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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
Does he mean things like motoblur?
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.
What are you basing that on? I would assume that the reason Android has a bigger marketshare than iPhone OS is because it's licensed to many, many manufacturers, whereas iPhone OS is only available on Apple products.
I don't think that has anything to do with it being "open."
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."
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.
The people that care about openness are an insignificant share of the market. Android is ahead because of increased hardware choice and cheaper handsets. That's it.
I always figured the Android market share was due to AT&T...
Posted from my iPhone
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.
Might be worth looking into HTC still since they've declared they are going to only be selling unlocked bootloaders on their phones. I know when I'm able to get a new android phone cheap again (with my contract) I'll be looking at a HTC since if I don't like what they give me I can just wipe it with a custom rom.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
"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.
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.
Pretty much. You can download the source code for Android here.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
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.
it doesn't matter how much you don't like it, they public loves it. This is why its still used by so many sites, because it works and the public loves it.
Minor correction, i suspect the public probably doesn't give a damn about flash in particular. Website designer love flash. The public just loves being able to access websites, therefore they need to be able to use flash whether they like it or not.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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.
Openness has almost *nothing* to do with Android's market share. The number of people who care is inconsequential. And besides, iOS has, and has always had, a greater market share than Android. Some time this quarter (it may have already happened, it may happen next month) Apple will have sold its 200 millionth iOS device. Android will be lucky to have half that.
The post that started this thread incorrectly said "iOS", it wasn't until the linux geek's reply that he altered it to the awkwardly phrased "iPhone OS".
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.
I thought Android already had half that? Here's the first link I found when googling: http://yourmobilesite.net/100-million-active-android-devices-is-android-taking-over-the-world/
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
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.
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 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
Nice, I missed that.
The sad thing is the average slashdotter will still think Android has surpassed iOS, as far too many have been saying here for over a year now. Android isn't even *close* to iOS's market share, and as Android's growth has settled down, it's not certain that it ever will.
That won't stop the endless postings that somehow people are flocking to Android because of "freedom", as though the average phone buyer gives two shits.