6 ms·

I strongly believe Google will replace ChromeOS with Android some day. ChromeOS compared to Android "Just Works™". I'm usually an iPhone user but I am very cur

by msoad 12y ago

I strongly believe Google will replace ChromeOS with Android some day. ChromeOS compared to Android "Just Works™". I'm usually an iPhone user but I am very curious about Android so often make the switch. Last time I switched to Galaxy Nexus my experience was not so good. Battery life and UI smoothness was far from iPhone. I switched back to iPhone. This time I switched to Android via a Nexus 5. Battery life is still not acceptable and many times I experienced things not working. Having to kill an app or cleaning their local cache are things I don't want to do on my phone. Specially when I'm trying to get around or find a very urgent information. I'm going to switch to iPhone with next release and wait for an operation system from Google that work as good as Chrome or iPhone.

Zigurd 12y ago
Not going to happen. Android is phenomenal success and needs no messing with. It will spread from tablets and handsets to TVs, cameras, cars, appliances, etc. Android will have a multi-decades dominance like Windows had, but spread across more different touchscreen hardware platforms. Chrome OS is doing a brilliant job soaking up Windows refugees with a laptop/netbook form factor, where you have a touchpad or other pointing device, so you don't have to make the Web finger-touchable, which it isn't. People will try to mix the two, but there is no point. EDIT: Yes I know TV isn't touch, but it is a d-pad/select style of interaction, which Android always supported, even before touch.
- MarkMc 12y ago
  Android on TV may be d-pad/select style, but many Android apps aren't. For example, the Australian public broadcaster ABC produces an Android app called iView, but it is almost unusable on an Android set-top box without a mouse.
  - Zigurd 12y ago
    Sadly, that's correct. Those apps should declare that limitation in their manifests. Which would in the case you cite lead to a TV app not being offered to TV devices. Botches like that are mostly due to buying cheapass, low-bidder implementations that don't implement the d-pad navigation methods in custom View classes. Actually, it's pretty difficult to avoid inheriting the default method implementations so the deficiency is probably mostly in not handling the highlighting and selection methods. Shoddy!
rayiner 12y ago
I think Android benefits from the general Google halo effect, but it just isn't very good. It's OK, in the same way Windows 98 was OK. My Nexus 5 has been buggier than my Lumia 620 or the iPhone 5 or iPhone 4 I had before that. Just little things: messed up text boxes in Chrome, app hangs in Chrome, etc. Some random bad design: if you turn off location services, which I do because of the marginal battery life, Maps will just sit around waiting for a location--it won't tell you to turn it on in the preferences. Its not the reliable appliance I want it to be. I have a regimented weekday schedule, and by midday I could be on my last legs battery wise, or still have half a tank. For some reason, I have a Gallery app as well as a Photos app. Of course, it'll continue to be popular because it's free. It's fine. It's just not that great. I too am back on the iPhone when they come out with bigger screens.
- chimeracoder 12y ago
  > Some random bad design: if you turn off location services, which I do because of the marginal battery life, Maps will just sit around waiting for a location--it won't tell you to turn it on in the preferences. I turn off location services (not because of the impact on battery life[0] but because I don't want to send my location to Google 24/7). Every time I open Google Maps and try to find the current location, I get a popup telling me to turn on location services[1]. [0] Neither GPS nor Google location services has a noticeable impact on battery life - the thing that will have a noticeable impact on battery life is when an app holds a lock on the GPS/location services (which actually has nothing to do with whether location services are on, since they can lock locations services even when they're off - an easy example of a culprit here is Foursquare's main app). [1] https://imgur.com/pGh3TUE https://imgur.com/pGh3TUE
  - rayiner 12y ago
    If you don't hit the locate button but instead just get directions from "my location" you won't get the popup.
    - chimeracoder 12y ago
      Yes, I do: https://i.imgur.com/srw0gMj.png https://i.imgur.com/srw0gMj.png
pavanky 12y ago
> Having to kill an app or cleaning their local cache are things I don't want to do on my phone. I haven't had to do this in a long long time. What apps were you using that required you to do this?
- briandh 12y ago
  "Cleaning local cache" particularly befuddles me. My first smartphone came loaded with Gingerbread and I don't remember ever having to do that, much less having to do it in recent memory.
- blinkingled 12y ago
  Yeah, that had me puzzled too. I haven't had to mess around with clearing apps or resetting data or even rebooting my phone since 4.1 hit the Gnex - even before that it was very occasional reboot and not much else. Nowadays it just works. Can't figure out why people keep complaining about battery life as well - probably they've the wrong phone. Head over the Anandtech or any other reputable review site and you will find many Android phones trumping the iPhone in battery life department. My Moto G easily runs for a day+ consistently and I am a pretty heavy user.
briandh 12y ago
