10 ms·

Nothing in Android makes sense except in the light of its original vision

98 points by siglesias 15y ago

barrkel 15y ago
I suspect the freedom for carriers is at the root of the similar freedom for users to change launcher, change default applications for the home button, dialer, etc. If reducing the former means reducing the latter, I'm against.
lmkg 15y ago
That actually sounds like a bad idea from the outset. There are exceptions (Apple), but my general observation is that hardware companies are bad at writing software, especially user-facing software. Making a consistent platform by writing a compatibility layer is a rock-solid concept, but expecting hardware vendors to be the ones writing software on top of that layer seems misguided. On the other hand, while they're not good at making the user-space software, it's something every OEM will think that they want to do. So if the goal is to get widespread adoption, it's a good hook. To be fair, most companies are bad at writing software, regardless of type, and even software companies aren't always good at writing software. I don't blame hardware companies, it's just not their core competency, and a hardware-engineering mindset is a poor fit for software design.
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  >hardware companies are bad at writing software Oh god yes. I work for a major hardware manufacturer. We are by far the dominant supplier in our field. We are making a web app that allows our customers to control, operate, and mange our products. It's garbage. Let alone the fact that it's written in Java using seam convos, there was just no thought whatsoever put into UX. For instance, if you press the back button, it takes you to the previous page. So far, so good. However, if you try to perform some (any) action after that, you get a Java stack track and, weirdly, a "your session has timed out" error. I brought this to our development lead, and his official, written response was, "lots of web apps break if you use the back button. If you use the back button during a ticketmaster checkout, you get an error. This isn't a problem." Again, our hardware is fantastic and we have well over 50% market share in a massive industry. We just don't have the institutional give-a-shit to go with it on the software side.
  - zecho 15y ago
    Yeah. I've seen Cisco software with buttons that do absolutely nothing. Click them all day long. They do nothing. The documentation says they do something, but they do not. Or GUIs that don't allow you to resize the window, despite the fact that a third of the GUI is cut off. I get a sick enjoyment out of watching our sysadmins flip out about software GUIs designed for the hardware they're running.
  - vacri 15y ago
    ... cisco? We were having lots of trouble with our office ADSL, and decided to buy a cisco modem from our ISP ("because if they sell it, they must be able to support it, right?"). I was a bit nervous because I know a little about cisco gear, but not enough to be confident to configure a router. This model was advertised as 'easy webif', and the ISP isn't a shoddy fly-by-nighter, so I took the gamble. Turns out the 'easy webif' was effectively IE-only and required java (refused to run in any of the linux browsers I tried)... took about a minute to intialise itself... and could barely configure the device (port forwarding? no, you can't do that here...). I have honestly never seen a worse webif in my life. Ended up returning it. Discussing it with a friend, he said that the webif isn't ever supposed to be used, it's just there as a tickbox to satisfy beancounters.
  - swalsh 15y ago
    My first inclination was Qualcomm. They have a pretty heavy share of the CDMA market, and are sporting some funky user portals that make heavy use of Java.
pazimzadeh 15y ago
Fun fact: The title is likely an adaptation of the quote "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" by Theodosius Dobzhansky.
there 15y ago
I had to scroll back up while reading this to see how old it was. The bug linked to is now closed, and the interview is from last year. Android 4 does use the GPU for more GUI operations and Google has mandated that 3rd parties must not modify the default theme (http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/01/06/google-imposing-gui-restrictions-on-android-4-0-devices/ http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/01/06/google-imposing-gui-rest...).
- Xuzz 15y ago
  That's not completely true. They can't (feels weird to say "can't" and "mandate" for an open source project) now replace the Google UI, but they certainly can add their own modifications. (And that's only on 1% of devices, too, running Android 4.0.) Also, while the GPU is now used to accelerate the UI, it is still simply not as smooth. The single-core Nokia Lumia 800 with Windows Phone is noticeably smoother at scrolling than my top-of-the-line Galaxy Nexus was. I'm excited for where Google is going with Android, but it's still not quite there yet.
  - there 15y ago
