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Motorola CEO Blames Open Android Store For Phone Performance Ills
angry tapir writes "Motorola's CEO blamed the open Android app store for performance issues on some phones. Of all the Motorola Android devices that are returned, 70 percent come back because applications affect performance, Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility, said during a webcast presentation at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Technology conference."
A company passing blame on another company for its failings...
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board -- Mark Twain Look for http://Thebar.steelbeachca
Third-Party apps affect performance?
Shocker.
Does he mean things like motoblur?
The openness of Android is a big part of why Android has better marketshare than iOS, so maybe they shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.
And how many of those "problem" applications were malware, badly written, or just the bloatware pre-installed on the phone from the carrier?
Because of the black box nature of smart phone, developers of smart phone applications are never held accountable for the resources their application consume. It should be standard to be able to see the amount of CPU, RAM and network I/O each application is generating so that hogs which cause performance, battery life or network overages can easily be spotted. As far as I can tell, neither Apple, Google or Microsoft has taken seriously exposing this type of data as a standard part of their phone software stack. Hence, we are left in situation similar to when the food industry was not required to put a break down of the nutritional information of the food The smart phone users have apps contributing "fat" and "sugar" into the smart phone's diet without any hard numbers to evaluate that impact.
If you read the article he does raise valid concerns about poorly performing apps that may degrade the user's experience. He's not merely complaining, he's also suggesting a possible solution:
"Motoblur collects information about customer use of applications and how that use relates to functions like power consumption. With that data, Motorola learns which applications drain power. "We are getting to the place that we should be able to warn you," Jha said. He envisions presenting a notice to users when they launch an application alerting them that using the application will drain 35 percent of the phone's power, for example, he said. The user can then decide to continue or conserve power."
And what about Motoblur which devours battery life with its constant updating of EVERYTHING?
Flash support was a big mistake. Apple is doing great without it. An old tech thing .. time for it to go.
From my (basic) understanding of Android and how it's multitasking it works: No.
This is nothing to do with the App store being open, this is more to do with Android App devs no doubt learning to code on a PC and not really getting to grips with coding for a mobile environment how Android multitasks in a unique way. In desktop development power consumption is rarely even thought about.
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/04/multitasking-android-way.html
They need to go with it rather than try to workaround it. Nor at times do they seem to grasp what limited resources and a battery mean and how Google designed around these limitations.
If you encounter an App that behaves poorly, uninstall it, rate it low in the market and harass the developer. That's what the rating system is for.
Often you'll find many alternatives that achieve the same thing - inexplicably one app may hog battery in the background, one may not at all. It's lazy rushed make-a-buck development pure and simple.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
A Cliq, to be precise. And if I could, I would return the thing, but I only have 6 months to go on the thing and after that I can get another phone. And I can pretty much guarantee that the next phone won't be a Moto phone.
The problem isn't the app store - the problem is that Moto builds crappy phones, and is then unable to provide updates in a timely fashion.
Some of the problems with Moto phones are just that they choose underpowered processors or more limited memory, and if you get too many apps installed the phone just dogs down. There are times that I press something, it takes a good 30 seconds before the phone responds. If I uninstall a few apps, it goes much better.
Motoblur is the 2nd issue I have with those phones. While Moto denies it, I suspect that in part it is the reason why they have such difficulties providing updates to the phones. My wife has a Droid and that doesn't have Blur, and they have no trouble getting updates out the door.
Devices returned? So they accept returns instead of resetting the device to stock. Oh no, my Windows PC is slow because I installed a bunch of crap that runs in the background, guess I should return the whole PC.
It's great that Motoblur will tell them how much battery and resources and app is using. Now how much is 'blur itself using to track all this information *and* phone it home to Moto?
On another note, every friend who has gone to a carrier store to purchase their phone has *always* had a Task Killer already installed, May I humbly suggest that a good place for Moto to start is by getting the Carrier reps to knock that off.
Does he mean things like motoblur?
Yep, the original Droid/Milestone was lighing fast running 2.1 and 2.2. When moto started to shoehorn in Motoblur they all of a sudden got really slow.
Same with HTC Sense but HTC are at least smart enough to chuck in lots of extra RAM to handle their bloated interface. I've been running Cyanogenmod on my Desire Z since 3 days after I got it and I've been more then pleased with how fast it is, Cyanogenmod uses ADW launcher which has a crapload of features (so much so it suffers from Kitchen Sink-itis) but is still very very fast.
I used to be a fan of Android on Moto, but between locked bootloaders and crappy social network based interfaces that slow everything down have completely changed my opinion on Moto. They are floundering because of bad design decision in using Motoblur, not because of Androids openness.
After HTC and Samsung, I'd rather buy a Huawei phone simply because they used the vanilla interface.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
"Top" needs to be standard on smart phones
I cannot emphasize strongly enough the horror and despair for humanity I see in this single phrase.
It's like saying back in the caveman days that what we really needed was a better rock to carve . No, we needed to move on from the cave and invent fire and dwellings.
We need to move BEYOND what we have have, what we know. We cannot keep producing computing devices for humanity that require as standard anything like Top. We need to have systems that actually exhibit some of the AI we've been working for decades on, and not have to have every user know what a process is, or indeed manage anything.
