17 ms·

The real issue here is not the hardware and not Android, but what device manufacturers and network providers cram down the throats of their customers. Custom UI

by yock 15y ago

The real issue here is not the hardware and not Android, but what device manufacturers and network providers cram down the throats of their customers. Custom UI enhancements/replacements, useless bundled apps that can't be removed, and the removal of standard, OS-delivered features. None of this should have been new or a surprise to the writer's mom, who was coming to Android from a feature phone. Feature phones have been plagued with the same crap for years, except they don't have a marketplace full of replacement apps that range from the serviceable to the remarkable. I'm glad the author's mom found a smartphone she likes, but this isn't an Android problem. It may very well be a Google problem, since Apple was indeed successful in keeping the kruft off the iPhone, but Android devices come to market in a completely different way than iPhones, and as long as we sign over our rights in exchange for a $400 device discount we're going to have to deal with some of it.

micampe 15y ago
I think this has been one of the major innovations of the iPhone: not allowing carriers to tamper with it. MS understood this and they are doing the same with WP7. Google knows it is a problem so they release the Google Experience phones, but they can’t disallow it completely.
- kooshball 15y ago
  I think it's quite interesting to see google go the same route as MS did with Windows and Windows Mobile which is allow the OEM to customize to make money, while letting user satisfaction drop. At the same time, WP7 is a total different strategy to tightly control the hardware and give a much greater user experience while the OEMs have less and less control.
markokocic 15y ago
But this what you explained is exactly the problem with Android. With iPhone, carriers, phone manufacturers and such are not allowed to install their crapware/bloatware on the phone. With Android, they can do whatever they want, and the only sane option for an end user is to root the phone.
- speckledjim 15y ago
  It's still a problem with US carriers. (Other countries have far better carriers and ecosystems than the US) It still absolutely amazes me that you guys usually pay for incoming SMS messages. I mean come on. W T F? If the carriers started charging each time you charge your battery the US public would just bend over and take it.
  - joshmanders 15y ago
    > It still absolutely amazes me that you guys usually pay for incoming SMS messages. What? I've never seen a carrier charge for incoming SMS.
    - cryptoz 15y ago
      Last time I checked (a few months ago), every large carrier in Canada charges 15 cents for each incoming SMS. That's Bell, Rogers, Telus...maybe some others. Many people have a plan addon that includes receiving some SMS for free, but the basic stock plans do not.
      - thequux 15y ago
        Canadian cell companies are a special kind of terrible. AFAICT, they exist purely to make the american companies look good by comparison. When I was there for 5 days, the cheapest way for me to get phone/internet on my Nexus S was to stick my Vodafone Germany SIM in and use roaming. (I was just using texts, twitter, and light maps; a total of 10MB for the weekend.)
      - Shenglong 15y ago
        Only Telus. Bell and Rogers are free incoming texts - or at least were, when I bought my phone (I have unlimited texting, but I like to make sure). However, that's not to say they don't try to jip you at every possibility. For the last few years, texting to the US had always been at the same rate as Canada (and covered by texting plans). Rogers decided to switch that on me when I wasn't paying attention... although I'm pretty sure I asked, and the Sales guy lied. In either case. One complaint to the FCC in the USA, or CCTS in Canada will get things your way. Both countries, from my experience, has pretty terrible customer service. I can barely understand half of Verizon's CS team, and one guy at Roger's CS actually told me I should just do nothing, even though I felt cheated, because "if you sue, our company has more money than you, and you'll lose for sure". Sigh.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- yock 15y ago
  The author specifically stated that his mom was.
nhebb 15y ago
The battery life and "scorching hot" temperature sound like hardware issues, but I doubt they're representative of all Android phones - just this model.
