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...
Re:Wow there is a first.. (Score:5, Informative)
Now I understand that many products have their problems. However, Motorola are just stupid when it comes to fixing them.
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He raises a valid concern and offers a solution (Score:5, Informative)
"Motoblur collects information about customer use of applications and how that use relates to functions like power consumption. With that data, Motorola learns which applications drain power. "We are getting to the place that we should be able to warn you," Jha said. He envisions presenting a notice to users when they launch an application alerting them that using the application will drain 35 percent of the phone's power, for example, he said. The user can then decide to continue or conserve power."
Re:He raises a valid concern and offers a solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Or... (Score:3)
... he just means that market apps can't compare to the awesomeness of bundled apps, like their bundled Blockbuster app, the crippled Skype VZW-only app, or the VZW Navigator app, which were hand picked by them. Besides, why would you want free apps when you can pay and get less?
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That is a shockingly bad name... Is it drunk
Nope, just the people who allowed it to be installed were drunk.
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.
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Well, the thing is that all he has to complain about is their decision to ship a underperforming system. They built their phones, they tested their phones with the OS and applications, they knew that their performance sucks. Complaining that apps force their phones to lag away is exactly like complaining that your computer lags away if you happen to run anything other than a clean desktop environment. The thing is, if you ship a computer which is incapable of handling mundane apps which other phones han
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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 tas
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This is a problem that affects all Android phones. People will complain about battery life and it is usually caused by one or two poorly designed apps they downloaded off the market. Quality apps don't have this problem.
Regardless, what is it with the insane trend to build smaller and smaller phones with tinnier and tinner non-interchangeable batteries that act more and more like a full blown PC than a phone and so hold their charge for a day or less. The marketing nonsense has to stop. I would much rather a bigger bulkier phone - thickness circa a decade ago - that I could confidently use without having to recharge for 3 days, even if it is running a crap app. If you're plugged into a wall charger it's no longer a mobile
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What I see here is the failure of the OS to protect the user from rougue apps. If Android phones are not going to use Apple's process of vetting Apps to insure they behave, then the OS should do more. Fo
Re:He raises a valid concern and offers a solution (Score:4, Informative)
Care to start naming names? My friend's phone would experience extreme UI lag then crash every few days to the point where she had to remove the battery to fix it (simple power cycle didn't remove the lag). Went away after I uninstalled Advanced Task Killer.
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You can still have a zippy phone with Advanced Task Killer, but you need to use it properly... on 2.x it'll start killing apps that you need running. There's also no point in having ATK running full time on 2.x, because of changes in the way Android handles sleeping apps and power management. As your friend noticed, running ATK can seriously harm your performance.
But you can configure ATK to not run full time, and to not auto-kill apps. I have it installed on my phone, and I use it to nuke the browser if it
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In fairness, Steve Jobs did see this coming during the whole "why can't the iPhone multi-task?" drama from a while back. IIRC, he predicted that users would have bad experiences with multitasking too much and blame it on the phones.
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But I really think it's the apps we do not ask for, but are pushed down to us from our carriers that are the real evil. I'm fairly careful about what apps I have installed, performance was great until things "started appearing". Things I can't delete... Not coincidentally, that's also when i started seeing performance issues on my phone.
I don't think most Americans drive expensive German sports sedans. We drive decidedly crappier, cheaper cars and make quasi-informed guesses about the tradeoff we are making
Re:Android fragmentation, closed source, open mark (Score:4, Informative)
The fact that submitting an application to the fragmented Android Market requires no inspection or vetting by gatekeepers means that very poorly written software will get in
Yes. However the fact that you can get poorly written software to perform some tasks is better than the state on the iPhone, where those same tasks simply cannot be performed unless you have a development kit.
Programming on Android is hard as it is due to the extreme OS versioning and hardware fragmentation
I don't find it hard. Stick to the documented APIs and test your application with multiple display resolutions in the emulator, and it seems to me you'll be fine. Unless you're trying to modify the behaviour of system apps (something which, if you tried to do it, would get your app banned from the iOS app store).
and the multiple states that an Android application must cycle through (often leaving dangerously dangling application threads)
Really? What's so hard about saving state and killing background threads in onPause() and restoring it in onResume()? Yes, there are apps that don't do this correctly. That doesn't mean it's hard.
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I don't find it hard. Stick to the documented APIs and test your application with multiple display resolutions in the emulator, and it seems to me you'll be fine. Unless you're trying to modify the behaviour of system apps (something which, if you tried to do it, would get your app banned from the iOS app store).
