3 ms·

The SD card in Android is a gibbering nightmare in far more ways than that. For starters, that it's necessary at all! The first devices all had only 256mb of f

by blasdel 16y ago

The SD card in Android is a gibbering nightmare in far more ways than that. For starters, that it's necessary at all! The first devices all had only 256mb of flash, but then the OS got bigger than that (can't upgrade older devices cleanly!), so they just doubled that to 512mb instead of doing anything sensible. Is there a single "Google Experience" Android device with more built-in Flash than that? What's worse is that they use it sparingly themselves but essentially force everyone else to -- Apps don't fit in the onboard flash, you can't even run Apps from the SD card, so everyone has to hack together their own asset system. Now the SD card isn't removable without breaking your running apps! It's a heap of ill-considered shit. Nobody would even propose these idiocies at Apple, much less get them past their manager. Even Windows Mobile wasn't this bad, but mostly just because they didn't try to do very much. The Android team thinks they're clever -- but when the WM diaspora (http://www.xda-developers.com/ http://www.xda-developers.com/) are the community that fixes up your shit, you're clearly not.

torpor 16y ago
Blame Microsoft. If FAT weren't such a trojan horse, the SD-card could be used a lot more effectively, but since FAT is a minefield, the SD card can't be used as a reliable and permanent component in the OS base system ..
- blasdel 16y ago
  FAT may be an incredibly shitty lowest common denominator, but that's completely irrelevant here. The SD card can't be used reliably because upstream never provided a common API for all apps to interface with it. They didn't even have the courtesy to encourage apps to use their bundle identifiers to segregate their shit! They really shouldn't be exposing a shared RW traditional filesystem to apps at all, no matter where it's located. Unfortunately that's the only API they exposed! They really should be forcing manufacturers to ship with at least 8gb of flash to get the "Google Experience", but instead even their Nexus One ships with as little storage as possible to save a couple dollars! My whole point is that the SD card SHOULD NOT be used as a permanent component in the OS base system at all. It should be removable storage, but the way apps are forced to use it makes it anything but! The whole thing is completely incompetent. It would have been hard/impossible for them to implement removable storage to Apple's standards of usability, but they could have at least done better than WinMo! Really they should have just shipped the original devices with a healthy amount of flash and no SD card slot at all, and added removable storage support in a later iteration (which is exactly what Apple did).
  - torpor 16y ago
    >My whole point is that the SD card SHOULD NOT be used as a permanent component in the OS base system at all. It should be removable storage, but the way apps are forced to use it makes it anything but! In the Pandora system, we have PND files, which solve this problem pretty well. Perhaps Google can consider something similar: http://pandorawiki.org/Libpnd_hub http://pandorawiki.org/Libpnd_hub

by blasdel 16y ago

torpor 16y ago

Blame Microsoft. If FAT weren't such a trojan horse, the SD-card could be used a lot more effectively, but since FAT is a minefield, the SD card can't be used as a reliable and permanent component in the OS base system ..

blasdel 16y ago
FAT may be an incredibly shitty lowest common denominator, but that's completely irrelevant here. The SD card can't be used reliably because upstream never provided a common API for all apps to interface with it. They didn't even have the courtesy to encourage apps to use their bundle identifiers to segregate their shit! They really shouldn't be exposing a shared RW traditional filesystem to apps at all, no matter where it's located. Unfortunately that's the only API they exposed! They really should be forcing manufacturers to ship with at least 8gb of flash to get the "Google Experience", but instead even their Nexus One ships with as little storage as possible to save a couple dollars! My whole point is that the SD card SHOULD NOT be used as a permanent component in the OS base system at all. It should be removable storage, but the way apps are forced to use it makes it anything but! The whole thing is completely incompetent. It would have been hard/impossible for them to implement removable storage to Apple's standards of usability, but they could have at least done better than WinMo! Really they should have just shipped the original devices with a healthy amount of flash and no SD card slot at all, and added removable storage support in a later iteration (which is exactly what Apple did).
- torpor 16y ago
  >My whole point is that the SD card SHOULD NOT be used as a permanent component in the OS base system at all. It should be removable storage, but the way apps are forced to use it makes it anything but! In the Pandora system, we have PND files, which solve this problem pretty well. Perhaps Google can consider something similar: http://pandorawiki.org/Libpnd_hub http://pandorawiki.org/Libpnd_hub