5 ms·

Honestly, it's starting to feel like Android on a lot of devices is a joke, as far as the hardware experience. I've always been a passionate fan of the OS and

Honestly, it's starting to feel like Android on a lot of devices is a joke, as far as the hardware experience. I've always been a passionate fan of the OS and anti-walled garden, but the daily frustrations of using my S6, a year old "flagship" phone, kind of makes me question what the advantages really are. It's so frustrating to hold an $800+ device while my home screen slowly populates with app icons, the back becoming scorching hot while the battery life visibly ticks down from the load. How does this phone have such grotesque memory management problems that running Maps and Spotify at the same time is enough to grind it to a crawl? Battery life has gradually decreased over time to the point that some days the phone is at 38% by lunchtime after primarily sitting in my pocket all morning. At this point the single most advantageous aspect of Android for me is the voice assistant - tasker seems nice, but I can't charge my phone four times a day. Nova launcher is cool, but I'd much rather be able to text my family without watching the keyboard lag out. Even the voice assistant has random, arbitrary issues - for some reason, saying "play ___ album on spotify" now only selects the album without playing it, or shuffle plays it out of the search. Makes it that much worse to see Cyanogen disintegrating. Somebody needs to push for higher quality at the state of the art.

steven777400 10y ago
I share your frustration. Part of the problem seems to be with most devices they are quite nice "out of the box" but over 6 to 12 months the experience degrades; battery and storage performance drop dramatically. I'd like to be able to read reviews of devices after 1 year of substantial use, rather than reviews of brand new devices.
- PaulHoule 10y ago
  Note this is already a notorious problem with Windows 95 and NT derivatives. Microsoft is aware of it and has made many changes to help. For instance there is an official interface to remove an unwanted program or to turn off a process that starts when you log in. Similarly there was a time when windows machines were not at all adequately patched and Microsoft has come out with a solution that (i) worked and (ii) improved the performance steadily since then.
erikpukinskis 10y ago
This makes Apple's choice to aggressively control background processes seem prescient to me. Also aggressively pushing specific media codecs. I have an Android (Moto E) now and have more or less alternated back and forth between iPhone and Android (last phone was an iPhone 6). The things I miss when in Android world are consistent battery life and camera quality.
- RX14 10y ago
  I think comparing the camera on a phone cosing £70 to a phone costing £500+ is a bit of a foregone conclusion.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- coredog64 10y ago
  If you like the way Apple controls background processes then you'll love what Microsoft does for WP 8.1.
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
I'd still put up with Android if it was still anti-walled garden. But it isn't, and hasn't been for years, which is why I finally stopping carrying the things. It's worth suffering a little pain to be open source, but unfortunately, if you have Play Services, you essentially aren't running an open source OS anymore.
- dispose13432 10y ago
  Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. While most people run Android the same way people run Apple, you can run Android and get your apps from f-droid, and you can run CM (and, if your into these things, Xprivacy), so while Google may still be getting your private data, random apps won't.
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    As someone who spent a couple years trying to use open source apps and F-Droid and such, good enough, Android is not. And Google getting your private data is far worse than random apps getting your private data. Because while random apps may get an incomplete picture, Google is profiling you on an unprecedented scale.
untog 10y ago