About the only thing "hard" about Android is making layouts that scale properly for different DPI screens and also the rotation behaviour. I have never had to change actual program logic to cope with one device differently from another and I expect that's true for virtually every application except those like games. I doubt the situation with games on Android is any worse than it is for iOS either, given that different iPhones run at different speeds too.
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All of the battery issues I have had with my Droid 2 Global have come from Motorola bundled functionality. Their modified Exchange client had some nice features, but was a battery hog. I nearly doubled my battery life by installing Touchdown. Something they did causes the phone to run the GPS almost continuously. My original DROID did not do this with the same set of apps installed. It attributes the time to the Maps app, but from what I've read, that is only because some other app is using the location ser
3rd party apps? (Score:5, Funny)
Does he mean things like motoblur?
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.
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Might be worth looking into HTC still since they've declared they are going to only be selling unlocked bootloaders on their phones. [slashdot.org] I know when I'm able to get a new android phone cheap again (with my contract) I'll be looking at a HTC since if I don't like what they give me I can just wipe it with a custom rom.
HTC is well supported by Cyanogenmod. The HW is typically good although on my Desire Z the internal speaker is nowhere near as good as a Samsung Galaxy S or Moto Milestone.
Samsung has also not locked the bootloader on the Galaxy S and Galaxy S2 (AFAIK, so don't accept this as gospel).
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To be fair, I'm counting '.apk' files in the
Re:3rd party apps? (Score:4, Interesting)
I had a Motorola Backflip for a while, I loved the concept, but the large number of apps that they insisted upon installing with the firmware, the ones I couldn't uninstall pretty much killed it for me. On top of that because they opted to use their Motoblur, it meant that had I kept the phone that I would have ended up waiting for them to QA that on top of whatever time it took for Google to release an update.
It being tightly locked down really didn't help anything.
Bloatware (Score:2)
"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.
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Amen to this. The closer our phones get to computers to more and more we need something like this.
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: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.
Wrong again (Score:2, Troll)
Sure, but that means something better than top, not some dumb-down interface that hides all the useful information.
There is no need for people to HAVE to view this information. People who want it will always be able to have it, so instead the design needs to be focused on how can a normal person NOT have it and be OK.
If we actually had any kind of AI that might make sense.
Well I don't know if you'd consider it AI or not but we have pretty good expert systems.
It's not about hiding anything from the user. I
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Sure there is a need.
This CEO is whining about apps being resource hogs.
THAT is what top is for: to tell you what the offending party is rather than just randomly b*tch and moan about it and act like nothing can be done.
Top may be too "geeky" for you but something needs to fill it's role.
Something needs to be there to answer the call when the end user asks: "What the h*ll is sucking the life out of this thing? Can I kill it and erase it?".
The New Godwin (Score:3)
Well I think comparing smartphone statuses to getting information on a multi-million dollar aircraft carrying 600 people is exactly equivalent.
Thread closed everyone!
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I don't think the sort of people who would install resource hungry apps on their phone and then be puzzled enough by the lack of resources to take it back to the store, would benefit from any interface anyone could devise.
Sure they would. That's why Apple has had such huge success - they have every type of app Android has and then some, but normal people cannot screw themselves over the way they can so easily on Android.
I am not saying that to praise Apple. I am saying that to lay down heavy blame at the
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You mean like the built-in Android task manager that shows you all running apps (including background services), how much memory and CPU time they are using and how much data they have stored? Or the battery life display that tells you exactly how much power each app used, as well as different bits of hardware like the radios and screen?
When an Android phone's battery is low the "charge me" prompt includes a button to go directly to the battery usage screen.
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).
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They ship with crapware that can be very difficult to uninstall or just exit so it doesn't keep sucking up your CPU/battery.
You don't need to quit them, Android apps don't work that way. In fact most don't even have a quit option. The phone simply kills them off when they are in the background and it needs more memory for a foreground app.
Google only does basic quality testing, the rest is up to users to comment about and rate in the market. That is the Google way - all content is user generated, including testing. I can see your point about Apple's more thorough testing but I prefer to make up my own mind, and having Apple filt
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?
Wrong AGAIN (Score:3)
These days, they ALSO support fake multitasking for user apps as well. An application can hook into an API for an already running Apple service such as audio or GPS but not start it's own where it can process its own data. When you close an IOS application, its current state is saved to memory for fast re-opening.
Good thing you took the time to learn about IOS multitasking. It makes evangelising it a lot easier and less embarrassing when someone else corrects you.
