Slashdot Mirror
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?
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."
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.
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
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.