- jm4 15y ago
  I owned 3 different Android phones over the past 3 years. My wife owned 2 models different from mine over the same span. My experience is based on using 5 different Android models from different manufacturers. Although I'm focusing now on the things I did not like, the fact that I stayed with Android for so long should suggest that there was plenty I did like. Battery life was terrible on every Android phone I used. I could not get through an 8-9 hour work day with moderate use (an hour or two of streaming, maybe a few web pages, some texting and a brief call or two). I can absolutely confirm the weird battery issues this user experienced. On multiple phones. At times, the phone would get warm (not scorching hot in my case) and the battery would go from close to a full charge to nearly dead in the span of an hour or so. I kept spare chargers everywhere. Five freakin' phones. I finally gave in and switched to an iPhone. Now I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner. Maybe this is a little dramatic, but after using iOS for several weeks I have come to the realization that Android is flat out trash in comparison. I like having an "end call" button that is actually responsive and, you know... ends a call. On Android I would press it several times before the call would end. Just about every time. On too many occasions I had to pull the battery off. The unresponsive button thing isn't isolated either. Push a button. Wait. Wait. Push it a couple more times. The whole thing is agonizingly slow. Try to unlock the screen. Crap. I have to push the button 3 or 4 times. Arrgghhh! Don't even get me started on typing. The keyboard would lag on a regular basis, to the point where it was just not practical to use it for texting. I would start to type, the keyboard froze up and then a bunch of special accented characters would show up. Turning off basically every feature of the keyboard like haptic feedback and auto-correction would help, but the typing experience was still the worst of any phone I have used since T9 predictive text has been available. Apps crashed left and right. I'm not even talking about random stuff from the Android market. I'm talking about the built in ones. I had a task killer installed. It was my most frequently used app. Let that sink in. My task killer was my most frequently used app. I was constantly killing things that were slowing down the phone or eating up battery for no good reason. Search the Android market for task killers. There are tons of them. Some of them run in the background and automatically kill stuff in an attempt to improve performance. I could go on, but I'd rather not. I'm just glad I don't have to use those Android phones anymore. It will be a very long time before I would consider buying one again.
stcredzero 15y ago
I'm glad the author's mom found a smartphone she likes, but this isn't an Android problem. I'll be downvoted, but here goes: This shows the Linux heritage. All of Linux's problems on the desktop aren't really problems with Linux. It turns out that Android's problems aren't Android's either. Solved!
- bad_user 15y ago
  All of Linux's problems on the desktop aren't really problems with Linux. Errr, what?
  - zdw 15y ago
    What he's saying is that all of Linux's problems are with the kernel and surrounding low level code (which is quite stable, performs well, etc.), but with the integration, support and design of the distributions laid on top of them. For example Ubuntu has made great strides in this regard, but some would say the continual, sometimes drastic changes in the shipped apps and modifications of the interface make it hard for users.
    - allbutlost 15y ago
      I actually think he is being facetious. It may be true to say "it's not android", but as far as they end-user is concerned it _is_ android. It's got the logos, came with an android sticker on the box. For that user, when it comes to purchase or recommend another phone, will they make the same distinction or will their previous android experience influence their choice?
      - stcredzero 15y ago
        It's more of a statement about the culture and expectations growing up around Android, than about Android the technical artifact. The technophiles are right about the point they make about the latter, but it's the former that will make or break it in the marketplace.
cmurdock 15y ago