    They can't (feels weird to say "can't" and "mandate" for an open source project) Open source isn't relevant here because that mandate is for any vendor wanting to distribute Google's proprietary apps (Market, Maps, Gmail, Google account sync, Face unlock, etc.) with their device. Every carrier and hardware vendor except Amazon falls into that category and is going to have to do whatever Google says to continue licensing those apps. Yes, they can continue making their own themes, but unless app developers specifically choose to use it with DeviceDefault, those apps will use the unmodified Halo theme which must now look the same on every device.
- dcurtis 15y ago
  Android 4 does use the GPU for some things, however scrolling performance is still nowhere near as good as it is on iOS. The "unmodified Halo theme" is referring to the icons and interface elements included with the operating system that developers can use when building their apps. Google even said this: "We have no desire to restrict manufacturers from building their own themed experience across their devices." (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2012/01/holo-everywhere.html http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2012/01/holo-everywhe...)
edderly 15y ago
Disagree > And RIM’s BlackBerry was still the most popular smartphone in the world. If your world was the USA. Symbian/S60 was the dominant smartphone OS. > What Miner and Google gambled on, and it seems bizarre in retrospect, was that the carriers and the manufacturers would be good at customizing and improving the user experience of the base operating system. No, the problem was that the available OS's had huge (leave it to the handset vendor) holes (Symbian), or that their competitors had control of the available 'easyish but hard' options (Nokia dominated Symbian). Or that the other options were crap (Windows Mobile), or required S/W engineering experience which was not easily obtained (generic Linux). The miracle of Android was that though it had some gaps in it's implementation, was good enough, and sponsored by a somewhat benign entity (at the time). However, the reason for the handset manufacturers trying to differentiate, no matter how incompetently, or not was that the problem that Android solved also holds a curse. That is that the handset manufacturers do not want to repeat the PC experience of comoditizing the hardware market - What has happened before will happen again - unless we try to retard things. The only way Google can reduce manufacturer freedom is to become truly non-free, on the day that happens, Android will fork.
- dcurtis 15y ago
  Thanks. I have fixed the error about RIM.
  - edderly 15y ago
    No problem, I've also toned down my reply.
    - hoi 15y ago
      Yep exactly, and that was why the Symbian Alliance formed. It was to prevent microsoft from doing what they did to the PC world. This is also one of the reasons ARM thrived instead of Intel. The other lesson that is still being battled is patents, Internet protocol is essentially free. Wireless is not. The other main difference is carriers, they are the gatekeepers to the valuable, yet resource limited spectrum that mobile phones need and therefore have a much larger control over the value chain than ISPs do for the Wired Internet.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
rdouble 15y ago
What Miner and Google gambled on, and it seems bizarre in retrospect, was that the carriers and the manufacturers would be good at customizing and improving the user experience of the base operating system. It made sense in context. Miner was the head of the Orange/FT research lab in Cambridge. A lot of creative engineers worked there but they were hamstrung by the junky phone SDKs available at the time. Android would have been just what they needed.
- harshaw 15y ago
  Yeah but I got to put stuff on my resume like experience with windows mobile 2002 and Symbian UIQ :) At Orange we toyed with pushing an Android precursor from Savaje. However, the timing wasn't right - hardware wasn't powerful enough and Orange/FT didn't have the balls or corporate DNA to establish something like the OMA. At Orange (or probably any carrier) getting a device out the door was a clusterfuck. You had to coordinate between the Device manufacturer (who never had any flexibility in their software schedule), the various operating companies who wanted phones in shop by Nov 1 for the Holiday or else, and various PM's running about trying to get features on the phone to help with their particular mandate (at the time it might have been music, IM, etc). So yeah, anyone with half a technical clue could see that you could get shit done faster with a common OS. WHat's amazing is that with a little bit of juice from Google and a crack engineering team from Rubin they managed to totally dominate the non IOS smartphone market in a couple of years. People seem to have this odd view that Android is deficient because it doesn't have some IOS optimizations. But look - if I told you to build something on one set of hardware and make it great that's 10x easier than building an open system. Yeah, closed systems may win in the end (and Apple is winning) but ANdroid couldn't be Android without a wider perspective.
manojlds 15y ago
The final suggestions makes me think that WindowsPhone is the perfect middle ground between Android and iOS