Sorry, but our baby cannot stay a baby forever, because a 50-year old baby you still have to treat like a baby is mentally damaged. We have to let computing be usable by everyone, not working fully only for the anointed and requiring mothering because we cannot tear ourselves loose from that model.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
and have ignored it. The original Droid (which I bought the day it was available, and still use) put Moto on the Android map, and yet they have done everything they can to vary from the things that made this device a huge success: No Motoblur, no locked and/or encrypted bootloaders, and a mostly vanilla Android experience. One need only read most any Android forum to see how many people regret 'upgrading' from the Droid 1 to another Moto device. I know I was originally excited to hear about new Moto Android phones such as the DroidX and Droid Pro, then being supremely underwhelmed with the devices' performance. The hardware was either improved or virtually unchanged, leaving the main difference: Motoblur, and loads of bloatware. Jha should get his own Motoblur house in order before he starts critcizing other apps for degrading the Android experience.
It's a poor mechanic that blames his tools
There are more Android PHONES, but iOS runs on iPod Touch and iPad as well. The are many more iOS devices that Android devices. Sigh.
I mean droid or android, there is no way people would confuse those right? Motorola has fallen a long way and it looks like they are not done yet. They may go bankrupt instead of chose to actually compete in the marketplace instead of trying to bully people unfortunate enough to buy their products.
Sure, but that means something better than top, not some dumb-down interface that hides all the useful information.
There is no need for people to HAVE to view this information. People who want it will always be able to have it, so instead the design needs to be focused on how can a normal person NOT have it and be OK.
If we actually had any kind of AI that might make sense.
Well I don't know if you'd consider it AI or not but we have pretty good expert systems.
It's not about hiding anything from the user. It's making a system in such a way that the components used together do not have a propensity to harm.
Again, users that want or need to see will ALWAYS BE ABLE to do so. Stop designing FOR THEM. They can HELP THEMSELVES.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Just got a droid X2. You'd think with half a gig of ram and a 1GHz dual-core chip in there it'd be a little faster than my droid1. Well, it is now, since I rooted it and froze most of the preinstalled Motorola and Verizon crap, replacing it with "open store" alternatives. Before, you wouldn't believe how horrifically bad it was; doing anything from opening an app to merely trying to scroll the screen would cause delays of upwards of 5-10 seconds. Almost returned it myself.
(For others with this phone/problem, nuking the DLNA and BackupAssistant stuff seemed to help the most.)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Motoblur collects information about customer use of applications and how that use relates to functions like power consumption. With that data, Motorola learns which applications drain power.
I wonder how many people know their phone is reporting this activity back to Motorola. I might have to check what my phone is doing, I'm in a part of the world where cellular data access is neither free nor unlimited (unless you are on an expensive contract, which I am not).
It would actually be interesting to see this information myself. I've just had a mooch around my phone and the "portal" available when connected to a PC and can't see any interface to show such data.
I wonder how much CPU time and battery power the included apps that I can't seem to uninstall and which keep restarting themselves after a while when I kill them with a task manager. I can tell you that the battery life on this Motorola phone has been laughable (quite frankly I consider the battery life specs on the sales information for this phone to be simply fraudulent) since I got it, before any extra apps were added by myself, and adding apps doesn't seem to have made it significantly worse (aside from the wireless tethering tool, but as that keeps the wifi and 3G radios at full tilt when in use I expect that to drain battery power far quicker than normal).
If you people would just stop using your phone for apps, games, or hell, even calls, you'd clearly see the superior Motorola phones give you no trouble. Why, I've had mine holding down a small stack of papers for well over six months without ever a hiccup!
Sincerely,
Joe Motorola.
Shocking, the same third party issues that caused MS so many headaches for so many years also applies to phones. The difference is people can tolerate some complexity on their desktop. Apple figured out the vertical integration thing when it came to phones. People don't want a PC in their hand, they want a well-running appliance. The failure to grasp that will be Android's undoing.
Anything else I missed?
There's nothing wrong with antenna, you're just holding it wrong.
I love my DroidX phone, but recently it became practically unusable because one of the apps I use keeps freezing my phone. Once frozen it takes a few minutes before OS automatically reboots the phone. This happens between 2 and 10 times a day for a 3rd weeks in a row now and had made my previously reliable phone very frustrating to use. I have not yet invested any time in search of application that will help diagnose it (but must do it soon), so I have no idea which of the applications freezes my phone. On the other hand, my wife iPhone4 just keeps working. Who needs an OS that lets all apps in, but requires user to know how to troubleshoot the software on device? How many users can actually troubleshoot it? How has the time? For now I have to suck it up every time my device reboots because I have not had time to fix it.
The awesome part is that when some joker returns his Atrix because its "too slow", you can turn around it buy it refurbished for half price!
Actually seriously, I just got an atrix not too long ago and from what I've seen the biggest problems have nothing to do with apps in themselves:
Large widgets (in terms of screen real estate) slow down the interface much like a large sprite will slow down your 3d game. Clearly this is caused by double-rendering if not other inefficiencies
Live backgrounds slow things down. Duh. My screen doesn't always turn on immediately when I press the on button to get out of sleep, and I've linked it to my pretty live background.