I agree. I've had an Android device since the Nexus One and kind of accepted all this as The Way Things Are, until I received an iPhone SE as a work phone. Not only is the form factor better than any Android device out there (I prefer smaller phones) the software just works so, so much better. I swipe to the camera from the lockscreen and it appears immediately, rather than four seconds later. And it can multitask as well as Android can, for my purposes (wasn't the case when I switched to the N1, of course). At this point, as much as I like Android, the UI, the open nature, etc. etc., I can't justify sticking with it for the next phone I buy.
- throwanem 10y ago
  I think a lot of this comes from people who've only ever used Android in a serious way just accepting that this is The Way Things Are. Me, I've only ever used iPhones. My mom has an Android device. It took her three or four tries to get through to me the fact that many apps on her phone, including some she actually uses and therefore can't uninstall, will start themselves up in the background and cheerfully chug along burning up battery and cellular data and system resource, making the phone run hot and lag when doing anything - and that, while she can (and has to) manually kill these apps in order for her phone to work well, before long they'll just fire themselves right back up and make the phone mostly useless again. It took her three or four tries at explaining this behavior because I found it totally bewildering. As I said, I've only had iPhones, and while they are hardly without flaws, the idea of a phone that just does what it damn well pleases is entirely outside my experience. It's true that some iOS apps do run in the background, but if they want to do anything that might impinge on system resource or privacy, they have to ask me if that's okay, and if I say it's not, the OS makes sure they don't. If they want to use cellular data, they can, but I have the option of denying them that permission, and if I do so, the OS makes sure they abide by that restriction. As far as I've been able to determine, Android can't provide the same capabilities to its user, and can only even approach them if you root it and install a custom build of the OS and then install some additional apps to expose a UI for those API calls. And even then, it's apparently somewhat dicey. As it happens, I have a spare iPhone SE in my closet. I won't for much longer, though; when I go home to visit this coming spring, I'm going to be bringing it along, and it's going to go from being my spare phone to being Mom's new phone. I mean, I wouldn't put up with the kind of nonsense she's been telling me about, and I do this stuff for a living! I see no conceivable reason why anyone else should have to, either. It's just absolutely insane to me.
jordache 10y ago
My 2+ years old Note 4 is running fine. It needs a new battery, but the core OS experience has improved from the various updates over the years. My iPad Air on the other hand has severly dimished usability from the various iOS updates. Orientation change no longer works reliably. The idiotic change from swipe to unlock via double tap of home tremedously increased the frustration in UX (Try a double tap while the tablet is barely upright via Apple's magnetic cover.)
- Fricken 10y ago
  I really want to get a Pixel, but I can't justify it because after replacing the battery on my Note 4 it works as well as the day I bought it. A friend of mine had a very different experience, his Note 4 slowed to a crawl and there was no sorting it out. He went back to Apple.
- nradov 10y ago
  Genuine Samsung replacement batteries are cheaply available direct from the manufacturer. Stock up while you still can.
mattmanser 10y ago
Have you tried clearing the cache from the debug screen? I had a similar problem with my old Nexus 5 that got fixed by doing that.
- mustacheemperor 10y ago
  Yes, when I heard about this I was really hopeful it'd help but the performance of the phone is completely unaffected.
icegreentea 10y ago
I have a N5 (ya...), and I've found that somedays I'll be getting ready to go home from the office (where I sit like 20ft from a WiFi AP), and find my phone down to ~20-30% battery life - and a quick look at battery stats will happily tell me that my WiFi somehow used up like 50% of my battery. I have no idea whats going on with that... sometimes I can notice while I'm using the phone doing some pretty low power stuff (playing some music...) that the back will just start getting hot. Andddd there I go turning off my WiFi. I have no idea how much this is helping, but I certainly feel dumb having to baby my smartphone like this.