- sounds 15y ago
  I think the mildly-open nature of Android will be better marketing than Windows Phone - not overboard on openness, but not completely closed. Hardware manufacturers and Cell providers won't support the extra cost of paying for the OS (in the long run). This outcome isn't what I would like most, but it seems realistic.
stretchwithme 15y ago
Its a shame they didn't at least establish some rules on how manufacturers could modify the interface.
- djhworld 15y ago
  If they did this none of the manufacturers would have taken on the platform though. Why should Google dictate to them what they put in their own products? If Google wanted to standardise Android they should have never released it as an OS for all and produced the phones themselves.
hoi 15y ago
Symbian was also designed with integration with hardware in mind and providing core API's for manufacturers and carriers to build a UI on top of. This is why the early owners of Symbian were a plethora of manufacturers and operators. Symbian even tried to designate 3 specific UI frameworks (touch, candybar and QWERTY) named Quartz, Pearl and Crystal.. but the shareholders revolted and went their own UI way (hence S60, UIQ & MOAP). Disclosure: I worked at Symbian between 1999-2003
cpeterso 15y ago
> The hardest part of building advanced mobile phones, he reasoned, was writing the lower-level software that the operating system uses to communicate with the hardware, including the radio baseband and audio/video controllers Wouldn't that hardware- and network-specific code be more easily written by the handset manufacturers and network providers than a third-party software (only) company?
drivebyacct2 15y ago
I can't possibly imagine how any phone could be smoother than the Galaxy Nexus. Yes, it's taken a long time to get it in 4.0 and it's available to almost no one, but it is finally fixed in my opinion.
- brettnak 15y ago
  I agree that the scrolling is pretty smooth. It's not quite as smooth as I think it could be but it's far beyond acceptable. I think when people say that scrolling doesn't "feel right" on a Galaxy Nexus is because of the distance you have to physically move your finger before it responds and actually starts scrolling. I think this is deliberate to prevent people from accidentally scrolling, but nevertheless, I think this is what people are seeing.
djhworld 15y ago
I think the reason why Android has become so popular with the manufacturers is because they're free to customise the OS. If Android was just a one interface, one direction platform I don't think any of them would have taken it up. Mobile phones are still a very competitive market and manufacturers want to differentiate their products to attract customers from another
- huggyface 15y ago
  Android became popular with manufacturers because they desperately needed to all gang behind one platform to have any hope against the incredible success of Apple. While quite a few vendors signed onto Android even before the first handsets, they did so at no cost and in name only -- the original Android army were the absolutely miserable G1 and G2 (HTC Dream and Magic), and it stayed that way for some time. At the time I was sure the platform would fail. As Apple grew, the necessity to commit to Android grew. Boring parables about why Android made a mistake because it isn't like iOS are as old as both operating systems, during the same time that Android has done gangbusters. My wife has a Captivate Glide with Gingerbread and Samsung's TouchWiz on it. She loves it. She doesn't know or care what ICS is, gets constant updates for the mapping and market and book reading and video viewing, etc. For the average real, non-blogging human being the model works remarkably well.
  - djhworld 15y ago
    Yep, but if Google just said "Here is our OS, you may put it on your products, but you may not deviate from principles set out by us" none of them would have taken up on it. Mobile phone hardware is generally the same across most devices these days and most of the "Joe Public" don't care what's on the inside - so the software is where the manufacturers try to differentiate themselves from each other as a selling point
richworks 15y ago
I wonder... if almost everyone knows and complains about the smoothness in Android being not as good as iOS(consistently, I mean)... Isn't Google aware of this? Or does achieving impeccable smoothness come at a cost(increased memory usage?).. which means that Google are in the crossroads here, trying to balance fluid UX and efficient memory management? Or is it because Apple and Microsoft have been leaders in software engineering for more than a couple of decades and may have mastered the ins and outs of Operating Systems.. and since it has been only 5-6 years that Google has been working on Android, are they still competitively behind Apple and MS in this regard? and so that we can hope for improvement?
- jan_g 15y ago
  There are millions of users out there (including myself), who don't care about smoothness or (in my case) don't even notice any difference between an ios or android scrolling. Also, you have to take into consideration the fact that majority of users had considerably slower feature phone before buying android phone. To them, android is blazingly fast.
