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Is Choice a Problem For Android?
New submitter mjone13 writes "Dave Feldman, in a blog posts, says that the problem Android faces is giving consumers too much choice. He cites several studies which state that consumers generally are unhappier when they have too much choice. 'Catering to all individual preferences creates a bloated, bland product. Not to mention a UI that’s impossible to navigate. Furthermore, people are notoriously bad at identifying what we want. And what we do want is influenced heavily by what we know — our expectations are constrained by our experience.' He then goes on to talk about Android fragmentation, app developer problems and bug issues. Finally he says the people who general prefer the choice Android provides are tinkers similar to gear heads who love tinkering with their car. 'I think many who extol Android’s flexibility fall into the tinkerer category, including some tech bloggers. They love all the ways they can customize their phones, not because they’re seeking some perfect setup, but because they can swap in a new launcher every week. That’s fun for them; but they’ve made the mistake of not understanding how their motivation differs from the rest of us.' Is choice really a problem for Android?"
Whether it's a problem depends on what the goals are. Providing a satisfying experience to a bunch of tinkerers is a very different thing from providing a satisfying experience to the multitude of non-tinkerers who buy smartphones.
"Dave Feldman is a product designer with a background in user experience, product management, and front-end development. Heâ(TM)s the co-founder and chief product officer of Emu. Heâ(TM)s held positions at Yahoo! and AOL. Check out his website Operation Project and follow him on Twitter @dfeldman."
aka mr. "I configured my configurable system to act like crap and by the way I love iPhone".
now, of course if I can make a plugin to handle file saving.. then of course I can install a dozen apps to do it. just because I install two different homescreens for example doesn't mean that I have to choose between the two each time I press home.. I could though, if I wanted.
basically the answer to his problems is to not install extra apps. I don't know what the fuck is his actual suggestion on how to remove the problem of choice. maybe he is working on his own android variant where you can't install anything... more likely he is trying to troll some buzz and score a new gig. that's what his writing looks like. only made more obvious by him submitting these pieces on different blogs to gather maximum buzz since nobody gives a shit about his blog and the product he is promoting(emu.is, some kind of sms frontend where you can attach your position easily. how novel, for 2003).
and the other problems? android phones are so BIG! well fuck buy a smaller android phone.
(oh and he doesn't really seem to understand android multitasking, only sort of).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Why is everyone talking like there even is a problem? In August Android had almost 80% of the market. Yeah, it must be incredibly boring and horrible to use if so many people want it.
which is totally what she said
It's not the users that are the problem its the dev teams because if you're writing for Apple you only need to test on few handsets & tablets. However, if you're writing for Android you need to test on fucking hundreds of different hand sets because each manufacturer has fucked with the OS. So either apps don't get written for android or if they do they normally get approx 100th the testing apps get on Apple.
Except if you were actually a developer working in the real life world (I am, on an app with 2 million daily active users) you'll know that that is not at all necessary. There are device-specific bugs, but they're rare, and in the most part we rotate testing on about 6 devices, and use bug reporting libraries to catch the rest. Our crash-rate is a tenth of the iOS team's crash-rate.