This is a similar problem to what goes on with PC vendors. They install crap-ware and borderline ad-ware on machines they sell to users who then complain that their brand new computer is already going slow after a few months. Even re-installing the OS using their provided "recovery" discs will re-install all this junk after installing the OS. Luckily you can circumvent this problem pretty easily with a PC. Not so easy with a locked-down phone from Verizon. Too bad there's not many wireless providers that don't pull this kind of stuff.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
sili 15y ago
This is the same problem that has plagued Windows on PC for years before this. Buying a PC from Dell or any other large retailers with Windows pre-installed meant a day worth of removing their crap-ware, support software, and back-up suits. Or you could reformat straight out of the box. Only this time the problem is more perwasive. With PC an average user did not get botherd by all this trash, the machine was good enough for surfing and email, which is what they used it for. Only advanced users and techies would get frustrated. However, with smartphones it seems to be a real problem even for an everyday user. What I don't understand though, is all this fat that providers pile on the phones and PC really worth it for them. They spend time and money to develop all these custom themes and apps, than users remove them. Even if users don't remove them and find them good enough to use, where is the profit to the provider? Branding and recognition?
- neutronicus 15y ago
  I think laptop OEMs got kickbacks for bundling crapware, especially antivirus software. I imagine the same is true of those mobile phones that bundle, say, Amazon.
  - jdietrich 15y ago
    At one point Sony offered a no-crapware option on some Vaio laptops. Until a PR shitstorm broke out, they were charging $50 extra. One can only imagine how much they're earning per-unit on kickbacks.
    - amorphid 15y ago
      Best Buy's "optimizes" computers prior to purchase. They charge something like $40 to remove the bloatware. http://m.gizmodo.com/5439590/best-buys-optimization-is-officially-a-huge-evil-scam http://m.gizmodo.com/5439590/best-buys-optimization-is-offic...
- henrikschroder 15y ago
  I find that the bundling on PCs have gotten much better in recent years. I bought a Packard Bell laptop for my dad, turned it on, chose the windows language and basic setup, waited half an hour for it to do its thing, and then it was good to go. An almost clean Windows 7 Home Premium, the only extra stuff on it was a 30-day Microsoft something trial, a 30-day Norton trial, and... that's it. And it's not even hard to remove those things if you don't want them. So the PC experience has gotten a lot better in recent years. I don't know why though, perhaps the industry learned? Perhaps it's not worth it to pre-load it with crap anymore?
bonch 15y ago
You can deny that it's an Android problem all you want, but to the customer, the problem is their Android phone and the fact Android allows this situation in the first place.
pmr_ 15y ago
Ironically this is shaking the trust of users in a sound platform and not in their network provider is not able to _not_ break something when modifying it.
dhughes 15y ago
Agreed. The touch on my Nexus One (HTC Passion) is horrible the slightest smudge and that's it no touch. I bought my mother an iPod touch a couple of years ago and the touch is fantastic. Actually anyone I know with HTC seems to have problems but not those I know with Android but not HTC hardware. I played around with a Samsung Galaxy II on display in a store and even after hundreds of people were poking at it and smudged it the touch was flawless. I've had a few crash on Android OS (v2.3.4 GRJ22) but I prefer it over iOS I find the iPod Touch's GUI suffocating after using Android.
stretchwithme 15y ago
That's 55 cents a day over a 2 year contract. And if you make $25 an hour after taxes (hopefully you make more), you're be working 92 seconds of every day just to pay the iPhone premium. Me thinks the better experience saves me at least 93 seconds of pain per day, possible even 2 whole minutes worth.
rayiner 15y ago
> I'm glad the author's mom found a smartphone she likes, but this isn't an Android problem. It may very well be a Google problem It's definitely Google's problem. Experiences like this tremendously hurt the Android brand. What if you bought a "BMW" but it turned out to be a piece of crap because BMW had licensed their engines and logo but exercised no quality-control over the final products? You'd never buy another BMW, regardless of whose fault it really was.