- huggyface 15y ago
  if almost everyone knows and complains about the smoothness in Android being not as good as iOS To the average user it is a complete non-issue: It's one of those things that you have to essentially point out to them. It is an issue for iOS boosters, however, because it's what they see as Android's Achilles heal.
ZeroGravitas 15y ago
This is one of the biggest myths of Android. Apple doesn't have manufacturer skins, therefore they must be utterly and irredeemably evil. On the other hand, if you actually look at it objectively, manufacturers filled in many genuine gaps and made the early Android OS look much better than the default. Various innovations they introduced have been brought back into core Android and/or stolen by CyanogenMod etc. From a business perspective, a lot of Android's permissiveness towards their hardware and network partners has obviously succeeded beyond most people's expectations. So the skins have both good points and bad and there are shades of gray but mostly you get the loud opinion of Android geeks (who want the very latest stock as a point of principle) and Apple geeks (who will tear down anything that Apple doesn't have e.g. big screens) usually with the assumption that what they think is important is the only reality. It's also worth noting that Android is clearly aiming to be more than just a phone or tablet OS, so customisation is probably required to support e.g. car computers.
fauigerzigerk 15y ago
The original vision is a good one and it works. You need to consider the cost of preventing bad devices and bad UI extensions. The cost is just what you see in iOS: Limited choice of devices. Restrictive censorship rules for users and developers. No checks and balances. Scolling works well on my Nexus S by the way.
- bitwize 15y ago
  Limited choice of devices. GOOD. Restrictive censorship rules for users and developers. If the government isn't doing it, it ain't censorship. Look at what quality filtering through an approval process did for the video game industry. The same force is in effect on iOS, and the quality of iOS apps is consistently pretty high, especially when compared to Android. Scrolling was total ass on my Epic 4G until I loaded some custom ROM where they did some sort of low-level magic to deliver an "ICS-like" experience on a Gingerbread code base. It still sucks, though, because unless you have a GNex, to get this UX on Android you have to visit some forum where l33t kids hang out and dink about with your phone, flashing its ROMs and potentially bricking it, and only then can you have something that vaguely suggests an iPhone in smoothness. With Apple, it comes with a butter-smooth UX right out of the box.
  - fauigerzigerk 15y ago
    If the government isn't doing it, it ain't censorship It is tantamount to censorship once you have chosen iOS, because that choice makes Apple the government of your content. But whatever you choose to call it, fact is that they restrict content based on value judgements that go well beyond anything you could ever call "quality assurance". They ban everything controversial regardless of quality.
TurnitUP 15y ago
When Apple launched the first iPhone it was sold for $500 without contract. Within months Apple had cut the low end model and dropped the price by a third to $400. For the iPhone 3G Apple would jump in bed with AT&T, introduce subsidized models, sales would explode and the rest is history. The Apple and AT&T partnership would lead to the Google Voice fiasco and delayed tethering feature rollout and the (still ongoing) download restrictions and low quality videos over youtube. It would be another 3 years before Apple released another iPhone model priced below $500 (the 8GB iPhone 3GS in fall of 2011). The obvious point is that the cell phone industry is hard to break into and the most successful players adapt the realities of the marketplace. It's no surprise to anyone that Google changed Android to make it succeed. (Unless you're MG Siegler; I'm still waiting for the blog post on how he hates iOS because Apple sold out).
- rsynnott 15y ago
  Ah, no. On release, for a few months, the iPhone was _$500 with contract_. Yes, really.
TeeWEE 15y ago
The only thing this where this guy is right is the scrolling issue. But he doesnt explain why this is. Android was created initially as a non-touch OS. When they had to support touch they could not totally rewrite how animation was done. This resulted in one thread doing event handling and animation. This is difficult to fix in Android's UI Architecture. And phones hardware often makeup for this fact. So scrolling is indeed a bit worse than IOS, but its not really painfull anymore. You should give this guy a Galaxy Nexus. Also the UI extensions on top of android are actually one of its strong points. Differentiation is the key here. And they are not so bad. The point here is: You do not have to be the best to rule the market! And Google knows that. However the Galaxy Nexus is the best phone out there, much better than any iphone.
Gotttzsche 15y ago
huh, i think i just gave him kudos; what the hell was that?