> Battery life is still not acceptable How do you know this is an Android issue rather than a hardware-specific one? It's hard to come to a strong conclusion without having hardware that runs both iOS and Android. Unless there are major power-oriented architectural differences in iOS, which I would be interested in hearing about if that is the case.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- XorNot 12y ago
  It's hard to come to thia conclusion without knowing what apps you're running - looking at you Facebook with chat turned on.
- fleitz 12y ago
  There are huge power-oriented architectural differences. 1) Background an app, it doesn't use power. 2) ObjC doesn't keep gobs of unused memory around 3) Hardware / software integration allows things like spinning up the radios, doing all the updates, shutting the radios down. 4) C code runs lightyears faster (aka. uses less power) than java. 5) iOS uses the GPU rather than the CPU to do most rendering tasks, and provides great tools to let developers know when it's CPU rendered. 6) Instruments tells you exactly what code is using power. 7) Location services, if an app uses too much GPS you ban it from location services. 8) Timer coalescing allows the CPU to sleep more
  - danieldk 12y ago
    C code runs lightyears faster (aka. uses less power) than java. First of all, it's not lightyears, usually only a factor of two. Secondly, iOS apps are usually written in Objective C, which uses dynamic binding, sacrificing part of C's performance. 5) iOS uses the GPU rather than the CPU to do most rendering tasks, So does Android: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/graphics/hardware-accel.html#determining http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/graphics/hardware-... 8) Timer coalescing allows the CPU to sleep more The Linux kernel has timer coalescing (since 2.8.28).
jasonisalive 12y ago
For what it's worth, I work in retail, and the average iPhone/iPad-using customer/staff member believes their devices run better when they manually kill apps. I also see quite a few iPhone customers who literally kill every app they use as soon as they finish using it.
- ohsnapman 12y ago
  An Apple Genius at an Apple store told my in-laws to kill their apps. Wish I was there in person to law down the law on that guy.
aikah 12y ago
Android has a web browser and if you dont like native apps just dont install any. WebOS only cant be successfull when the competition have all their features + native apps.
danieldk 12y ago
This time I switched to Android via a Nexus 5. Battery life is still not acceptable I switched to Moto X after using an iPhone for four and a half years. With the same usage patterns, my Moto X lasts as long as my iPhone 4 before. The Nexus 5 is apparently notorious when it comes to actual battery life. Having to kill an app or cleaning their local cache are things I don't want to do on my phone. Specially when I'm trying to get around or find a very urgent information. Never had to that that. In fact, my experience is quite the opposite. Even after all those years, iMessage messages would arrive minutes to ours too late or in the wrong order (very annoying when you have to meet with someone). iTunes Match would often only download albums partially. Calendar sync was not immediate (there was often a delay between adding an appointment and it showing up on the Mac and vise versa). Since switching to Android I wouldn't want to go back. It has decent keyboards (finally coming in iOS 8), I can actually share data between apps (finally coming in iOS 8), I can attach files from within the e-mail client (rather than only being able to pick a file from an app and then saying that I want to share it via e-mail). Google Now and voice recognition are awfully much better than Siri, especially because it's actually integrated in the Google Now Launcher, and not an island on its own. Besides that fact that I find Android far more pleasing, I bought my Moto X for half the price of an iPhone 5 and I have a data plan for 10 Euro per month. This means I can upgrade my phone every 8-12 month without spending a dime extra.
- msoad 12y ago
  I have a friend that has a Moto X. I think I should try a better hardware. Nexus 5's GPS/BT/LTE chip is not working well I guess. I have to kill Google Maps every single day to get it working.
piyush_soni 12y ago
I get at least one full day with every charge of battery, sometimes 1.5 days. I don't think it's bad on Nexus 5. I've never had to clean caches or kill apps since the date I bought the Nexus 5 in Oct. last year.
- superplussed 12y ago
  Same. I've been a big fan of the phone and haven't had any problems despite fairly heavy usage patterns with apps and data.
mirsadm 12y ago
My experience has been the opposite. In fact there were couple of articles with evidence of android apps being more stable than their iOS versions [0]. The difference wasn't large however. Its the same case with battery life. It seems pretty comparable to the iPhone 5 and 5S [1] [0] http://bgr.com/2014/03/28/apple-android-app-stability/ http://bgr.com/2014/03/28/apple-android-app-stability/ [1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/7517/google-nexus-5-review/3 http://www.anandtech.com/show/7517/google-nexus-5-review/3
drzaiusapelord 12y ago
>Battery life is still not acceptable I can't think of any Nexus device that had a long battery life. The pressure to deliver a high-spec $350 phone means cuts somewhere. The big beautiful screen uses a lot of juice as well. I think if you want battery like you should not buy into the Nexus platform. That said, its certainly not bad. There are reviews of long on-screen usage and its certainly usable. It just may not be as long as the tiny-screen iphone. Things not working on Nexus for me is pretty rare. Usually one bad application that wasn't expecting to be on the newest version of Android and has not been properly tested for it.. Typically, these get patched quickly.