by yock 15y ago

micampe 15y ago

I think this has been one of the major innovations of the iPhone: not allowing carriers to tamper with it. MS understood this and they are doing the same with WP7. Google knows it is a problem so they release the Google Experience phones, but they can’t disallow it completely.

kooshball 15y ago
I think it's quite interesting to see google go the same route as MS did with Windows and Windows Mobile which is allow the OEM to customize to make money, while letting user satisfaction drop. At the same time, WP7 is a total different strategy to tightly control the hardware and give a much greater user experience while the OEMs have less and less control.

markokocic 15y ago

But this what you explained is exactly the problem with Android. With iPhone, carriers, phone manufacturers and such are not allowed to install their crapware/bloatware on the phone. With Android, they can do whatever they want, and the only sane option for an end user is to root the phone.

speckledjim 15y ago
It's still a problem with US carriers. (Other countries have far better carriers and ecosystems than the US) It still absolutely amazes me that you guys usually pay for incoming SMS messages. I mean come on. W T F? If the carriers started charging each time you charge your battery the US public would just bend over and take it.
- joshmanders 15y ago
  > It still absolutely amazes me that you guys usually pay for incoming SMS messages. What? I've never seen a carrier charge for incoming SMS.
  - cryptoz 15y ago
    Last time I checked (a few months ago), every large carrier in Canada charges 15 cents for each incoming SMS. That's Bell, Rogers, Telus...maybe some others. Many people have a plan addon that includes receiving some SMS for free, but the basic stock plans do not.
    - thequux 15y ago
      Canadian cell companies are a special kind of terrible. AFAICT, they exist purely to make the american companies look good by comparison. When I was there for 5 days, the cheapest way for me to get phone/internet on my Nexus S was to stick my Vodafone Germany SIM in and use roaming. (I was just using texts, twitter, and light maps; a total of 10MB for the weekend.)
    - Shenglong 15y ago
      Only Telus. Bell and Rogers are free incoming texts - or at least were, when I bought my phone (I have unlimited texting, but I like to make sure). However, that's not to say they don't try to jip you at every possibility. For the last few years, texting to the US had always been at the same rate as Canada (and covered by texting plans). Rogers decided to switch that on me when I wasn't paying attention... although I'm pretty sure I asked, and the Sales guy lied. In either case. One complaint to the FCC in the USA, or CCTS in Canada will get things your way. Both countries, from my experience, has pretty terrible customer service. I can barely understand half of Verizon's CS team, and one guy at Roger's CS actually told me I should just do nothing, even though I felt cheated, because "if you sue, our company has more money than you, and you'll lose for sure". Sigh.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

yock 15y ago
The author specifically stated that his mom was.

nhebb 15y ago

The battery life and "scorching hot" temperature sound like hardware issues, but I doubt they're representative of all Android phones - just this model.

jm4 15y ago
I owned 3 different Android phones over the past 3 years. My wife owned 2 models different from mine over the same span. My experience is based on using 5 different Android models from different manufacturers. Although I'm focusing now on the things I did not like, the fact that I stayed with Android for so long should suggest that there was plenty I did like. Battery life was terrible on every Android phone I used. I could not get through an 8-9 hour work day with moderate use (an hour or two of streaming, maybe a few web pages, some texting and a brief call or two). I can absolutely confirm the weird battery issues this user experienced. On multiple phones. At times, the phone would get warm (not scorching hot in my case) and the battery would go from close to a full charge to nearly dead in the span of an hour or so. I kept spare chargers everywhere. Five freakin' phones. I finally gave in and switched to an iPhone. Now I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner. Maybe this is a little dramatic, but after using iOS for several weeks I have come to the realization that Android is flat out trash in comparison. I like having an "end call" button that is actually responsive and, you know... ends a call. On Android I would press it several times before the call would end. Just about every time. On too many occasions I had to pull the battery off. The unresponsive button thing isn't isolated either. Push a button. Wait. Wait. Push it a couple more times. The whole thing is agonizingly slow. Try to unlock the screen. Crap. I have to push the button 3 or 4 times. Arrgghhh! Don't even get me started on typing. The keyboard would lag on a regular basis, to the point where it was just not practical to use it for texting. I would start to type, the keyboard froze up and then a bunch of special accented characters would show up. Turning off basically every feature of the keyboard like haptic feedback and auto-correction would help, but the typing experience was still the worst of any phone I have used since T9 predictive text has been available. Apps crashed left and right. I'm not even talking about random stuff from the Android market. I'm talking about the built in ones. I had a task killer installed. It was my most frequently used app. Let that sink in. My task killer was my most frequently used app. I was constantly killing things that were slowing down the phone or eating up battery for no good reason. Search the Android market for task killers. There are tons of them. Some of them run in the background and automatically kill stuff in an attempt to improve performance. I could go on, but I'd rather not. I'm just glad I don't have to use those Android phones anymore. It will be a very long time before I would consider buying one again.

stcredzero 15y ago

I'm glad the author's mom found a smartphone she likes, but this isn't an Android problem. I'll be downvoted, but here goes: This shows the Linux heritage. All of Linux's problems on the desktop aren't really problems with Linux. It turns out that Android's problems aren't Android's either. Solved!

bad_user 15y ago
All of Linux's problems on the desktop aren't really problems with Linux. Errr, what?
- zdw 15y ago
  What he's saying is that all of Linux's problems are with the kernel and surrounding low level code (which is quite stable, performs well, etc.), but with the integration, support and design of the distributions laid on top of them. For example Ubuntu has made great strides in this regard, but some would say the continual, sometimes drastic changes in the shipped apps and modifications of the interface make it hard for users.
  - allbutlost 15y ago
    I actually think he is being facetious. It may be true to say "it's not android", but as far as they end-user is concerned it _is_ android. It's got the logos, came with an android sticker on the box. For that user, when it comes to purchase or recommend another phone, will they make the same distinction or will their previous android experience influence their choice?
    - stcredzero 15y ago
      It's more of a statement about the culture and expectations growing up around Android, than about Android the technical artifact. The technophiles are right about the point they make about the latter, but it's the former that will make or break it in the marketplace.

