Google Extends Its Patch Reward Program To Include Android

An anonymous reader writes "Google has extended its proactive Patch Reward Program to include even more open-source software. Among them is the Android Open Source Project, which the company previously did not reveal was going to be added. Last month, Google started providing financial incentives (between $500 and $3,133.70) for proactive improvements to OSS that go beyond merely fixing a known security bug. Google said at the time it would be rolling out the program gradually, and hinted that more project types would be on the way."

Comments

$3,133.70 ??

[themushroom]

I saw wut u did dere.

Re:$3,133.70 ??

[viperidaenz]

Yeah, they cheapened out. That's what. $31337 makes more sense.

Re:$3,133.70 ??

[mythosaz]

Totally |33+

Re:$3,133.70 ??

[CODiNE]

yeah, what the heck is an "eleeto"?

Re:$3,133.70 ??

[djdanlib]

It's when you get two Cheetos that fused together during manufacturing.

Re:$3,133.70 ??

[Soluzar]

You could say they were being generous, since $313.37 is the lowest amount of money which contains the string in question.

such is the life of a peasant.

[turkeydance]

we shall abide by our Lord's wish.

They should consider a "poor UI design program"

[AbRASiON]

You know, like this relentless drive to make things flat, single shaded and without borders / lines or dividers making information / data easier to identify. It's all mashed together.

Furthermore the tabletification of web pages, the urge to push Google+ on their customers, really importantly also is the move to remove the menu (context) button on Android devices instead for a multi-task button. One of the _primary_ reasons, literally one of the biggest factors in me moving to Android from Apple was this genius concept of the options / settings / context "other" menu button ALWAYS being in a consistent spot and not fucking floating around on the screen randomly like it does on an iphone! (Yes, I know Blackberry did it first and credit to them too)
But nope, let's change that idea for a multi-task button, what the hell? No thanks - I'd rather just do a double tap of home for multi-task.

Then there's the removal of the text on icons - yes, I get this allows them to be able to regionalise things MUCH MUCH faster, can't deny that benefit to THEM but to me? To identify these ambiguous looking icons? Sure some are consistent, like a green telephone icon at a diagonal angle for call and flat 'hanging up' red phone for hanging up but some of the other stuff is not so clear (and even if you figure it out it takes time to process) It took me at least 30 seconds to figure out how to edit a draft email in the new gmail app about 6 months ago, because they removed the fucking text 'edit' - there's a small pencil icon instead, tucked in a corner.

So yes, a poor UI design program is bloody essential, if not the fucking firing of developers when a project is complete. STOP fiddling, STOP justifying your jobs somehow. Some internet websites / apps are services now. They are like water, it's like a toaster, does it REALLY need to actually change?
Do I really need multiple inboxes? I LIKE the priority inbox, now already the damn thing is 'grandfathered' for their new design, how long until that multi-inbox thing is forced on me as the old one is finally terminated / not supported?

Sorry to rant but Google for the past 18 months is NOT the google of previous times, they are driving me frankly, fucking bonkers. Get your shit together.

http://i.imgur.com/h7Mpdq4.gif
See also:
http://techreport.com/blog/25657/google-i-love-you-but-youre-bringing-me-down

Re:They should consider a "poor UI design program"

[Anonymous Coward]

They are like water, it's like a toaster

Overly dramatic much? Water is necessary for (at least human) life, text on icons adds a little bit of convenience to your high-end phone/pocket computer. By the way you talk about it I almost thought it meaningfully affected your quality of living in some way.

If it's really that big a deal, you can use any of the other dozens of launchers, or mail clients, or etc available from independent developers.

Re:They should consider a "poor UI design program"

[Jane Q. Public]

"You know, like this relentless drive to make things flat, single shaded and without borders / lines or dividers making information / data easier to identify. It's all mashed together."

This "flat-ification" of the UI did have a bit of a rationale behind it, but they turned it into a fad and carried it too far.

3D elements, shading, colors, dividers between elements, etc... all are part good UI design that was developed over a period of decades. It is ultimately based on psychology and neurophysiology, and what makes up a good human-computer interface.