sbierwagen 10y ago
I recently switched to an iPhone 6S from a first gen Moto G. The Moto G was never a fast phone, but a new thing it started to do towards the end of its life was OOM kill the mp3 player if you backgrounded it. At first it was if you did something heavyweight, like start a game. Then it was browsing an ad-heavy site. Then it was if you opened the web browser at all. This, plus the usual Android lag, bad battery life, intrusive Google Botnet stuff. The tipping point was this. I walk to the coffee shop with music playing. I order, sit down, start reading. There's an amusing line in the book, so I take out the phone to take a picture of it, which kills the music player. Then a Google Maps notification pops up asking me to add the photo to the coffee shop's Maps page. I think, why the fuck am I still using Android? I know Google tracks me everywhere I go, but do they have to be so obvious about it?
- ahmetkun 10y ago
  As a 1st gen. Moto G owner, i feel similar. I feel annoyed to be forced to get a new phone every two years. It was a much better experience to use Chrome and Spotify together with this phone in 2014. Now Spotify alone is freezing from time to time, especially after the latest update. Chrome was fast and responsive. Now it's guaranteed that if I open a web page in Chrome, any other app i might have open are killed and will have to be reloaded if i want to go back to them quick. I really like the phone and wish to use it for a while longer, but my experience is getting a bit worse each day.
  - tdkl 10y ago
    In 2014 you had Kitkat, which was the last "good" Android release. The L (and future) are just horrible with memory and they don't care, since most of the devices now are 2GB+.
  - loudmax 10y ago
    My 1st gen Moto G is still going strong. Loading apps may be a little slow, but things rarely crash randomly. I'm pretty careful about exiting out of apps that I'm not actively using though, especially Google Maps. I recently updated the OS to CyanogenMod though, mainly because the phone stopped receiving security updates. I wouldn't say the phone performs better running CM, but it's no worse than when I first bought the phone. I really hope CynogenMod can keep the ball rolling. I wouldn't want to run the stock image after it's fallen this far behind security updates.
zhte415 10y ago
> It's so frustrating to hold an $800+ device while my home screen slowly populates with app icons, the back becoming scorching hot while the battery life visibly ticks down from the load. Why spend $800 for this? Really? Really? Is there a point to spend $800 on a device that in a showroom or a friend's hand was not feeling ok and needing to charge four times per day? Decent camera (would have been called world-class 2 years ago), battery charged once every 3 days, stock Android, 2 SIM card sockets, 64GB SD card, 5.x sized screen. But there are still things the camera phone can't do: Longer range/landscape photos. Interesting to see which manufacturer is able to put a quality detachable lens on a cameraphone, or when Nikon/Canon put SIM cards and telephony in their already Android-enabled equipment.
- mustacheemperor 10y ago
  You're spending at least $800 on any "flagship" phone, it just might be through your carrier contract. I agree, I often wonder why the hell this is supposed to be worth the money. It was not marketed as "not feeling ok and needing to charge four times per day," and as I recall it even ran great the first few months...Until the initial hardware warranties started running out, at which point my aux jack started disconnecting, the memory issues became apparent, etc...
matwood 10y ago
I went from the iPhone to the HTC One and then the Nexus 5. I always had various power issues, but stuck it out until the iPhone came out with the larger size. Only when I went back to the iPhone did I realize how poor the Android experience had been. The iPhone is not perfect, and Android has good things about it, but overall the iPhone experience is better than either Android device I used. The Nexus phones were a great value, but if the Pixel is going to be priced as a flagship phone then I see little reason to buy it over an iPhone.