Really, when I scroll with my finger, FIGURE OUT WHAT I AM DOING BEFORE DOING IT. I cannot believe that that Apple got something as simple as finger scrolling right and yet Android (or maybe motorblur, whichever) is still rough around the edges this late in the game in that I can scroll down a webpage and suddenly have it think I clicked a link that my finger happened to cross over. Same with me tapping an app on the damned motorblur main screen, having it highlight, but not having it launch. I even cranked up the "responsiveness vs. accuracy" setting to full accuracy and this still happened. Even the browsers all color links as visited if you do a scroll starting with the link. And don't get me started with the flash ads for videos that have a pause or full screen button in the corner and yet tapping that button brings me to a web page instead. The firefox app also has some really funky tap functionality where it picks the link thats at the bottom of your finger, not the center of it, and sometimes gets confused if you have multiple links under your finger and won't ever pick the dead center one. Its as if android has no standardized "tap" functionality in their SDK or something.
I do like their neat battery manager that tells me that "Phone Idle" is my #1 drainer when its not my screen... but I have to question if they employed any tricks to help reduce that number (turning the NAND off... partitioning the DRAM, caching it, and turning off most of it... etc). For example, I found the automatic brightness to be too aggressive and too bright most of the time than is necessary. I really shouldn't have to download an app to toggle that on and off to save battery.
Oh yeah, they also disabled more than two fingers on the touch hardware even though the touch hardware supports it.
But its not an apple product, and I like the customization, the ability to watch flash vidoes, the speed (tegra 2!), and other things
Many people do not know that Motorola split into two companies at the beginning of this year. Motorola Mobility which sells lame ass cell phones and Motorola Solutions (where I work) which sells two way radio systems and other communications gear to the enterprise and government market.
I hate being lumped in with them because Motorola Solutions is more stable and doesn't make stuff that sucks.
Adding capabilities to Motoblur is one way that Motorola can try to set itself apart in an increasingly crowded Android market.
I would like to see manufacturers release pure Android phones and compete on hardware. It seems to me that a manufacturer could easily set themselves apart by advertising the pure Google experience, much like the Nexus phones do.
Why don't they compete to see who can release the latest update first? I know I'd be more inclined to go with the company that doesn't drag out updates (or keep you guessing) for months.
About the only hardware differences I see are screen design. Oh, and radios that won't work on anyone else's 3G network. I suppose can forgive the second one, since there are so many differences in network design, but still, it would be nice to see a Pentaband chip in something other than the Nokia N8.
Instead we get crippled, buggy phones that never get fixed because they think software development is cheap and easy to do.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
I am on my second Motorola Android phone- orginal Droid and now Droid 2 Global.
The first was not bad out of the box and better once I loaded a custom ROM on it. Rooting and ROMming the Droid was easy- basically a trivial process within a few months of release.
The Droid 2 Global has been a different matter:
Out of the box the MotoSlow garbage meant that the phone was slower and less responsive than my Droid.
Rooting was fairly easy but it took a while to get a rom and last I checked there was still only one that worked globally.
Fortunately the rom works quite well- better than the original, stock ROM, Motorola! It is faster and more reliable as well. I initially had force closes once a day, now I rarely get them at all.
My sister chose to get a D2G instead of an iPhone and is still happy with it but she has kept the MotoSlow on hers and we have compared:
My phone is always faster- sometimes a LOT faster- and more responsive when opening apps of any sort.
Motorola: if you really want to differentiate yourselves get rid of MotoSlow or at least make it optional with a more basic Android an option.
And make it easy to change ROMs.
The way you are going with MotoSlow, you will not last that much longer in the market. People have figured out what the problem IS really and it is most definitely NOT the open Android Market.
The Moto CEO can do two things about this instead of wringing his hands that people are actually using his phones:
1: Go the way of locking down devices. If an app he doesn't like doesn't belong on the phone, the phone will freeze and uninstall it.
2: Just forget about it, let consumers do what the hell they want, and rake in the money. HTC is doing quite well doing this.
These people are selling broken guns and then blaming bullet makers for their own exploding barrels. I'm sure someone could make a quick Windows virus/security analogy if we wanted to further the example of how pointing fingers does little to change a broken status quo.
Lol. Why am I unsurprised this awful company blames their awful hardware on someone else lol. And yeah seriously, that's a weird thing for a company that personifies bloatware to say. Haha motofail
There are 100+ models of Android based phones and only one model of iOS.
Not one of the 100 outsells iPhone anywhere in the world and if you count all the devices with Android, you have to count all the devices with iOS, which in combination outsells all Android devices by 59%.
Android devices are selling .... but only when you count them in combination is when they sound like big numbers .... but only if you discount all iOS devices but the iPhone.
I suffered through stock droid pros, and 2 droid 2's to tell you that its not the apps its their motoblur. When nothing aftermarket has been downloaded and the system randomly reboots ~5 times a day it's their stock hardware/software issue. I think right now all they are trying to do is build some android hate as they prepare to leave the market for their own new smart phone software they have been trying to keep on the down low. - End HTC bias.
