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Google To Take 'Apple-Like' Control Over Nexus Phones (droid-life.com)
Soulskill writes: According to a (paywalled) report in The Information, Google CEO Sundar Pichai wants the company to take greater control over development of their Nexus smartphones. When producing Nexus phones, Google has always partnered with manufacturers, like Samsung, LG, and HTC, who actually built the devices. Rather than creating a true revenue stream, Google's main goal has been to provide a reference for what Android can be like without interference from carriers and manufacturers. (For example, many users are frustrated by Samsung's TouchWiz skin, as well as the bloatware resulting from deals with carriers.
But now, Google appears to want more control. The report indicates Google wants to do a better job of competing throughout the market. They want to compete with Apple on the high end, but also seem concerned that manufacturers haven't put enough effort into quality budget phones. The article at Droid-Life argues, "We all know that Nexus phones will never be household items until Google puts some marketing dollars behind them. Will a top-to-bottom approach finally push them to do that?"
But now, Google appears to want more control. The report indicates Google wants to do a better job of competing throughout the market. They want to compete with Apple on the high end, but also seem concerned that manufacturers haven't put enough effort into quality budget phones. The article at Droid-Life argues, "We all know that Nexus phones will never be household items until Google puts some marketing dollars behind them. Will a top-to-bottom approach finally push them to do that?"
Google, drop that Dalvik/Java crap and then you can eat Apple's lunch. That is the #1 thing that is holding Android back. #2 One should not need to pack in a 100MB runtime with their app because the built in Android Browser is broken. #3. Bloody standardize a build of Android that runs on everything.
Like what I'm getting at is that an x86 or ARM build of an app should be able to download the respective executables, and not have to download additional libraries at all. But because of the clusterfark that is Android fragmentation, damn near every App has to ship the entire bloatload of dependencies from the C/C++ runtime to software implementations of h264 and truetype because the apps can not rely on the OS libraries to be up to date. An iOS app does not have this problem. The OS libraries always work and are always up to date unless the user deliberately doesn't update their device (eg jailbroken.) This is why Apps on Android suck. If it's not Dalvik rubbish getting in the way, it's the dependency hell that causes bloat so the average app ends up being 100MB... even for HTML5 apps.