by msoad 12y ago

Zigurd 12y ago

Not going to happen. Android is phenomenal success and needs no messing with. It will spread from tablets and handsets to TVs, cameras, cars, appliances, etc. Android will have a multi-decades dominance like Windows had, but spread across more different touchscreen hardware platforms. Chrome OS is doing a brilliant job soaking up Windows refugees with a laptop/netbook form factor, where you have a touchpad or other pointing device, so you don't have to make the Web finger-touchable, which it isn't. People will try to mix the two, but there is no point. EDIT: Yes I know TV isn't touch, but it is a d-pad/select style of interaction, which Android always supported, even before touch.

MarkMc 12y ago
Android on TV may be d-pad/select style, but many Android apps aren't. For example, the Australian public broadcaster ABC produces an Android app called iView, but it is almost unusable on an Android set-top box without a mouse.
- Zigurd 12y ago
  Sadly, that's correct. Those apps should declare that limitation in their manifests. Which would in the case you cite lead to a TV app not being offered to TV devices. Botches like that are mostly due to buying cheapass, low-bidder implementations that don't implement the d-pad navigation methods in custom View classes. Actually, it's pretty difficult to avoid inheriting the default method implementations so the deficiency is probably mostly in not handling the highlighting and selection methods. Shoddy!

rayiner 12y ago

I think Android benefits from the general Google halo effect, but it just isn't very good. It's OK, in the same way Windows 98 was OK. My Nexus 5 has been buggier than my Lumia 620 or the iPhone 5 or iPhone 4 I had before that. Just little things: messed up text boxes in Chrome, app hangs in Chrome, etc. Some random bad design: if you turn off location services, which I do because of the marginal battery life, Maps will just sit around waiting for a location--it won't tell you to turn it on in the preferences. Its not the reliable appliance I want it to be. I have a regimented weekday schedule, and by midday I could be on my last legs battery wise, or still have half a tank. For some reason, I have a Gallery app as well as a Photos app. Of course, it'll continue to be popular because it's free. It's fine. It's just not that great. I too am back on the iPhone when they come out with bigger screens.

chimeracoder 12y ago
> Some random bad design: if you turn off location services, which I do because of the marginal battery life, Maps will just sit around waiting for a location--it won't tell you to turn it on in the preferences. I turn off location services (not because of the impact on battery life[0] but because I don't want to send my location to Google 24/7). Every time I open Google Maps and try to find the current location, I get a popup telling me to turn on location services[1]. [0] Neither GPS nor Google location services has a noticeable impact on battery life - the thing that will have a noticeable impact on battery life is when an app holds a lock on the GPS/location services (which actually has nothing to do with whether location services are on, since they can lock locations services even when they're off - an easy example of a culprit here is Foursquare's main app). [1] https://imgur.com/pGh3TUE https://imgur.com/pGh3TUE
- rayiner 12y ago
  If you don't hit the locate button but instead just get directions from "my location" you won't get the popup.
  - chimeracoder 12y ago
    Yes, I do: https://i.imgur.com/srw0gMj.png https://i.imgur.com/srw0gMj.png

pavanky 12y ago

> Having to kill an app or cleaning their local cache are things I don't want to do on my phone. I haven't had to do this in a long long time. What apps were you using that required you to do this?

briandh 12y ago
"Cleaning local cache" particularly befuddles me. My first smartphone came loaded with Gingerbread and I don't remember ever having to do that, much less having to do it in recent memory.
blinkingled 12y ago
Yeah, that had me puzzled too. I haven't had to mess around with clearing apps or resetting data or even rebooting my phone since 4.1 hit the Gnex - even before that it was very occasional reboot and not much else. Nowadays it just works. Can't figure out why people keep complaining about battery life as well - probably they've the wrong phone. Head over the Anandtech or any other reputable review site and you will find many Android phones trumping the iPhone in battery life department. My Moto G easily runs for a day+ consistently and I am a pretty heavy user.