I had a Motorola Defy which seemed like a nice phone (moto blur isn't for me) but after 4 days the gorilla glass cracked (through no fault of mine) and Motorola didn't want to know about it. He should worry about the quality of their own products and services before he points the finger at the echo system whos shoulders they are standing on.
Android is sluggish and buggy. It is Google quality which means perpetual pre-beta.
Android fans would deny it until they die .... but the fact is the OS is buggy and the UI is visually sluggish compared to any other smartphone OS ... even the old WinMo.
Moto phones are only called "Droid" in Verizon. Verizon paid a huge amount of money to license the word "Droid" from Lucas Films and they call everything with Android a "Droid".
I have a Motorola Spice, which is a relatively budget smartphone that works well enough for its price. However my biggest complaint is that Skype doesn't work on it (and from what I've read, a number of other Motorola phones). It installs, it loads, and it even allows me to receive calls - but my voice is completely muted. The response from Skype is that this *may* be addressed in a future update.
Is this the fault of Skype or of Motorola? Or both? I support the idea of Android, or at least I want to. But there must be at least some level of standards in place.
Yeah, and the "walled garden" approach sucks. Stay tuned. By-the-way, the reason android outsells iPhone is that they're much, much cheaper.
But I really think it's the apps we do not ask for, but are pushed down to us from our carriers that are the real evil. I'm fairly careful about what apps I have installed, performance was great until things "started appearing". Things I can't delete... Not coincidentally, that's also when i started seeing performance issues on my phone.
I don't think most Americans drive expensive German sports sedans. We drive decidedly crappier, cheaper cars and make quasi-informed guesses about the tradeoff we are making when we purchase. We can have the PC vs. Mac argument again...but I don't think anyone cares.
Motorola would not accept that their products are just crappy.
The return rate of the Xoom is a ridiculous 33% (1 of 3 sold).
I have PCs, and Macs, and fix peoples PC problems, and their Routers and Droids and iPhones, and ... You name it, I am the geek with too many 'normal' friends.
All these comments say Motorola is to blame for crappy products, no updates, and crappy support. People this is a PHONE!!! there's no support! Not that there shouldn't be, but it is a fact of life. At least Motorola provided an update to the original droid to 2.2., and they even tested it first! What thanks did they get??? Script kiddies that got upset because it did not come out they day it was released. Even more that got upset because they said the hardware didn't support tethering. Sorry... it really doesn't. Motorola didn't lie. There are apps out that that fake out the Bluetooth to do pseudo tethering, but it's not done right. So Motorola did not back port broken tethering to a device that didn't have the right chip and some third party hacked it into partial submission. Again. Not Motorola's fault.
How many other vendors have provided ANY updates? very few. gee! Is my Droid loaded to the max with preloaded junk? no. Are many of the others? yes.
My droid works. It always has. It screws up with garbage apps that break it, and some apps drain the battery. Uninstall them. This is not a Motorola problem.
I am not saying there is not better hardware out there, but there is plenty of WORSE hardware out there, and I would go so far as to say MOST hardware out there is no better or worse, and most of the other vendors provide fewer updates, even worse support and bloatware you can't uninstall.
The iPhone is better hardware, and an easier to use interface, but you have to drink the Apple cool aid to have it. I like Apple's stuff, and I buy it, but their phone is missing some stuff I don't want to miss (like Google Maps and GMail integration).
Anyway.. I am not trying to say Motorola doesn't suck, but basically they all suck to some degree, and Motorola is not anywhere near the bottom of the pile.
2 cents.
These aren't the droids you're looking for.
I don't seem to grok all the MotoBlur and slowness hatred - My Atrix has never slowed down and I have lots of open app store apps installed along side motoblur. Battery life is very decent too. I had to replace the first unit due to random reboots but that was a hardware issue.
So the Android platform's open nature makes the overall user experience inferior for exactly the reasons Steve Jobs said a completely open platform such as Android's would? Shocking. As a geek I love Android's open nature. As somebody whose friends call them anytime a PC or gadget has trouble, I can't recommend Apple strongly enough.
Its a poor carpenter that blames his tools. Complexity in apps require better engineered phones. Benchmark these phones against the competition; do the competitors make the same claims?. Feature bloated apps are hardly going to go away; if anything they will continue to drain performance. The thing is to over engineer not under power the phone. or your competition will. Sad to see this attitude.
The IT and developer folks make up a teeny tiny percentage of the world's total population. Do you understand that most people (read: BILLIONS) do not/can not manage their smartphone's processes for optimal battery, cpu, memory, and network performance?
To your point, however, Windows Mobile did give their users a task manager. It was crazy then and it is crazy now.
...the ones that they bundle that you are not allowed to remove...
It's not "for" anything. It's just a symbol, like the word "Apple" itself (it's true! they don't actually sell fruit).
Well I think comparing smartphone statuses to getting information on a multi-million dollar aircraft carrying 600 people is exactly equivalent.
Thread closed everyone!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You cannot avoid a necessary evil. The only other way out is the iphone approach -- disabling multitasking!
That's not at all what the iPhone does though.
From day one, it has supported multitasking - for system apps.