98 points by siglesias 15y ago

I suspect the freedom for carriers is at the root of the similar freedom for users to change launcher, change default applications for the home button, dialer, etc. If reducing the former means reducing the latter, I'm against.

lmkg 15y ago

That actually sounds like a bad idea from the outset. There are exceptions (Apple), but my general observation is that hardware companies are bad at writing software, especially user-facing software. Making a consistent platform by writing a compatibility layer is a rock-solid concept, but expecting hardware vendors to be the ones writing software on top of that layer seems misguided. On the other hand, while they're not good at making the user-space software, it's something every OEM will think that they want to do. So if the goal is to get widespread adoption, it's a good hook. To be fair, most companies are bad at writing software, regardless of type, and even software companies aren't always good at writing software. I don't blame hardware companies, it's just not their core competency, and a hardware-engineering mindset is a poor fit for software design.

redthrowaway 15y ago
>hardware companies are bad at writing software Oh god yes. I work for a major hardware manufacturer. We are by far the dominant supplier in our field. We are making a web app that allows our customers to control, operate, and mange our products. It's garbage. Let alone the fact that it's written in Java using seam convos, there was just no thought whatsoever put into UX. For instance, if you press the back button, it takes you to the previous page. So far, so good. However, if you try to perform some (any) action after that, you get a Java stack track and, weirdly, a "your session has timed out" error. I brought this to our development lead, and his official, written response was, "lots of web apps break if you use the back button. If you use the back button during a ticketmaster checkout, you get an error. This isn't a problem." Again, our hardware is fantastic and we have well over 50% market share in a massive industry. We just don't have the institutional give-a-shit to go with it on the software side.
- zecho 15y ago
  Yeah. I've seen Cisco software with buttons that do absolutely nothing. Click them all day long. They do nothing. The documentation says they do something, but they do not. Or GUIs that don't allow you to resize the window, despite the fact that a third of the GUI is cut off. I get a sick enjoyment out of watching our sysadmins flip out about software GUIs designed for the hardware they're running.
- vacri 15y ago
  ... cisco? We were having lots of trouble with our office ADSL, and decided to buy a cisco modem from our ISP ("because if they sell it, they must be able to support it, right?"). I was a bit nervous because I know a little about cisco gear, but not enough to be confident to configure a router. This model was advertised as 'easy webif', and the ISP isn't a shoddy fly-by-nighter, so I took the gamble. Turns out the 'easy webif' was effectively IE-only and required java (refused to run in any of the linux browsers I tried)... took about a minute to intialise itself... and could barely configure the device (port forwarding? no, you can't do that here...). I have honestly never seen a worse webif in my life. Ended up returning it. Discussing it with a friend, he said that the webif isn't ever supposed to be used, it's just there as a tickbox to satisfy beancounters.
- swalsh 15y ago
  My first inclination was Qualcomm. They have a pretty heavy share of the CDMA market, and are sporting some funky user portals that make heavy use of Java.

pazimzadeh 15y ago

Fun fact: The title is likely an adaptation of the quote "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" by Theodosius Dobzhansky.

there 15y ago

I had to scroll back up while reading this to see how old it was. The bug linked to is now closed, and the interview is from last year. Android 4 does use the GPU for more GUI operations and Google has mandated that 3rd parties must not modify the default theme (http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/01/06/google-imposing-gui-restrictions-on-android-4-0-devices/ http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/01/06/google-imposing-gui-rest...).