But there are a lot of "fresh young faces" in the industry today, that never bothered to learn this stuff, and so because they don't know their history, they will be doomed to repeat it.

Originally, making the UI "flatter" was supposed to save CPU and GPU resources. But today's CPUs and GPUs are more than capable of handling it.

And Google is hardly the only offender. Apple "dumbed down" some of their OS X interface elements as part of their "bringing OS X and iOS together" strategy... like rather stupidly taking the color out of the icons in the Finder sidebar. But it really doesn't make sense to make one UI worse in order to match the other... the idea is supposed to be to improve the other until it is as good as the first.

Re:They should consider a "poor UI design program"

[master_kaos]

No, every time I use gmail I am confused on what a button does because there is no text. Sure the common things that I use every day I eventually figure out, but the more obscure option I rarely use? I have to hover over a bunch of buttons waiting for a tool tip (oh right, you don't' get tooltips on a phone)

Let me guess whenever you use word, or libre office or whatever you use you ONLY use the toolbar and you instantly know what every icon does without the tooltip? Didn't think so. At least they give you a menu to look through options.
Sure it looks more "sexy" with just icons, but usability goes down the drain

Re:They should consider a "poor UI design program"

[Jane Q. Public]

When you use it enough to learn what the icons mean, it is faster and easier to use them, than to go through a tree of menu items.

I know many casual users will not appreciate that, but for the people who do it all the time, it's just plain good UI design.

Re:They should consider a "poor UI design program"

[AbRASiON]

We're not talking about a tree of text items - I agree with you that text only trees are messy.
We want BOTH, you know? What we had earlier!?

An icon for edit with a silly pencil and it says "edit" underneath it.
An icon with the GPS bubble, with "GPS" underneath it.

I put Cyanogenmod on my Galaxy S4 recently and the stock google camera is a _fucking disgrace_ stuff is completely unlabelled and utterly meaningless icons, just put the god damned text below the icon so I can understand what the hell is going on.

Re:They should consider a "poor UI design program"

[djdanlib]

UI design is good when it enables you to be efficient at a task and it does that. I agree there. However I think his point is more of a UX point. How do you learn other than just hitting things to see what they do? There's no manual, no alternative noob mode with text, no hover-for-tooltip, and no help file. Users shouldn't have to enlist the aid of another user.

User thoughts might include: Is this going to break something? Can I undo it? I'd better not touch it. How do you Google an icon? (You don't.) Why is that there? Where is the menu? Where is the list of things I can do here? I don't want to break anything. It's scary/frustrating because I don't know how to use it, but there is no guidance.

Eventually, you get enough of these negative/confusing emotions and the thought "Ah well, back to iPhone" forms. I've seen it firsthand with several people who tried to switch because they kept having thoughts like that during the whole return period on their Androids.

So you see, it's a fairly basic UX misstep that could be avoided with some sort of hint. It's really unfortunate that it happens all over the Android ecosystem because I like it and want to see it succeed... but they're really shooting themselves in the foot still.

Re:They should consider a "poor UI design program"

[Vitriol Angst]

I know when I was asked to do usability on an early website I was designing to be as a portal, I committed hearsay -- and this is after I'd made a living creating 3D interfaces that looked like the real world. I said; look at the top 5 or 6 links that all the popular websites have and just do those. Break everything down based on that. What most people are used to is what they expect to see. Generic an vanilla is useful. People are not here to "interact" with our website, they are here for content and the quickest way to navigate to that with the least hassle is the BEST way.

It's hard to do usability when you say; "done!" It's like someone who makes vitamins or artificial flavors to add to food. Why not just give people strawberries without adding citric acid? We are at year 40 of the food additive business (figure I pulled from my rear) and what's the food you pay a premium to get? Food with a short list of ingredients and just the stuff you wanted. Anything unpronounceable at the top of the ingredients list gets my veto.

>> But let me say; the dang phones have a lot of room for improvement. A hand tool shaped like a bar of soap? Really? I could spend pages explaining on how and why phones are done wrong -- the most basic is that then need to be slightly LESS rectangular so you know which end is up in your pocket. The should have a flip front because we've lost all kinds of space to separate the mic from the listening speaker and we hang up with our cheeks all the time (until 3D sensing tech gets better). Clamshell was a natural way to protect the screen from keys -- and to hang up without the infernal phone blanking on us and we try and activate it again and hang up.