briandh 12y ago

> Battery life is still not acceptable How do you know this is an Android issue rather than a hardware-specific one? It's hard to come to a strong conclusion without having hardware that runs both iOS and Android. Unless there are major power-oriented architectural differences in iOS, which I would be interested in hearing about if that is the case.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
XorNot 12y ago
It's hard to come to thia conclusion without knowing what apps you're running - looking at you Facebook with chat turned on.
fleitz 12y ago
There are huge power-oriented architectural differences. 1) Background an app, it doesn't use power. 2) ObjC doesn't keep gobs of unused memory around 3) Hardware / software integration allows things like spinning up the radios, doing all the updates, shutting the radios down. 4) C code runs lightyears faster (aka. uses less power) than java. 5) iOS uses the GPU rather than the CPU to do most rendering tasks, and provides great tools to let developers know when it's CPU rendered. 6) Instruments tells you exactly what code is using power. 7) Location services, if an app uses too much GPS you ban it from location services. 8) Timer coalescing allows the CPU to sleep more
- danieldk 12y ago
  C code runs lightyears faster (aka. uses less power) than java. First of all, it's not lightyears, usually only a factor of two. Secondly, iOS apps are usually written in Objective C, which uses dynamic binding, sacrificing part of C's performance. 5) iOS uses the GPU rather than the CPU to do most rendering tasks, So does Android: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/graphics/hardware-accel.html#determining http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/graphics/hardware-... 8) Timer coalescing allows the CPU to sleep more The Linux kernel has timer coalescing (since 2.8.28).

jasonisalive 12y ago

For what it's worth, I work in retail, and the average iPhone/iPad-using customer/staff member believes their devices run better when they manually kill apps. I also see quite a few iPhone customers who literally kill every app they use as soon as they finish using it.

ohsnapman 12y ago
An Apple Genius at an Apple store told my in-laws to kill their apps. Wish I was there in person to law down the law on that guy.

aikah 12y ago

Android has a web browser and if you dont like native apps just dont install any. WebOS only cant be successfull when the competition have all their features + native apps.

danieldk 12y ago

This time I switched to Android via a Nexus 5. Battery life is still not acceptable I switched to Moto X after using an iPhone for four and a half years. With the same usage patterns, my Moto X lasts as long as my iPhone 4 before. The Nexus 5 is apparently notorious when it comes to actual battery life. Having to kill an app or cleaning their local cache are things I don't want to do on my phone. Specially when I'm trying to get around or find a very urgent information. Never had to that that. In fact, my experience is quite the opposite. Even after all those years, iMessage messages would arrive minutes to ours too late or in the wrong order (very annoying when you have to meet with someone). iTunes Match would often only download albums partially. Calendar sync was not immediate (there was often a delay between adding an appointment and it showing up on the Mac and vise versa). Since switching to Android I wouldn't want to go back. It has decent keyboards (finally coming in iOS 8), I can actually share data between apps (finally coming in iOS 8), I can attach files from within the e-mail client (rather than only being able to pick a file from an app and then saying that I want to share it via e-mail). Google Now and voice recognition are awfully much better than Siri, especially because it's actually integrated in the Google Now Launcher, and not an island on its own. Besides that fact that I find Android far more pleasing, I bought my Moto X for half the price of an iPhone 5 and I have a data plan for 10 Euro per month. This means I can upgrade my phone every 8-12 month without spending a dime extra.

msoad 12y ago
I have a friend that has a Moto X. I think I should try a better hardware. Nexus 5's GPS/BT/LTE chip is not working well I guess. I have to kill Google Maps every single day to get it working.

piyush_soni 12y ago

I get at least one full day with every charge of battery, sometimes 1.5 days. I don't think it's bad on Nexus 5. I've never had to clean caches or kill apps since the date I bought the Nexus 5 in Oct. last year.

superplussed 12y ago
Same. I've been a big fan of the phone and haven't had any problems despite fairly heavy usage patterns with apps and data.

mirsadm 12y ago

My experience has been the opposite. In fact there were couple of articles with evidence of android apps being more stable than their iOS versions [0]. The difference wasn't large however. Its the same case with battery life. It seems pretty comparable to the iPhone 5 and 5S [1] [0] http://bgr.com/2014/03/28/apple-android-app-stability/ http://bgr.com/2014/03/28/apple-android-app-stability/ [1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/7517/google-nexus-5-review/3 http://www.anandtech.com/show/7517/google-nexus-5-review/3

drzaiusapelord 12y ago

>Battery life is still not acceptable I can't think of any Nexus device that had a long battery life. The pressure to deliver a high-spec $350 phone means cuts somewhere. The big beautiful screen uses a lot of juice as well. I think if you want battery like you should not buy into the Nexus platform. That said, its certainly not bad. There are reviews of long on-screen usage and its certainly usable. It just may not be as long as the tiny-screen iphone. Things not working on Nexus for me is pretty rare. Usually one bad application that wasn't expecting to be on the newest version of Android and has not been properly tested for it.. Typically, these get patched quickly.