Xuzz 15y ago
That's not completely true. They can't (feels weird to say "can't" and "mandate" for an open source project) now replace the Google UI, but they certainly can add their own modifications. (And that's only on 1% of devices, too, running Android 4.0.) Also, while the GPU is now used to accelerate the UI, it is still simply not as smooth. The single-core Nokia Lumia 800 with Windows Phone is noticeably smoother at scrolling than my top-of-the-line Galaxy Nexus was. I'm excited for where Google is going with Android, but it's still not quite there yet.
- there 15y ago
  They can't (feels weird to say "can't" and "mandate" for an open source project) Open source isn't relevant here because that mandate is for any vendor wanting to distribute Google's proprietary apps (Market, Maps, Gmail, Google account sync, Face unlock, etc.) with their device. Every carrier and hardware vendor except Amazon falls into that category and is going to have to do whatever Google says to continue licensing those apps. Yes, they can continue making their own themes, but unless app developers specifically choose to use it with DeviceDefault, those apps will use the unmodified Halo theme which must now look the same on every device.
dcurtis 15y ago
Android 4 does use the GPU for some things, however scrolling performance is still nowhere near as good as it is on iOS. The "unmodified Halo theme" is referring to the icons and interface elements included with the operating system that developers can use when building their apps. Google even said this: "We have no desire to restrict manufacturers from building their own themed experience across their devices." (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2012/01/holo-everywhere.html http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2012/01/holo-everywhe...)

edderly 15y ago

Disagree > And RIM’s BlackBerry was still the most popular smartphone in the world. If your world was the USA. Symbian/S60 was the dominant smartphone OS. > What Miner and Google gambled on, and it seems bizarre in retrospect, was that the carriers and the manufacturers would be good at customizing and improving the user experience of the base operating system. No, the problem was that the available OS's had huge (leave it to the handset vendor) holes (Symbian), or that their competitors had control of the available 'easyish but hard' options (Nokia dominated Symbian). Or that the other options were crap (Windows Mobile), or required S/W engineering experience which was not easily obtained (generic Linux). The miracle of Android was that though it had some gaps in it's implementation, was good enough, and sponsored by a somewhat benign entity (at the time). However, the reason for the handset manufacturers trying to differentiate, no matter how incompetently, or not was that the problem that Android solved also holds a curse. That is that the handset manufacturers do not want to repeat the PC experience of comoditizing the hardware market - What has happened before will happen again - unless we try to retard things. The only way Google can reduce manufacturer freedom is to become truly non-free, on the day that happens, Android will fork.

dcurtis 15y ago
Thanks. I have fixed the error about RIM.
- edderly 15y ago
  No problem, I've also toned down my reply.
  - hoi 15y ago
    Yep exactly, and that was why the Symbian Alliance formed. It was to prevent microsoft from doing what they did to the PC world. This is also one of the reasons ARM thrived instead of Intel. The other lesson that is still being battled is patents, Internet protocol is essentially free. Wireless is not. The other main difference is carriers, they are the gatekeepers to the valuable, yet resource limited spectrum that mobile phones need and therefore have a much larger control over the value chain than ISPs do for the Wired Internet.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

rdouble 15y ago

What Miner and Google gambled on, and it seems bizarre in retrospect, was that the carriers and the manufacturers would be good at customizing and improving the user experience of the base operating system. It made sense in context. Miner was the head of the Orange/FT research lab in Cambridge. A lot of creative engineers worked there but they were hamstrung by the junky phone SDKs available at the time. Android would have been just what they needed.

harshaw 15y ago
Yeah but I got to put stuff on my resume like experience with windows mobile 2002 and Symbian UIQ :) At Orange we toyed with pushing an Android precursor from Savaje. However, the timing wasn't right - hardware wasn't powerful enough and Orange/FT didn't have the balls or corporate DNA to establish something like the OMA. At Orange (or probably any carrier) getting a device out the door was a clusterfuck. You had to coordinate between the Device manufacturer (who never had any flexibility in their software schedule), the various operating companies who wanted phones in shop by Nov 1 for the Holiday or else, and various PM's running about trying to get features on the phone to help with their particular mandate (at the time it might have been music, IM, etc). So yeah, anyone with half a technical clue could see that you could get shit done faster with a common OS. WHat's amazing is that with a little bit of juice from Google and a crack engineering team from Rubin they managed to totally dominate the non IOS smartphone market in a couple of years. People seem to have this odd view that Android is deficient because it doesn't have some IOS optimizations. But look - if I told you to build something on one set of hardware and make it great that's 10x easier than building an open system. Yeah, closed systems may win in the end (and Apple is winning) but ANdroid couldn't be Android without a wider perspective.