These days, they ALSO support real multitasking for user apps as well. I can have a navigation app in the background guiding me by voice while I play music and browse the web or run apps (hopefully I'm not the driver in these cases....)
The difference is, that all works because iPhone channels multi-tasking into stated intents - that is, the app has to specify FOR WHAT PURPOSE it needs to multitask. This lets the system constrain what it can do and more intelligently monitor what it's doing so that if it gets too wild with system resources it can be unloaded.
That's exactly the right start down the road we need to travel. It doesn't matter what the user runs, the phone will still have battery at the end of the day (or multiple days). 99% of users will run apps in the background that they consider valuable. Over time we'll figure out the right way to let more and more apps run in the background properly, but we the model has to be one of "first, do no harm" - where we are talking about harm to the naive user.
Windows Phone 7 happily also seems to be taking this route.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
the problems started when they lost airspeed indication, but the reason they crashed appears to be that the aircraft designers didn't think they needed to give the pilots the information which they would have required to indicate that the plane was stalled.
The problem with using that as an argument FOR the status quo, is there is always some more information you can unveil. Now you have Top, great, but can you list the parent PID? Now you have the parent PID, but can you see the memory paging behavior? Now you have the memory paging but you still can't see the registers while it is running.
There is such a thing as too much information for a task. For something like flying a plane air-speed should be paramount information to the mount there should be hard-linked mechanical backup indicators that would chime when the computer disagreed with them. Or basically many layers of design choice that made bad choices by the system not matter beyond the layer they lived in.
It's all about holistic system design, not chucking a bunch of displays on a system in hopes you gave the user enough information and calling it a day.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So what you are saying is that consumers are too stupid to use judgement, to read reviews, to carefully consider what should be on the phone, and that Google should restrict their choices.
Maybe Google can come out with a special version of their OS - code named 'Obama' - and it will lock everything down and prevent you from freely installing whatever software you want.
The fact that submitting an application to the fragmented Android Market requires no inspection or vetting by gatekeepers means that very poorly written software will get in
Yes. However the fact that you can get poorly written software to perform some tasks is better than the state on the iPhone, where those same tasks simply cannot be performed unless you have a development kit.
Programming on Android is hard as it is due to the extreme OS versioning and hardware fragmentation
I don't find it hard. Stick to the documented APIs and test your application with multiple display resolutions in the emulator, and it seems to me you'll be fine. Unless you're trying to modify the behaviour of system apps (something which, if you tried to do it, would get your app banned from the iOS app store).
and the multiple states that an Android application must cycle through (often leaving dangerously dangling application threads)
Really? What's so hard about saving state and killing background threads in onPause() and restoring it in onResume()? Yes, there are apps that don't do this correctly. That doesn't mean it's hard.
wow.. linux really rocks..
Nailed that one. Sure looks like iOS is 'winning' to me. Just over half as many iOS devices as there are Android devices, But people must be sick of this fragmentation and wouldn't ever think of buying an Android device, right? It's a good thing that iOS doesn't have any malware on it, best of all no applications sending off all sorts of non-anonymous data to who knows where, without telling you that this would happen. Before you reply, note that I'm aware Android does this, but if you'll take a gander, you'll find your precious iOS sending uniquely identifiable info about 3x as often as Android, and it doesn't warn you.
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/04/multitasking-android-way.html
By design,. they got Android scheduling wrong. Have left a gaping hole for applications to specify "run in background/foreground", "run as service". Who is stopping tom/dick/harry/corporate coders from coding every thing as a service. This is the same principle of OpenGL's work procedures. This also runs against their original principle "all processes are born equal". They have tried to hibernate the application by capturing the state of the application. By looking at their implementation, they tried to jam in a VM layer. The regular UNIX os does swapout sleeping processes if needed.
These days, they ALSO support fake multitasking for user apps as well. An application can hook into an API for an already running Apple service such as audio or GPS but not start it's own where it can process its own data. When you close an IOS application, its current state is saved to memory for fast re-opening.
Good thing you took the time to learn about IOS multitasking. It makes evangelising it a lot easier and less embarrassing when someone else corrects you.
IOS multitasking is what I call "I wish it were multitasking"
Why "limited"? Because iOS multitasking isn't really multitasking in the traditional senseâ"it's certainly not what you get on a desktop computer, or even what you get from Apple's own iPhone apps. Apple claims that it only allows for certain functionality
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I think that, given the current state of a variety of subjects, there is ample proof that Americans are indeed too stupid to use judgement.
They will not even vote in an informed fashion, are you suggesting they will install applications with a contrary attitude?
iOS model does have its advantages. take two application from the same publisher and the same functionality:
Facebook
Facebook on Android eats trough my battery, while Facebook on the iPhone is way less hungry. I don't know why, probably something to do with how Android handles push notifications (if those are handled at all, which I don't know)
under: "Settings" -> "About phone" -> "Battery use". Perhaps more akin to 'powertop' than 'top', but it shows what share of battery power is being consumed by what applications. It's incredibly easy to spot a resource hog and choose to uninstall or not run it!
;)
In my experience, usually at least %60 of drain is from the display alone (well, %50-ish if you're running an instant messenger in the background).