IOS multitasking is what I call "I wish it were multitasking" [arstechnica.com]
Why "limited"? Because iOS multitasking isn't really multitasking in the traditional senseâ"it's certainly not what you get on a desktop computer, or even what you get from Apple's own iPhone apps. Apple claims that it only allows for certain functionality
Motoblur (Score:2)
And what about Motoblur which devours battery life with its constant updating of EVERYTHING?
From my understanding of Android (Score:5, Interesting)
This is nothing to do with the App store being open, this is more to do with Android App devs no doubt learning to code on a PC and not really getting to grips with coding for a mobile environment how Android multitasks in a unique way. In desktop development power consumption is rarely even thought about.
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/04/multitasking-android-way.html
They need to go with it rather than try to workaround it. Nor at times do they seem to grasp what limited resources and a battery mean and how Google designed around these limitations.
If you encounter an App that behaves poorly, uninstall it, rate it low in the market and harass the developer. That's what the rating system is for.
Often you'll find many alternatives that achieve the same thing - inexplicably one app may hog battery in the background, one may not at all. It's lazy rushed make-a-buck development pure and simple.
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It does have something to do with the app store being open. I believe that if you tried to submit an application that sucked down too much CPU (such as using 100% at idle) that it would be rejected from Apple's app store. More subtle waste, probably not, but obvious junk is probably caught by their automated testing.
By doing less QA on apps going into the store, Android can have problems like this more easily.
But your right, this is no different from the problems you see everywhere else. I've seen Flash v
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Well, I have an Atrix now. I had iPhones up to the 3GS.
Android multitasking flat out sucks. My android friends try to say "Oh But Android *really* multitasks" and that's true, but the complete wrong solution. FWIW, iOS multitasks too. Just fine. It's Apple's restrictions that make them register a background function that is metered out. Why do they meter it out? To make the battery last!
Full-on multitasking is the wrong approach on a battery-powered device. You have to change your accounting method to accou
Re:From my understanding of Android (Score:4, Interesting)
This is nothing to do with the App store being open, this is more to do with Android App devs no doubt learning to code on a PC and not really getting to grips with coding for a mobile environment how Android multitasks in a unique way. In desktop development power consumption is rarely even thought about.
That's amusing. Google has re-invented Go Computer's PenPoint. That's how they ran multiple semi-persistent applications on their tablet in the late 1980s.
Well, I have a Moto Android phone (Score:5, Informative)
A Cliq, to be precise. And if I could, I would return the thing, but I only have 6 months to go on the thing and after that I can get another phone. And I can pretty much guarantee that the next phone won't be a Moto phone.
The problem isn't the app store - the problem is that Moto builds crappy phones, and is then unable to provide updates in a timely fashion.
Some of the problems with Moto phones are just that they choose underpowered processors or more limited memory, and if you get too many apps installed the phone just dogs down. There are times that I press something, it takes a good 30 seconds before the phone responds. If I uninstall a few apps, it goes much better.
Motoblur is the 2nd issue I have with those phones. While Moto denies it, I suspect that in part it is the reason why they have such difficulties providing updates to the phones. My wife has a Droid and that doesn't have Blur, and they have no trouble getting updates out the door.
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I have an Atrix and all the Moto apps suck. And something as simple as entering text into them is noticeably delayed. And its common to all the moto apps. What the hell is it doing?
I usually replace the motocrap with free stuff from the market.
My favorite was the image viewer in the SMS app. It only shows the image 1/2 size, for 8 seconds, then puts it at 1/4 size. No idea how or why, or how to turn it off. So I switched to GoSMS Pro.
They had the secret to Android success (Score:2)
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This. A thousand times this.
If I was a Motorola customer or shareholder, I'd be calling for Jha's head. I'm neither, and there are plenty of other manufacturers putting out great Android wares to choose from, so I'm just pointing and laughing.
Goodbye Motorola, we hardly missed ye.
is that why motorola is trying to deceive people? (Score:2)
Just got an X2, it's not the store (Score:4)
Just got a droid X2. You'd think with half a gig of ram and a 1GHz dual-core chip in there it'd be a little faster than my droid1. Well, it is now, since I rooted it and froze most of the preinstalled Motorola and Verizon crap, replacing it with "open store" alternatives. Before, you wouldn't believe how horrifically bad it was; doing anything from opening an app to merely trying to scroll the screen would cause delays of upwards of 5-10 seconds. Almost returned it myself.
(For others with this phone/problem, nuking the DLNA and BackupAssistant stuff seemed to help the most.)