manojlds 15y ago

The final suggestions makes me think that WindowsPhone is the perfect middle ground between Android and iOS

sounds 15y ago
I think the mildly-open nature of Android will be better marketing than Windows Phone - not overboard on openness, but not completely closed. Hardware manufacturers and Cell providers won't support the extra cost of paying for the OS (in the long run). This outcome isn't what I would like most, but it seems realistic.

stretchwithme 15y ago

Its a shame they didn't at least establish some rules on how manufacturers could modify the interface.

djhworld 15y ago
If they did this none of the manufacturers would have taken on the platform though. Why should Google dictate to them what they put in their own products? If Google wanted to standardise Android they should have never released it as an OS for all and produced the phones themselves.

hoi 15y ago

Symbian was also designed with integration with hardware in mind and providing core API's for manufacturers and carriers to build a UI on top of. This is why the early owners of Symbian were a plethora of manufacturers and operators. Symbian even tried to designate 3 specific UI frameworks (touch, candybar and QWERTY) named Quartz, Pearl and Crystal.. but the shareholders revolted and went their own UI way (hence S60, UIQ & MOAP). Disclosure: I worked at Symbian between 1999-2003

cpeterso 15y ago

> The hardest part of building advanced mobile phones, he reasoned, was writing the lower-level software that the operating system uses to communicate with the hardware, including the radio baseband and audio/video controllers Wouldn't that hardware- and network-specific code be more easily written by the handset manufacturers and network providers than a third-party software (only) company?

drivebyacct2 15y ago

I can't possibly imagine how any phone could be smoother than the Galaxy Nexus. Yes, it's taken a long time to get it in 4.0 and it's available to almost no one, but it is finally fixed in my opinion.

brettnak 15y ago
I agree that the scrolling is pretty smooth. It's not quite as smooth as I think it could be but it's far beyond acceptable. I think when people say that scrolling doesn't "feel right" on a Galaxy Nexus is because of the distance you have to physically move your finger before it responds and actually starts scrolling. I think this is deliberate to prevent people from accidentally scrolling, but nevertheless, I think this is what people are seeing.

djhworld 15y ago

I think the reason why Android has become so popular with the manufacturers is because they're free to customise the OS. If Android was just a one interface, one direction platform I don't think any of them would have taken it up. Mobile phones are still a very competitive market and manufacturers want to differentiate their products to attract customers from another

huggyface 15y ago
Android became popular with manufacturers because they desperately needed to all gang behind one platform to have any hope against the incredible success of Apple. While quite a few vendors signed onto Android even before the first handsets, they did so at no cost and in name only -- the original Android army were the absolutely miserable G1 and G2 (HTC Dream and Magic), and it stayed that way for some time. At the time I was sure the platform would fail. As Apple grew, the necessity to commit to Android grew. Boring parables about why Android made a mistake because it isn't like iOS are as old as both operating systems, during the same time that Android has done gangbusters. My wife has a Captivate Glide with Gingerbread and Samsung's TouchWiz on it. She loves it. She doesn't know or care what ICS is, gets constant updates for the mapping and market and book reading and video viewing, etc. For the average real, non-blogging human being the model works remarkably well.
- djhworld 15y ago
  Yep, but if Google just said "Here is our OS, you may put it on your products, but you may not deviate from principles set out by us" none of them would have taken up on it. Mobile phone hardware is generally the same across most devices these days and most of the "Joe Public" don't care what's on the inside - so the software is where the manufacturers try to differentiate themselves from each other as a selling point

richworks 15y ago

I wonder... if almost everyone knows and complains about the smoothness in Android being not as good as iOS(consistently, I mean)... Isn't Google aware of this? Or does achieving impeccable smoothness come at a cost(increased memory usage?).. which means that Google are in the crossroads here, trying to balance fluid UX and efficient memory management? Or is it because Apple and Microsoft have been leaders in software engineering for more than a couple of decades and may have mastered the ins and outs of Operating Systems.. and since it has been only 5-6 years that Google has been working on Android, are they still competitively behind Apple and MS in this regard? and so that we can hope for improvement?

jan_g 15y ago
There are millions of users out there (including myself), who don't care about smoothness or (in my case) don't even notice any difference between an ios or android scrolling. Also, you have to take into consideration the fact that majority of users had considerably slower feature phone before buying android phone. To them, android is blazingly fast.
huggyface 15y ago
if almost everyone knows and complains about the smoothness in Android being not as good as iOS To the average user it is a complete non-issue: It's one of those things that you have to essentially point out to them. It is an issue for iOS boosters, however, because it's what they see as Android's Achilles heal.