Why the heck do people complain about the lack of something... that IS ALREADY BUILT IN?!?
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
It's not hard to develop apps for Android. And do you know what happens to apps that affect performance, crash or whatever? They get downvoted into oblivion and ignored.
I don't find it hard. Stick to the documented APIs and test your application with multiple display resolutions in the emulator, and it seems to me you'll be fine. Unless you're trying to modify the behaviour of system apps (something which, if you tried to do it, would get your app banned from the iOS app store).
About the only thing "hard" about Android is making layouts that scale properly for different DPI screens and also the rotation behaviour. I have never had to change actual program logic to cope with one device differently from another and I expect that's true for virtually every application except those like games. I doubt the situation with games on Android is any worse than it is for iOS either, given that different iPhones run at different speeds too.
... he just means that market apps can't compare to the awesomeness of bundled apps, like their bundled Blockbuster app, the crippled Skype VZW-only app, or the VZW Navigator app, which were hand picked by them. Besides, why would you want free apps when you can pay and get less?
I8-D
Wish the problem wasn't just some random, cheaply written software. On my Android Phone, Skype really grinds everything to a halt. I am sure this will improve when it is under MS control.
How can people like Arial as font?
It's quite unreadable to see a bunch of vertical bars and have to guess what "Ill" means!
Come on, that's not a font, that's a horror
Or maybe a barcode?
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
I've got a Moto Defy (my first Android phone). I bought it for the whole "life-proof" thing (I'm sick of sweat, pocket lint, and 10 inch falls killing my phones).
I've had random issues with it from the first week, sometimes it was a downloaded app, many times it was a pre-loaded app, for a month it was the class 10 memory card (turned out it was too fast for the poor phone), and a few times it was the pre-loaded task manager app.
At this point, I have to reboot the phone a few times a week because some vital feature stopped working. When the warranty runs out, I'm going to have a little party, root the phone, and experience all the Android joy I hoped for before I came to know "MotoBlur".
Regarding the app market, there are a lot of talented people making really neat, useful, and just plain awesome apps. There are also a lot of retched devs flooding the market with clones (worse than their originals), "poke-the-monkey" games, phone-specific apps, and all manner of noise. Some of the bad devs turn into good devs when their coding gets better, but there seem to be far more code-it-and-forget-it devs.
It's gotten to the point where I generally avoid the app market on my phone in favor of searching/browsing it from my desktop computer; I'm just sick of spending an inordinate amount of time researching an app on one tiny 4 inch screen with poor multi-tasking.
Programming on Android is hard as it is due to the extreme OS versioning and hardware fragmentation
In part, the fragmentation issue is due to manufacturers such as Motorola who fail to support their hardware by issuing timely updates. If we had a situation were for a given generation of Android we saw continual patches and upgrades, much the same way as with many desktop OS versions, perhaps we wouldn't have quite this mess.
And no, I don't entirely blame the manufacturers but Moto has one of the worst records for failing to update their hardware so I'm not particularly sympathetic to their claims here.
It's not hard to develop apps for Android. And do you know what happens to apps that affect performance, crash or whatever? They get downvoted into oblivion and ignored.
The Skype app, which mangles performance, and the Facebook app, which voraciously wolfs down battery charge, haven't been downvoted into oblivion and ignored yet. How long should we expect to wait for this to happen?
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
Are they collecting data on what apps their users use ?
Are they sending it back to Motorola for analysis ?
Does it mention anything about this in the customer documentation?
Since this slashdot, I am required to make the following analogy:
Strong-AI will appear right after I get my flying car.
You've been watching way too much ST:TNG
Utopia is pretty on TV, but I wouldn't want to live there.
it is "too incomprehensible" as to what Top is even doing, for 98% of the people across the planet!
I agree with you a process manager identical to that on a PC with a full-size screen isn't the best design for a handheld device. But in what way would you reorganize the information?
You are no better than a spammer.
You are no better than a pick pocket.
I disagree with your tone here. Just because someone happens not to know the best solution doesn't mean that making available the second-best solution is tantamount to a crime.
People can call Apple control freaks or whatever but the more that Android goes on and the more I think Apple did things just right. I'm still on Android simply because it works good enough and I can't stomach the idea of paying hundreds of pounds for a phone or have an expensive contract but if the iphone 5 comes out soon and it's completely awesome then I may very well change my mind. I just don't like the idea of not knowing what I'll get in regards to performance if I get another Android phone and no I don't think I should have to root the thing to make it work right. I enjoy hacking about on my desktop that I built myself but for a phone that I pay good money for either outright or through a contract then I expect the thing to work especially if I root it, have a problem and then no one wants to hear about it because I rooted my phone nor do I want to unreachable because I need to take time to find how to fix something myself.
iOS deals with this differently (just as an example). Apps which consume too much memory when in the background are culled while the user is not using them
Android does this too. First it kills apps in the background that have not installed a service, and then it kills services.
and they have enforced strict restrictions on background processing (initially it was banned, now it must be done explicitly)
And under Android, any application that doesn't want to get evicted from RAM had better explicitly start a service.