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I'll take that as true when... (Score:3)
Motoblur collects information about customer use of applications and how that use relates to functions like power consumption. With that data, Motorola learns which applications drain power.
I wonder how many people know their phone is reporting this activity back to Motorola. I might have to check what my phone is doing, I'm in a part of the world where cellular data access is neither free nor unlimited (unless you are on an expensive contract, which I am not).
It would actually be interesting to see this information myself. I've just had a mooch around my phone and the "portal" available when connected to a PC and can't see any interface to show such data.
I wonder how much CPU time and battery power the included apps that I can't seem to uninstall and which keep restarting themselves after a while when I kill them with a task manager. I can tell you that the battery life on this Motorola phone has been laughable (quite frankly I consider the battery life specs on the sales information for this phone to be simply fraudulent) since I got it, before any extra apps were added by myself, and adding apps doesn't seem to have made it significantly worse (aside from the wireless tethering tool, but as that keeps the wifi and 3G radios at full tilt when in use I expect that to drain battery power far quicker than normal).
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I'm digging my new Android. Love it compared to the iThing it replaced. I don't feel at all "deprived" for switching and my Android device is certainly "perky" enough compared to the Apple device I used before.
Perhaps Motorola needs to stop blaming others.
If you've got 70% returns, then it's not the stuff people are adding to it that's the problem.
Darn people and their apps! (Score:3, Funny)
If you people would just stop using your phone for apps, games, or hell, even calls, you'd clearly see the superior Motorola phones give you no trouble. Why, I've had mine holding down a small stack of papers for well over six months without ever a hiccup!
Sincerely,
Joe Motorola.
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.
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And yet you bought an iPhone, that doesn't work out of the box like every other phone on the market does. You have to take it home, plug it into a computer, having already installed iTunes first. iTunes topped 80mb last time I looked too, and takes a while to download and install.
Take a step back.
Oh, come on. In the real world, iPhones do actually work for many people. Using iTunes to update the OS once a calendar quarter is, actually, not that burdensome.
The way I look at it (and I'm also in IT, have been for ~20 years and unfortunately have not retired today, congratulations to GPP) the iPhone experience is about 95% out of the box. And that's what you get. In exchange for using a Solution and having almost everything Just Work, you get to live with the warts too.
For me, an Android device is a
Awesome part (Score:2)
The awesome part is that when some joker returns his Atrix because its "too slow", you can turn around it buy it refurbished for half price!
Actually seriously, I just got an atrix not too long ago and from what I've seen the biggest problems have nothing to do with apps in themselves:
Large widgets (in terms of screen real estate) slow down the interface much like a large sprite will slow down your 3d game. Clearly this is caused by double-rendering if not other inefficiencies
Live backgrounds slow things dow
Software Competition? (Score:2)
Adding capabilities to Motoblur is one way that Motorola can try to set itself apart in an increasingly crowded Android market.
I would like to see manufacturers release pure Android phones and compete on hardware. It seems to me that a manufacturer could easily set themselves apart by advertising the pure Google experience, much like the Nexus phones do.
Why don't they compete to see who can release the latest update first? I know I'd be more inclined to go with the company that doesn't drag out updates (or
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I don't think that has anything to do with it being "open."
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What are you basing that on? I would assume that the reason Android has a bigger marketshare than iPhone OS is because it's licensed to many, many manufacturers.
By licensed you mean open sourced. Which pretty much proves the GP's point.
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And the open sourcing of Android was accomplished how?
Tell me I dont have to explain this to you.
The Wikipedia article should explain it (HINT: Android has been open source since it's release).
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No please explain, I'm thick.
Do I just download Android from Google and do whatever I want with it?
Re:Then again... (Score:4, Informative)
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The point he was making is that it Android was open sourced by applying an open source *LICENSE* to the code. Without that *LICENSE*, downloading downloading Android from Google and doing "whatever I want with it" would be a copyright violation.
Dear AC (Hijacked Public). His (your) troll was obvious, he was (you're) trying to obfuscate between "open license" and "license". Having an open license does not make something closed, which was the GGP's attempted point. just because Android is license does not mean it cannot be open.
If I wanted to release my own Android phone on my own hardware, I don't need the OHA's permission to use Android.
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The openness of Android is a big part of why Android has better marketshare than iOS, so maybe they shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.
What are you basing that on? I would assume that the reason Android has a bigger marketshare than iPhone OS is because it's licensed to many, many manufacturers, whereas iPhone OS is only available on Apple products.