steven777400 10y ago

I share your frustration. Part of the problem seems to be with most devices they are quite nice "out of the box" but over 6 to 12 months the experience degrades; battery and storage performance drop dramatically. I'd like to be able to read reviews of devices after 1 year of substantial use, rather than reviews of brand new devices.

PaulHoule 10y ago
Note this is already a notorious problem with Windows 95 and NT derivatives. Microsoft is aware of it and has made many changes to help. For instance there is an official interface to remove an unwanted program or to turn off a process that starts when you log in. Similarly there was a time when windows machines were not at all adequately patched and Microsoft has come out with a solution that (i) worked and (ii) improved the performance steadily since then.

erikpukinskis 10y ago

This makes Apple's choice to aggressively control background processes seem prescient to me. Also aggressively pushing specific media codecs. I have an Android (Moto E) now and have more or less alternated back and forth between iPhone and Android (last phone was an iPhone 6). The things I miss when in Android world are consistent battery life and camera quality.

RX14 10y ago
I think comparing the camera on a phone cosing £70 to a phone costing £500+ is a bit of a foregone conclusion.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
coredog64 10y ago
If you like the way Apple controls background processes then you'll love what Microsoft does for WP 8.1.

ocdtrekkie 10y ago

I'd still put up with Android if it was still anti-walled garden. But it isn't, and hasn't been for years, which is why I finally stopping carrying the things. It's worth suffering a little pain to be open source, but unfortunately, if you have Play Services, you essentially aren't running an open source OS anymore.

dispose13432 10y ago
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. While most people run Android the same way people run Apple, you can run Android and get your apps from f-droid, and you can run CM (and, if your into these things, Xprivacy), so while Google may still be getting your private data, random apps won't.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  As someone who spent a couple years trying to use open source apps and F-Droid and such, good enough, Android is not. And Google getting your private data is far worse than random apps getting your private data. Because while random apps may get an incomplete picture, Google is profiling you on an unprecedented scale.

untog 10y ago

I agree. I've had an Android device since the Nexus One and kind of accepted all this as The Way Things Are, until I received an iPhone SE as a work phone. Not only is the form factor better than any Android device out there (I prefer smaller phones) the software just works so, so much better. I swipe to the camera from the lockscreen and it appears immediately, rather than four seconds later. And it can multitask as well as Android can, for my purposes (wasn't the case when I switched to the N1, of course). At this point, as much as I like Android, the UI, the open nature, etc. etc., I can't justify sticking with it for the next phone I buy.

throwanem 10y ago
I think a lot of this comes from people who've only ever used Android in a serious way just accepting that this is The Way Things Are. Me, I've only ever used iPhones. My mom has an Android device. It took her three or four tries to get through to me the fact that many apps on her phone, including some she actually uses and therefore can't uninstall, will start themselves up in the background and cheerfully chug along burning up battery and cellular data and system resource, making the phone run hot and lag when doing anything - and that, while she can (and has to) manually kill these apps in order for her phone to work well, before long they'll just fire themselves right back up and make the phone mostly useless again. It took her three or four tries at explaining this behavior because I found it totally bewildering. As I said, I've only had iPhones, and while they are hardly without flaws, the idea of a phone that just does what it damn well pleases is entirely outside my experience. It's true that some iOS apps do run in the background, but if they want to do anything that might impinge on system resource or privacy, they have to ask me if that's okay, and if I say it's not, the OS makes sure they don't. If they want to use cellular data, they can, but I have the option of denying them that permission, and if I do so, the OS makes sure they abide by that restriction. As far as I've been able to determine, Android can't provide the same capabilities to its user, and can only even approach them if you root it and install a custom build of the OS and then install some additional apps to expose a UI for those API calls. And even then, it's apparently somewhat dicey. As it happens, I have a spare iPhone SE in my closet. I won't for much longer, though; when I go home to visit this coming spring, I'm going to be bringing it along, and it's going to go from being my spare phone to being Mom's new phone. I mean, I wouldn't put up with the kind of nonsense she's been telling me about, and I do this stuff for a living! I see no conceivable reason why anyone else should have to, either. It's just absolutely insane to me.

jordache 10y ago

My 2+ years old Note 4 is running fine. It needs a new battery, but the core OS experience has improved from the various updates over the years. My iPad Air on the other hand has severly dimished usability from the various iOS updates. Orientation change no longer works reliably. The idiotic change from swipe to unlock via double tap of home tremedously increased the frustration in UX (Try a double tap while the tablet is barely upright via Apple's magnetic cover.)

Fricken 10y ago
I really want to get a Pixel, but I can't justify it because after replacing the battery on my Note 4 it works as well as the day I bought it. A friend of mine had a very different experience, his Note 4 slowed to a crawl and there was no sorting it out. He went back to Apple.
nradov 10y ago
Genuine Samsung replacement batteries are cheaply available direct from the manufacturer. Stock up while you still can.

mattmanser 10y ago

Have you tried clearing the cache from the debug screen? I had a similar problem with my old Nexus 5 that got fixed by doing that.

mustacheemperor 10y ago
Yes, when I heard about this I was really hopeful it'd help but the performance of the phone is completely unaffected.