ZeroGravitas 15y ago

This is one of the biggest myths of Android. Apple doesn't have manufacturer skins, therefore they must be utterly and irredeemably evil. On the other hand, if you actually look at it objectively, manufacturers filled in many genuine gaps and made the early Android OS look much better than the default. Various innovations they introduced have been brought back into core Android and/or stolen by CyanogenMod etc. From a business perspective, a lot of Android's permissiveness towards their hardware and network partners has obviously succeeded beyond most people's expectations. So the skins have both good points and bad and there are shades of gray but mostly you get the loud opinion of Android geeks (who want the very latest stock as a point of principle) and Apple geeks (who will tear down anything that Apple doesn't have e.g. big screens) usually with the assumption that what they think is important is the only reality. It's also worth noting that Android is clearly aiming to be more than just a phone or tablet OS, so customisation is probably required to support e.g. car computers.

fauigerzigerk 15y ago

The original vision is a good one and it works. You need to consider the cost of preventing bad devices and bad UI extensions. The cost is just what you see in iOS: Limited choice of devices. Restrictive censorship rules for users and developers. No checks and balances. Scolling works well on my Nexus S by the way.

bitwize 15y ago
Limited choice of devices. GOOD. Restrictive censorship rules for users and developers. If the government isn't doing it, it ain't censorship. Look at what quality filtering through an approval process did for the video game industry. The same force is in effect on iOS, and the quality of iOS apps is consistently pretty high, especially when compared to Android. Scrolling was total ass on my Epic 4G until I loaded some custom ROM where they did some sort of low-level magic to deliver an "ICS-like" experience on a Gingerbread code base. It still sucks, though, because unless you have a GNex, to get this UX on Android you have to visit some forum where l33t kids hang out and dink about with your phone, flashing its ROMs and potentially bricking it, and only then can you have something that vaguely suggests an iPhone in smoothness. With Apple, it comes with a butter-smooth UX right out of the box.
- fauigerzigerk 15y ago
  If the government isn't doing it, it ain't censorship It is tantamount to censorship once you have chosen iOS, because that choice makes Apple the government of your content. But whatever you choose to call it, fact is that they restrict content based on value judgements that go well beyond anything you could ever call "quality assurance". They ban everything controversial regardless of quality.

TurnitUP 15y ago

When Apple launched the first iPhone it was sold for $500 without contract. Within months Apple had cut the low end model and dropped the price by a third to $400. For the iPhone 3G Apple would jump in bed with AT&T, introduce subsidized models, sales would explode and the rest is history. The Apple and AT&T partnership would lead to the Google Voice fiasco and delayed tethering feature rollout and the (still ongoing) download restrictions and low quality videos over youtube. It would be another 3 years before Apple released another iPhone model priced below $500 (the 8GB iPhone 3GS in fall of 2011). The obvious point is that the cell phone industry is hard to break into and the most successful players adapt the realities of the marketplace. It's no surprise to anyone that Google changed Android to make it succeed. (Unless you're MG Siegler; I'm still waiting for the blog post on how he hates iOS because Apple sold out).

rsynnott 15y ago
Ah, no. On release, for a few months, the iPhone was _$500 with contract_. Yes, really.

TeeWEE 15y ago

The only thing this where this guy is right is the scrolling issue. But he doesnt explain why this is. Android was created initially as a non-touch OS. When they had to support touch they could not totally rewrite how animation was done. This resulted in one thread doing event handling and animation. This is difficult to fix in Android's UI Architecture. And phones hardware often makeup for this fact. So scrolling is indeed a bit worse than IOS, but its not really painfull anymore. You should give this guy a Galaxy Nexus. Also the UI extensions on top of android are actually one of its strong points. Differentiation is the key here. And they are not so bad. The point here is: You do not have to be the best to rule the market! And Google knows that. However the Galaxy Nexus is the best phone out there, much better than any iphone.

Gotttzsche 15y ago

huh, i think i just gave him kudos; what the hell was that?