wild west where vendors can fark up YOUR phone and mostly get away with it.
My suggestion: Palm pre with WebOS. You can wait a bit until the new phone comes out (should be a few month, according to rumors). It's like Apple in the way that it is a standard package, not to be changed by the vendors, but it is not a closed garden. As a bonus, Palm/HP have the most homebrew-friendly attitude, so you do not have to worry about each version upgrade ruining your patches.
And it's a beautiful OS, with not neat stuff coming in the next version (WebOS 2.0).
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and you have micro-USB connector imposed on all carriers. How is that working?
How is Apple coping with that? (MacHeads here are dying to know.)
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What I'm dying to know is where you got the idea that it was imposed, and why you think it's a bad idea for chargers to have a common plug.
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Because it still has compatibility problems. Phones have had USB mini ports for years now, yet they always seem to make things so the chargers are incompatible with each other. Some use the ID pin to determine if it's a charger (so they can drop >500mA to charge faster). Some use special resistors on the D+/D- lines to determine charge current compatibility (Apple - 1
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With an adapter [pocket-lint.com], allegedly.
And the connector is being imposed on manufacturers, not carriers.
BlackBerry and Nokia phones are already coming with MicroUSB charging capability. I've tried both with a MicroUSB to USB-A cable and an Apple USB charger [apple.com]. The BlackBerry charges but the Nokia doesn't.
The Nokia (E72) implementation is a bit weird actually. I seems to need a connection to whatever it's connected to over USB before it will start charging. Switching from off-but-charging to on-and-charging briefly
Someone call Google! (Score:4, Insightful)
You know. I've never bought a car thinking it had any features in it other than the ones I knew it had. How about instead of treating consumers like they're the awkward creepy man-child that greets customers at Wal-Mart, we just expect people to have enough interest in the product to do their research and read the fucking box and reviews to find out what the device is even capable of? I mean, are there any reasons other than because the expectation of personal responsibility is dead?
Re:Someone call Google! (Score:5, Insightful)
it also enables the CARRIER or vendor to 'comment out' stuff that we would want and adding crap to our screens that we do NOT want. and often you cannot change this, as its not really a 'portable pc' as people want to think. its still in a lock-down mode when it comes to your ability to do things with ALL 'google phones'.
google did not control the carriers. they made a huge mistake in this design aspect.
this is the problem.
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Re:Someone call the OHA (not Google) (Score:2, Insightful)
Secondly, every phone you buy - at least in the US - is locked down, so your argument is that their Achilles heal is that - in one respect only - they are not better than the others.
Thirdly, it is locked down by default, but nothing is stopping you from unlocking it or paying someone to unlock it for you.
Finally, it
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The problem is that carriers do not want you to have a general-purpose computer on their networks. They want to be able to sell you each. individual. application. The last thing they want is the end-user installing software, so they take steps to disable functionality. They want you to have a pseudo-smartphone, it looks neat, costs a lot, racks up the data charges...but isn't a general-purpose computer.
This is at odds with what we all thought Android promised us: a real OS for our tiny computers that would
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"The last thing they want is the end-user installing software, so they take steps to disable functionality. They want you to have a pseudo-smartphone, it looks neat, costs a lot, racks up the data charges...but isn't a general-purpose computer.
This is at odds with what we all thought Android promised us: a real OS for our tiny computers that would let us treat the carrier like any other ISP."
A less sinister reason could be that they don't want masses of rogue smartphone programs run by people who can't comp
but not in that way (Score:3, Insightful)
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Spending $200 on a phone just to hear "everything on your phone sucks- download these dozen programs to patch it up"... sucks.
How is that any different than having to jailbreak an iPhone?
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The difference is that you payed $600 for the iPhone.
I Agree (Score:5, Insightful)
The plus side of it (being fair here) is it is really driving competition and making the different forks of Android as well as iOS better because of it. It's forcing manufacturers to drive to improve, which is good for the consumer but, for people who want Android to win, it will soon become a discussion of specific forks of Android because there will no longer be one unified version.
Heck, I find myself looking at Android phones thinking "if I were to switch from my iPhone, which one would I be interested in getting?" (I won't be switching - I like my iPhone - but I like to contemplate which version of Android interests me to keep my options open and all that.) That, to me, is a clear sign that the differentiation is real and something people need to keep in mind.
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TechCrunch had a really good post [techcrunch.com] a few days ago about carriers exploiting the openness of Android. Worth a read.