icegreentea 10y ago

I have a N5 (ya...), and I've found that somedays I'll be getting ready to go home from the office (where I sit like 20ft from a WiFi AP), and find my phone down to ~20-30% battery life - and a quick look at battery stats will happily tell me that my WiFi somehow used up like 50% of my battery. I have no idea whats going on with that... sometimes I can notice while I'm using the phone doing some pretty low power stuff (playing some music...) that the back will just start getting hot. Andddd there I go turning off my WiFi. I have no idea how much this is helping, but I certainly feel dumb having to baby my smartphone like this.

sbierwagen 10y ago

I recently switched to an iPhone 6S from a first gen Moto G. The Moto G was never a fast phone, but a new thing it started to do towards the end of its life was OOM kill the mp3 player if you backgrounded it. At first it was if you did something heavyweight, like start a game. Then it was browsing an ad-heavy site. Then it was if you opened the web browser at all. This, plus the usual Android lag, bad battery life, intrusive Google Botnet stuff. The tipping point was this. I walk to the coffee shop with music playing. I order, sit down, start reading. There's an amusing line in the book, so I take out the phone to take a picture of it, which kills the music player. Then a Google Maps notification pops up asking me to add the photo to the coffee shop's Maps page. I think, why the fuck am I still using Android? I know Google tracks me everywhere I go, but do they have to be so obvious about it?

ahmetkun 10y ago
As a 1st gen. Moto G owner, i feel similar. I feel annoyed to be forced to get a new phone every two years. It was a much better experience to use Chrome and Spotify together with this phone in 2014. Now Spotify alone is freezing from time to time, especially after the latest update. Chrome was fast and responsive. Now it's guaranteed that if I open a web page in Chrome, any other app i might have open are killed and will have to be reloaded if i want to go back to them quick. I really like the phone and wish to use it for a while longer, but my experience is getting a bit worse each day.
- tdkl 10y ago
  In 2014 you had Kitkat, which was the last "good" Android release. The L (and future) are just horrible with memory and they don't care, since most of the devices now are 2GB+.
- loudmax 10y ago
  My 1st gen Moto G is still going strong. Loading apps may be a little slow, but things rarely crash randomly. I'm pretty careful about exiting out of apps that I'm not actively using though, especially Google Maps. I recently updated the OS to CyanogenMod though, mainly because the phone stopped receiving security updates. I wouldn't say the phone performs better running CM, but it's no worse than when I first bought the phone. I really hope CynogenMod can keep the ball rolling. I wouldn't want to run the stock image after it's fallen this far behind security updates.

zhte415 10y ago

> It's so frustrating to hold an $800+ device while my home screen slowly populates with app icons, the back becoming scorching hot while the battery life visibly ticks down from the load. Why spend $800 for this? Really? Really? Is there a point to spend $800 on a device that in a showroom or a friend's hand was not feeling ok and needing to charge four times per day? Decent camera (would have been called world-class 2 years ago), battery charged once every 3 days, stock Android, 2 SIM card sockets, 64GB SD card, 5.x sized screen. But there are still things the camera phone can't do: Longer range/landscape photos. Interesting to see which manufacturer is able to put a quality detachable lens on a cameraphone, or when Nikon/Canon put SIM cards and telephony in their already Android-enabled equipment.

mustacheemperor 10y ago
You're spending at least $800 on any "flagship" phone, it just might be through your carrier contract. I agree, I often wonder why the hell this is supposed to be worth the money. It was not marketed as "not feeling ok and needing to charge four times per day," and as I recall it even ran great the first few months...Until the initial hardware warranties started running out, at which point my aux jack started disconnecting, the memory issues became apparent, etc...

matwood 10y ago

I went from the iPhone to the HTC One and then the Nexus 5. I always had various power issues, but stuck it out until the iPhone came out with the larger size. Only when I went back to the iPhone did I realize how poor the Android experience had been. The iPhone is not perfect, and Android has good things about it, but overall the iPhone experience is better than either Android device I used. The Nexus phones were a great value, but if the Pixel is going to be priced as a flagship phone then I see little reason to buy it over an iPhone.