That gets rid of the need for top or application manager or any such program
Memory is not the only resource. Data transfer allotment is another. Battery charge is another. Should the user of a phone have the ability to see which applications have used the largest portion of the subscriber's 2 GB per month data transfer allotment or the largest portion of the phone's battery charge?
Android apps don't work that way. In fact most don't even have a quit option. The phone simply kills them off when they are in the background and it needs more memory for a foreground app.
Memory is not the only resource that needs to be managed. Please see my other comment.
Most of us come from the long lineage of the PC (by which I mean personal computer, not IBM clone) and we tend to approach these handheld computers from a similar angle. We saw the evolution of increasing memory and increasing processor speed and eventually increasing display performance and capability. We also saw the push to make things smaller while remaining powerful. And in every case, we ran into limits and we begrudgingly accepted them.
Handhelds come with their own advantages and limitations but they also have their own usefulness which is not merely portability as many seem to believe.
They are computers, no mistaking that. But they exist within an set of parameters which are quite different from the PC. Meanwhile, the pool of developers for these devices come from...where? PCs of course, and they tend to write for these mobile devices as if they were PCs which includes following many of the bad habits formed in the PC programming community which includes wasting memory, system resources such as file handles, processor resources and more. For the PC, this isn't so bad -- they are plugged into a wall outlet the majority of the time and RAM and hard disk space is cheap. But what about mobile computers? Not so! They are running on battery most of the time, the memory is limited as are the other system resources. But just as in the PC world, programmers for these handhelds write as if their program is the only program running on the device and that power and storage are limitless.
How do we protest bringing the old culture of thoughtless and inconsiderate programming into the mobile device arena? Apple has an approach and as much as it angers people, it's actually working to a great degree. Should Google/Android take a similar approach? No. That's just not free enough. So what then? Well, perhaps the user needs more information with which to judge and manage a program. We know large programs use lots of memory and resources. But that's not the whole story is it? Even a very large program can be written in such a way that it is resource conscious and sips at the systems processor power using only what is needed keeping waste to a minimum and maximizing the end user's battery life.
In the Linux laptop world, we have a program called "power top." With power top, we can determine what processes are draining the battery the most and then the user can make an informed decision about whether or not to kill the process. While the "reviews and comments" about apps on the android app store are helpful, they are based on opinions of often non-technical people and so they are often speculative and baseless. If among the stats of a program was included a "power top rating" or something similar, users could be made aware of how much of a drain the program might be and make an informed decision about whether or not to use it and when.
Not only would this help to shape a user's understanding and expectations for their mobile devices, but it would give an additional metric by which applications can be judged and measured which is specifically relevant to the needs of mobile computing. (Which I remind you all is significantly different from PCs!) With such a metric available to the user, programmers would then begin to compete more on that basis as well as their traditional "speed and capacity" metrics. In short, this would be the difference between being the best "star player" and the best "team player" where, in the mobile market, the best "team player" is the most valuable player.
Just because an app is popular doesn't mean you shouldn't down vote it. Doing so will put pressure on manufacturers to fix any perceived flaws. Personally I don't see any reason that either Skype or Facebook should perform any worse under android than they do under any other smart phone OS. I know that Skype wants to run automatically at startup which is an annoying feature but it can be disabled.
You can't control the user experience.
For once, Wall Street called this one correctly. Lots of analysts predicted that all handset vendors that do not control their entire platform like Apple does, run the risk of a bad user experience.
Apple and RIM have control over the entire product - hardware, operating system, and even application approval and distribution. This results in a controlled, predictable, end user experience - and that's what their user base wants.
Let's be honest. Lots of Android customers on Verizon were only Android customers because they wanted a modern smartphone, and couldn't get an iPhone without switching to AT&T.
I'm certain some of those customers are thrilled with the "openness" of the Android platform, but I'll bet most don't care. They just want a widget that works with a minimum of fuss.
I predict many of these "types" will switch to iPhone eventually.
-ted
The N900 has top. Nobody bought it.
That could be because nobody could even try it. About a year ago, I tried to find a store in my home town where I could try an N900 before buying one. None of the three stores that I visited carried it.
im not sure of the exact order of power users but
1 every time an app ping out via one of the transceivers
2 sounds (with high volume sound being worse)
3 any high brightness use of the display
4 anything that forces the cpu to go into max clock
will drain power so to fix this
1 limit pings to whats absolutely needed (updates to most programs should not be needed daily) and find out the minimum amount of pings needed for any "real time" apps
2 unless its a game not everything needs to cause a noise (and limit game noises to like 75% volumne at most) and default sounds to OFF
3 you want to have a flashlight?? stick 2 or 3 LEDS and a fracking LENS on the top end of the phone and be done with it
4 use common or lightweight runtimes whenever possible
5 HAVE A REAL TASK MANAGER AVAILABLE BY DEFAULT AND YES THE CARRIER PROVIDED APS SHOULD BE STOPPABLE (and removeable)
then lets talk about the "ap store" killing your precious devices battery oh if Google really wanted this to get solved quick they would have some sort of "power use rating" in the Ap Store so you could see that a given ap is a power hog.