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The proper analogy is the 80's (Score:5, Insightful)
Despite Google being the unifying factor, the carriers are even more greedy and less capable than the Unix vendors of old, and meanwhile Apple remains ascendant and proprietary.
Inconsistent user interfaces diminish network effects and will suppress Android adoption... then there are abominations like the Verizon vCast store [androidpolice.com].
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You're spot on and it's similar to what Bluetooth went through. Oh your car has Bluetooth? So does my phone. Why can't it stream to your speakers? What's A2DP? It streams to my headphones wirelessly, what's the difference, they're both Bluetooth?
it'll turn into two people that both have new android phones with different features and can't understand why
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As long as most people can say "I love HTC phones," and not realize they are in fact talking about a brand that sells phones with a handful of different operating systems, Android isn't going to be a label to dilute.
And that's how most of my acquaintances are. They'll tell me how happy they are with a new phone, not having any idea what OS it runs. It's just too new a concept for them.
If they see a cool feature on a friend's phone, they'll buy _that model_, they won't figure out what OS it runs and start lo
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If they see a cool feature on a friend's phone, they'll buy _that model_, they won't figure out what OS it runs and start looking for phones with that OS expecting it to have that particular feature.
That's the problem because that's exactly what will drive the vendors to proprietary extensions. You might say that's just more choice for the consumer but the real problem of fragmentation is for the developer. They have to make sure their app/game works across all different versions, different hardware, submit it to different carrier specific stores, etc.
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I believe that people _will_ hear about cool features that an Android phone offers, buy an Android phone and find out, too late, that it's available on _other_ Android phones, not the one they bought.
This is rapidly becoming a problem with other smartphones as well, so it's just par for the course. It's sad when marketeers can collude with each other to provide the illusion of choice, when the reality is they all offer the same crappy deal except for killer feature x. I was most annoyed for instance, to find that BlackBerry Enterprise Server was not a feature of all BlackBerrys. Some carriers disable this functionality and charge extra for it, even though I'm administering the BES! They just assume that
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Essentially, I think that the carriers ARE trying the "embrace and extend" business model to fragment and force lock into them for certain features. But the problem is that they're having problems with the "extend" part, because everytime they try to extend, they see that Google
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Doesn't matter at all (Score:2, Interesting)
Android is not a consumer brand, therefore its flavors can't raise or sink the brand. The whole premise is flawed.
no, but... (Score:2)
I've already given up developing (Score:5, Interesting)
Not much more I can say. After developing for a year and a half by myself, it has gotten unmanageable. I can make an app that is polished and slick for the Droid, but the ratings get dragged down by other devices that it apparently doesn't run slick on.
As a single person I can't possibly manage all of the QA and customer service that all of these devices demand. It was fun while it lasted. Never developed for the iPhone but I can see how it might be a better experience.
But you can test on a subset (Score:2, Interesting)
iphone 3g, 3gs, 4, 4.01, 4.1, original iphone, ipod touch 1 2 and 3..
That list sounds daunting, but all you really need to test on is:
iPhone 3G running iOS 3.2.
iPhone 4 running iOS4.x (latest version).
The 3G could run iOS 4.x if you only wanted to develop for 4 (which is realistic as the adoption rate of new OS releases is very high and rapid). After iOS4 comes to the iPad (November) I'm switching all development to support iOS4 only.
The 3G is really the low bar for performance to test against, as long a
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all iOS devices have the same input. Android phones have keyboards, touch, some have stock android, some have OEM overlays, etc. with iOS all you do is test on the current OS and the previous version if needed. all the hardware will support it.
Leave Android Alone! (Score:5, Interesting)
No (Score:2, Insightful)
Choice is bad, obviously (Score:3, Interesting)
I have to say this, damn people.
Look at all the different cars we can buy, food, shoes, clothes.
Books, music, movies, etc...
Do I really need to go on?
This article is just flamebate, to cause peeps to get angry.
Anyways, didn't we have an article that like 70% of the Android Devices were 2.0 and up?
And I bummed my G1 is running 1.6? No. The phone works fine and does what I want it to. Keep my calender info, call people, receive calls, and i like to read ebooks on it.
If I want Android 2.2, I can either use a custom rom, or i can buy a new phone.
Just like everything fucking thing else.
I'm going to add this. I'm glad we have all these choices. It's good for us. Now quit thinking you need to defend what you buy, because that sort of thinking is stupid.
Seems rather contradictory (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFA:
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of open-source tools, and Android has the potential to offer all the advantages of an open platform, but it also gives the handset and cellphone providers the power to customize and add endlessly to their phones.