cmurdock 15y ago

This is a similar problem to what goes on with PC vendors. They install crap-ware and borderline ad-ware on machines they sell to users who then complain that their brand new computer is already going slow after a few months. Even re-installing the OS using their provided "recovery" discs will re-install all this junk after installing the OS. Luckily you can circumvent this problem pretty easily with a PC. Not so easy with a locked-down phone from Verizon. Too bad there's not many wireless providers that don't pull this kind of stuff.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

sili 15y ago

This is the same problem that has plagued Windows on PC for years before this. Buying a PC from Dell or any other large retailers with Windows pre-installed meant a day worth of removing their crap-ware, support software, and back-up suits. Or you could reformat straight out of the box. Only this time the problem is more perwasive. With PC an average user did not get botherd by all this trash, the machine was good enough for surfing and email, which is what they used it for. Only advanced users and techies would get frustrated. However, with smartphones it seems to be a real problem even for an everyday user. What I don't understand though, is all this fat that providers pile on the phones and PC really worth it for them. They spend time and money to develop all these custom themes and apps, than users remove them. Even if users don't remove them and find them good enough to use, where is the profit to the provider? Branding and recognition?

neutronicus 15y ago
I think laptop OEMs got kickbacks for bundling crapware, especially antivirus software. I imagine the same is true of those mobile phones that bundle, say, Amazon.
- jdietrich 15y ago
  At one point Sony offered a no-crapware option on some Vaio laptops. Until a PR shitstorm broke out, they were charging $50 extra. One can only imagine how much they're earning per-unit on kickbacks.
  - amorphid 15y ago
    Best Buy's "optimizes" computers prior to purchase. They charge something like $40 to remove the bloatware. http://m.gizmodo.com/5439590/best-buys-optimization-is-officially-a-huge-evil-scam http://m.gizmodo.com/5439590/best-buys-optimization-is-offic...
henrikschroder 15y ago
I find that the bundling on PCs have gotten much better in recent years. I bought a Packard Bell laptop for my dad, turned it on, chose the windows language and basic setup, waited half an hour for it to do its thing, and then it was good to go. An almost clean Windows 7 Home Premium, the only extra stuff on it was a 30-day Microsoft something trial, a 30-day Norton trial, and... that's it. And it's not even hard to remove those things if you don't want them. So the PC experience has gotten a lot better in recent years. I don't know why though, perhaps the industry learned? Perhaps it's not worth it to pre-load it with crap anymore?

bonch 15y ago

You can deny that it's an Android problem all you want, but to the customer, the problem is their Android phone and the fact Android allows this situation in the first place.

pmr_ 15y ago

Ironically this is shaking the trust of users in a sound platform and not in their network provider is not able to _not_ break something when modifying it.

dhughes 15y ago

Agreed. The touch on my Nexus One (HTC Passion) is horrible the slightest smudge and that's it no touch. I bought my mother an iPod touch a couple of years ago and the touch is fantastic. Actually anyone I know with HTC seems to have problems but not those I know with Android but not HTC hardware. I played around with a Samsung Galaxy II on display in a store and even after hundreds of people were poking at it and smudged it the touch was flawless. I've had a few crash on Android OS (v2.3.4 GRJ22) but I prefer it over iOS I find the iPod Touch's GUI suffocating after using Android.

stretchwithme 15y ago

That's 55 cents a day over a 2 year contract. And if you make $25 an hour after taxes (hopefully you make more), you're be working 92 seconds of every day just to pay the iPhone premium. Me thinks the better experience saves me at least 93 seconds of pain per day, possible even 2 whole minutes worth.

rayiner 15y ago

> I'm glad the author's mom found a smartphone she likes, but this isn't an Android problem. It may very well be a Google problem It's definitely Google's problem. Experiences like this tremendously hurt the Android brand. What if you bought a "BMW" but it turned out to be a piece of crap because BMW had licensed their engines and logo but exercised no quality-control over the final products? You'd never buy another BMW, regardless of whose fault it really was.