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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."
They continually fail to address glaring issues with many of their Android products. They are often harsh when dealing with customers over on their support forums (I'm looking at you, Matt!) and they almost never give a straight answer. The whole "I have no new information" spiel is really getting old over there.
Now I understand that many products have their problems. However, Motorola are just stupid when it comes to fixing them.
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."
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.
Pretty much. You can download the source code for Android here.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
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 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.