So just what is the advantage of an open platform if OEMs are not allowed to customize it? I see Android like the Linux kernel on which it is built. The Linux kernel powers all manner of desktops, phones and other devices with a wide variety of user interfaces. Similarly, Android is a building block to make a phone user interface. It allows manufacturers to make an HTC phone, or a Motorola phone (etc).
And what is the alternative? Lock down the OS so OEMs can't replace applications with their own choices? Isn't that the practice that causes everyone to complain about Microsoft? Just imagine that the default browser in Android was Internet Explorer. Would anyone here complain about manufacturers replacing it with anything else on their model of phone? No? Then it seems a bit rich to complain about any other customization of the platform.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
So just what is the advantage of an open platform if OEMs are not allowed to customize it?
They can make it work better with their hardware or network. The danger is changing it in ways that makes it incompatible with applications that run fine on other phones.
They miss the point (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, it most certainly will (Score:2)
The choice has to be a choice of applications, and it has to be applied by user.
Operating system, working environment, primary configuration features have to be stable, uniform and consistent. As anyone that deals with end users knows, lack of consistency will invariably create confusion, leading to negative perceptions and all that is related to that.
Take an example of Windows. A clean Windows installation (at least as of XP) is a decent system, simple enough with most controls and configuration items in f
The Real War (Score:3, Interesting)
I strongly agree with this article [eliainsider.com].
The war we should be paying attention to is not iPhone vs Android vs. WM7 vs Blackberry - it's us against the carriers. The carriers need to be dumb pipes, with device makers dictating what interfaces and software get used.
But Google went whole hog the other way, letting carriers run amok after a promising start where it seemed like they would maintain a firm hand. Now it's at the point where a new Android phone will have Bing as the only search engine it's possible to use!!
I'm a mobile developer and at times have considered Android development, but cannot in good conscious support a model that I feel screws the market over so badly. The whole open vs. closed argument is a farce, when for 99% of the population the iPhone is just as open as Android, and only the most technical can distinguish the difference.
In fact, I feel so strongly about the issue of carriers taking over the smartphone world, that if I ever do move to support a second platform it will probably be WM7!!! And believe me, in the not so distant past I would never have wanted to support Microsoft because of misgivings about them. But I feel it's important to support any company that is willing to try and dictate control over the carriers, and I believe Microsoft had said they planned to fix the UI for WM7 and not let carriers modify it.
If you do buy Android, try to buy phones that the carriers have not worked over.
Google had all the power they needed (Score:3, Insightful)
People act like google has some magical power to make the carriers bend over for them.
Google had all the leverage they needed over the carriers, because they have the only viable alternative to the iPhone. Other carriers saw iPhone exclusive carriers like AT&T snapping up customers, and they needed SOMETHING to compete.
carriers never would have bought into android if it didn't have the potential for customization,
And yet many carriers bought into, and still carry, they iPhone which allows none
From a developer's perspective (Score:3, Informative)
As a developer for both Android and iOS (and a few other mobile) platforms, I can say this is already an issue with Android (from a dev's perspective, at least). While "choice" always sounds good for consumers, the only real choices are usually pre-made by carriers and handset manufacturers, leaving the consumer with little more choice than they had with previous generations of phones (Motorola's RAZR had a pretty good Wheel of Fortune game "app," too).
Although the Android emulator is fine for quick checks, a viable Android product must be tested on a growing number of handsets and other products, making R&D for a new app MUCH more time consuming and costly than that of its iPhone counterpart (Even if you only wanted to support a single device, choosing to support only the latest iPhone 4, for instance, still gives one a much larger target audience than choosing only to support the latest Samsung Galaxy model on a particular carrier).
And supporting a commercial Android app is a larger undertaking too -- more like that of traditional PC development, in which one might expect to deal with a variety of hardware or setting possibilities, but nothing like traditional mobile or game console development -- in which one can expect some level of uniformity among systems.
In other words, iPhone developers can much more easily and affordably offer quality apps at lower prices than their Android counterparts. I'm not saying it's impossible to offer the same quality of user experience across the board, but it is without question a larger undertaking for Android development. And eventually, this WILL affect consumers, too -- either by limiting the size of their pool of quality apps, or by increasing the cost of these same apps.
Really, people, just stop (Score:5, Insightful)
First, Steve Jobs complains that Android is fragmented and offers too many versions.
No one else had said it before.
Then a bunch of second-rate tech websites echo it.