Re:They should consider a "poor UI design program"

[Jane Q. Public]

An icon with the GPS bubble, with "GPS" underneath it.

Sure. I agree. That is another aspect of this "new" trend, to distance themselves from "skeuomorphics", which is part of that "fad" I mentioned before. And a self-destructing fad, too. To repeat what I wrote above: they didn't learn their history, so they are doomed to repeat it via lot of bad decisions like these.

The "modern" (nonsensical) "theory" is that icons do not need to be "skeuomorphic" (i.e., resemble a real-world object). I know this because I am a developer and a lot of young developers I hear from have swallowed this kool-aid. They think that an icon should divorce itself from any real-world similarity, and just be an abstract symbol.

Now, this is a FINE idea, if you are talking about symbols that have become international standards. Things like the symbol on power buttons (the circle with the little line at the top), or the "pause" function (parallel vertical bars).

But how did these symbols get to be international standards? Because they were agreed upon by international committees and they appeared everywhere on actual, physical buttons, for decades.

But these other icons they're putting out have no immediate association for people. There is no standard; people don't know what they mean. Which makes for a terrible interface. It can take a user whole minutes to learn what an icon means, when an "old style, skeuomorphic" icon (especially with a text label), which these young developers so thoroughly revile and rail against, would have been picked up by the eye and brain in 10 milliseconds.

Yes, they're throwing out decades of hard lessons learned by thousands (if not millions) of human-computer UI developers, and they somehow think that' good. I can only guess it's because they don't know any better.

In other words, it's Dunning-Kruger, made fad.

Re:They should consider a "poor UI design program"

[Jane Q. Public]

"So you see, it's a fairly basic UX misstep that could be avoided with some sort of hint."

Yes, but...

I agree with you. But this is a 100% avoidable mistake. NOT putting those things into interfaces -- and more, insisting that they're not needed or even wanted -- indicates a level of ignorant arrogance on the part of many young developers that has often astounded me.

Re:They should consider a "poor UI design program"

[djdanlib]

That's what I'm saying. Cheers!

to bad that the cell carriers and oem slow down up

[Joe_Dragon]

to bad that the cell carriers and oem slow down updates on android

Elito?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell kind of sense is that?

Extremely rewarding for both sides

[Salgat]

People who do this for a hobby get rewarded even more now for their contributions (along with a huge boost to the resume) while Google wins out because of the large amount of man hours saved from crowd sourcing these contributions.

I got one...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got one - on my Samsung GS2, there are a whole bunch of crappy apps that refuse to be uninstalled. Looks like a bug to me ;-)

Improve OS for $3k?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is paying $3k for improvements to Android? So a career in software development just isn't possible any longer. You'd make more money scavenging metal from recycle bins.

Re:Improve OS for $3k?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right.

Because they want you to quit your day job for that, and not, you know, just hack in your free time and make some side cash on it.

Will these be OS updates or...

[Monsuco]

Great idea but it's not exactly a secret that Google has a lot of trouble convincing carriers and OEMs to update their devices. Ordinarily, that would blunt the ability to fix problems and add features to existing devices but Google has an answer to that. Since Google can't convince carriers and OEMs to update their devices (apart from Google's own Nexus line), Google crafted a workaround.

If you have an Android device and you check your installed apps (make sure its on the All tab and not the Downloaded tab) you'll probably see an app called Google Play Services. If you check the permissions on this app you'll see it pretty much has the authority to do pretty much anything it wants. It can even alter its own permissions without notifying the user and updates itself silently without relying on the Play Store to do so. Ordinarily, this kind of God-like app would be creepy but Google has basically used it to bypass carriers and OEMs and push out new features without having to actually update the OS. Pretty much any device running Froyo (2.2) or higher uses this.

I wonder if Google actually needs to update the Android OS itself to fix bugs or if they can just use the Play Services app to work around this.