(hmm i could see a pair of 5 segment batteries as the icon one for "this ap" and one for "average ap in this category" )
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I downloaded the Walgreens app for my Galaxy S phone. Walgreens is a pharmacy for you non-US folks. It was actually pretty slick, you can find a location nearby and send prescription refills in by scanning your bottle. Not amazing, but handy.
Except I noticed my battery life tanked after installing. It turns out the app was polling GPS for location information constantly. When I checked to see what apps were using battery, the Walgreens app had used 85% of my battery and spent 8.5 hours on GPS. And no, turning off GPS at the phone level had no effect, it was off when I installed and remained off according to the phone. The app also had no way to stop this behavior. Deleted. Maybe it's been fixed, it's been about 6 months since this happened.
So, yeah, some seemingly innocuous apps can completely hose a phone. I can't believe I'm saying this but Apple certainly has a leg up when it comes to ensuring this stuff doesn't happen. Who cares though, im a happy iphone to android switcher and i'm not going back. At least my android phone had the tools to identify what the hell was going on.
I've got an HTC Desire CDMA and recently installed CM7. My battery life has almost doubled. I'm really liking Cyanogenmod a lot. It's as stable as the factory HTC Sense was too.
blame the spoon for making you fat.
That's funny, I have a Droid 2 Global and it's great. Well, once I disabled as much of the crap that Motorola bundled with it and removed their terrible widgets. Suddenly I stopped having problems booting the shell and my battery life literally doubled.
Know what caused the worst CPU and power consumption? The RSS reader. A technology literally designed for occasional checking and low bandwidth consumption.
Magically, I can install a dozen widgets from other random third party vendors with no problems. Foursquare? Twidroid? Reddit is Fun? All fine, all on my home screen and auto-updating. Yet Motorola, with the ability to do literally months of integration testing, can't make an app that would be an easy exercise for any first-year CS student without FUBARing it all up. I don't even know why they bothered because Android comes with a news app ANYWAY that actually works. Pathetic.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Make your own appstore then...
Phones are more or less just like computers these days and what's the main gripe of technical support when a user brings in a broken machine? A: There's tons of shit software (malware, spyware but also badly coded applications) installed on it.
This has nothing to do with what app download service you're using and has all to do with users and what they install.
~Syberz
There is no quality control on any of the android apps out there. It's a crap-shoot whether or not you get something written by a kid with no regard to standards.
Based on owning several Android phones, I think the problem is in part with Motorola phones and their firmware, and in part with bad resource management in Android. The former is just Motorola's own stupidity; they don't know how to do software. The latter is a well-known problem with Android: badly written apps can bring the system to its knees; that's being addressed in 3.x
what if the dev only has 1 phone and it happens to be a high-end one (because most of us are gadget geeks too)...we may not be aware that it is too resource hungry on your G1.
This is another alleged advantage of iOS: fewer models of hardware to support. An iPod touch 3 and an iPod touch 4 ought to be enough for anyone testing an app designed for iPhone and iPod touch.
So you are a highly experienced IT geek and you find iPhone easy to use. Well, that's not surprising.
iPhone: install iTunes, sign up for Apple account, connect iPhone, sync, deal with firmware upgrades in iPhone, then regularly sync and backup, remembering not to disconnect prematurely
Android: enter Google account (new or existing)
Which one is easier to use? Most people don't even know how to install software on their computers, let alone understand syncing. Don't even get me started on Apple's idiotic notification system that makes you click through dozens of alerts and notifications and just won't stop.
Do some apps make Android slow? Sure; it's a fully multitasking OS. But that's a concept people grasp easily: "application X makes my phone slow, I'm just going to uninstall it".
It's quite coherent. More importantly, it's better designed, easier to program, easier to use, more secure, and more functional than iOS.
Who is stopping tom/dick/harry/corporate coders from coding every thing as a service.
A service that has been foregrounded has an icon in the notification area at the top of the display, thus appearing to the user to be "still open".
The regular UNIX os does swapout sleeping processes if needed.
Conventional wisdom is that the access patterns of a swap file are more suited to the wear patterns of spinning disks than to those of NAND flash memory.
I had a Motorola droid phone for a day and took it back due to crappy battery life. I didn't download any apps on the phone - it sucked right out of the box. The salesman claimed I didn't know how to manage the battery. Its supposed to be a smart phone, it should manage its own battery.
How low can you go? I can't help but rolling the phrase "pathetic" in my head over and over again. How about this: http://fbforandroid.blogspot.com/2011/06/facebook-arrives-to-android-os.html
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I had been waiting for months for the Bionic, but everything I'm reading about MotoBlur and Motorola's attempts to lock or close down their phones is scaring me away from their phones. I'm leaving the Blackberry and iPhone because I don't like their closed worlds. The closed formats go hand in hand with a closed philosophy that is not a technology track I want to be involved with.
I'm sure Motorola is not listening to this but I hope many many buyers of phone share this sentiment as demand will hopefully eventually drive supply!
Hunger is the best sauce.
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I calculate $1,000, not $1,500. From Apple.com in the United States, a new Mac mini costs $600, a new iPod touch 4 costs $300, and a certificate costs $100 for one year. The Mac mini can use the monitor, USB keyboard, and USB mouse of the desktop PC you already own. Or do you live in another country where Apple charges more for its products?