Then it gets reposted here and a bunch of 7-figure IDs and Anonymous Cowards post "me too" stuff.
Do I have to spell out a marketing-company forged FUD campaign? Has it been so long since IBM vs. Microsoft? Do we really need to re-learn what this looks like?
If a carrier abuses the phones, leave the carrier.
If a phone comes out neutered, don't buy it.
Having a codebase that moves rapidly forward is a simple fact of computing since broadband got big. Calling it a weakness is pure bullshit, especially when the competition moves (at most) at the rate of about a significant change once per year.
Re:Really, people, just stop (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, because there's plenty of carriers out there you can give your business to, especially ones that don't come with shitty customized software.....oh wait. No one is saying Android itself as an OS nor the pace at which it's developed is a weakness. What people are saying is that it's bullshit when you have to replace a device that's less than a year old just to take advantage of new features. You can't trust carriers to guarantee an upgrade path at all, let alone a timely one.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why are you waiting for your carrier to upgrade your phone OS? Root the damn thing and upgrade it yourself.
Used to be that people in these here parts made fun of Apple (where "fun" is a euphemism) because you had to root the iPhone in order to customize it. Now it's become a *positive* thing? I must've missed something on teh twitter.
Two types of people (Score:3, Insightful)
There appear to be two types of people: people very concerned about Android's fragmentation and its inevitable demise and people who actually own Android based phones. Thank you for your concern, but we're doing fine, thanks. We're busy enjoying the ability to install software from third parties without going through the Android Market, the ability to choose easy to root phones, the ability to choose phones we can easily replace the core operating system on, and more.
On a related note, us Linux users are also somehow surviving in the face of dozens of distributions.
Neither model is actually better (Score:4, Insightful)
Android on the other hand is more like the next step of Symbian... with slightly better design and control. Symbian was a heap of shit for developers. The API was a nightmare, content delivery worked only sometimes. Their package management system was a tinker toy. Additionally, their memory model was designed with a 25 year old PDA in mind, and their argument for it was that it needs to work with GCC 2.91. They implemented an ad-hoc exception model with a "clean-up stack" which was a lame excuse for auto-pointers as 2.91 didn't have good template support.
Android on the other hand has a relatively simple development model and it seems as if application development (so long as native code isn't important) is really quite easy. You can code in their Java like language (I do this to help with the law suit to differentiate and call it something else) and make an app and get it running quickly. Unfortunately, it runs on about a billion different processors (there are tons of ARMs out there) with a gazillion (quite cool that word is in the spell checker) graphics subsystems out there (nVidia, frame buffer, TI, etc...) and there are a multitude of different types of touch screens (single touch, multi touch, hi-resolution, low resolution, no-touch, just joypad, high latency, low latency). There are a pile of audio subsystems, I won't even begin to cover the massive number of those, it's mind boggling.
Writing simple cook book and business apps for Andoid is a charm. Takes far less time than on iOS, almost as little time as on Windows Phone 7 (which is WAY EASY) and can be tested more or less in an emulator without any problems. The only issue is the touch screen input which can be averted by making the buttons all a little bigger.
Anything requiring high response rates, fancy input methods, real-time audio, etc... is a nightmare on the platform. It's even worse than on Windows. There are just too many methods of input.
Android is a pretty neat touch screen platform that allows absolutely any manufacturer out there to make a full blown smart phone for almost nothing. Chinese vendors are already pumping these things out by the truckload and it's only a matter of time before it's possible to buy full smartphones for $50 or less.
You can buy an after market iPhone screen and touch panel from China for $20 (free shipping). And they are pretty good replacements. This means that they can get them for less than half that. Cheap system on a chip ARM processors can be bought for less the same. It's entirely possible that you can get ALL the parts required to make a full Android phone in China for probably $30. The specs will be pathetic, but will improve rapidly over time. The result, an Android phone containing the bare minimum memory required to run the phone, the bare minimum CPU required to run a telephone call, the bare minimum audio quality required to hear the other person, probably not even enough specs to download an application.
Of course, noone would buy these phones right? Well, probably not more than 100,000 of each model (which is the target Nokia sets for their mid-range smart phones). Remember there are a shit load of Asian people buy Chinese knockoffs of all these things. And what's best is, these aren't even knock offs. Thanks to the open source nature of Android, it's 100% legitimate to make these things. Of course, no westerners would buy these things. Umm... or would they. DealExtreme.com will sell tens of thousands of these. They'll be sold all over the Mediterranean and Caribbean islands to t
Re: (Score:3, Informative)