He was questioning Android's 'openness' being the cause of Androids market share by replying that it was because it was licensed to so many companies. If his point was as you say, then it was a semantically convoluted point.
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The version the OEM's use is the OHA version, which differs from the open-source (AOSP) tree. They pay money for licenses.
Incorrect.
They license the Google applications which are not part of Android and never have been.
Hey, but thanks for trying.
Cyanogenmod is built from AOSP, they don't pay a cent to OHA (thus cant bundle Google apps).
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I would assume that the reason Android has a bigger marketshare than iPhone OS is because it's licensed to many, many manufacturers, whereas iPhone OS is only available on Apple products. I don't think that has anything to do with it being "open."
How do you think it's available to many, many manufacturers? It's by virtue of it being open.
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Who cares WHY it has a bigger market share? Who cares in generally really. The main reason you even have to consider such nonsense is the "winner take all" mindset of the fanboys of proprietary systems.
Apple can ignore me and it's fanboys can try to marginalize me so long as I have a means to escape either of them.
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That's a misconception.
Android phones have a bigger percentage of the marketshare of phones than the iPhone has.
But the total number of devices running iOS(iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, tv is 59% greater than the total number of devices running Android. [comscore.com]
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Please re-read the part you quoted:
I would assume that the reason Android has a bigger marketshare than iPhone OS...
It doesn't say anything about the iPod Touch, the iPad, iTv... just the iPhone.
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The post that started this thread incorrectly said "iOS", it wasn't until the linux geek's reply that he altered it to the awkwardly phrased "iPhone OS".
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You confused the hell out of me for a sec there - you seem to be arguing water isn't wet.
But I think what you are saying is that consumers don't care from open... That Android only has bigger market share because there are more manufacturers and devices to choose from. This may well be true, but you are putting the cart before the horse.
The reason there are more devices and manufacturers to choose from is because Android is open.
QED Android has a bigger market share because it is open.
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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.
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The openness appeals not so much to the consumers, but to the manufacturers and carriers, who can then offer Android-based products at a wide range of price points.
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I dunno.
You plug in the phone, a file mangler window pops up, you drag and drop some stuff, you unplug the phone.
That all seems remarkably more simple and straightforward than what Apple makes you do.
It's no longer 1999 and you're no longer competiting against the Nomad.
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The people that care about openness are an insignificant share of the market
The consumers 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.
And that's because it's open and a significant number of manufacturers care about licensing costs.
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Choice is better. Every style of product always sells better when there is choice. Doesn't matter if it's smartphones, computers, clothes or even food like hamburgers.
I don't think Dave Thomas would agree [neowin.net]
He saw that one of the problems with KFC, and all fast food restaurants of the day, was that they had much too complicated menu’s. He then worked with Colonel Sanders to drastically simplify the menus, focusing on a few signature meals. This small change particularly helped turn around the KFC franchise; and, though it was a minor thing, helped revolutionize fast food restaurant menus all over the world. Even to this day, the staple of most fast food restaurants is their overly simplistic menus, focusing on a handful of signature meals.
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I always figured the Android market share was due to AT&T...
Posted from my iPhone
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iOS has much greater market share (Score:2, Interesting)
There are more Android PHONES, but iOS runs on iPod Touch and iPad as well. The are many more iOS devices that Android devices. Sigh.
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The openness of Android is a big part of why Android has better marketshare than iOS, so maybe they shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Openness has almost *nothing* to do with Android's market share. The number of people who care is inconsequential. And besides, iOS has, and has always had, a greater market share than Android. Some time this quarter (it may have already happened, it may happen next month) Apple will have sold its 200 millionth iOS device. Android will be lucky to have half that.
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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.
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I have an iPhone and I can tell you it doesn't bother me one bit. I know from experience on my laptop just how big a cpu/power drain Flash usually is (this is usually the developer's fault, not flash it's self, but the effect is the same). It's only been once or twice in the last 2+ years I wanted to do something that required flash, and that was usually playing a video. My family has 3 iPhones and an iPad, and they've never asked me about it.
I can generally divide the Flash content I run across into four
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it doesn't matter how much you don't like it, they public loves it. This is why its still used by so many sites, because it works and the public loves it.
Minor correction, i suspect the public probably doesn't give a damn about flash in particular. Website designer love flash. The public just loves being able to access websites, therefore they need to be able to use flash whether they like it or not.
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Flash is like Microsoft and how Apple wants to be.
It's something that you can't really avoid. You can be "pretend snooty" all you like. No one really believes you.
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Anything else I missed?
There's nothing wrong with antenna, you're just holding it wrong.