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Android Companies Keep Pretending That Android Doesn't Exist (theverge.com)
Europe's biggest tech show IFA is underway in Berlin currently. Companies from around the world are showcasing their new smartphones at the event, chearleading the advancements they have made on the hardware side. Pretty much all these devices are running Android, but the way they are presented, you wouldn't be able to tell if that really is the case. The Verge's Vlad Savov writes: Sony would have us believe that buying an Xperia phone grants us a pass into the exclusive Xperia experience. The stuff actually differentiating the Xperia brand is junk and bloatware: the Xperia assistance software is a mobile version of Microsoft's Clippy. Huawei is even worse in its Android omerta, deathly afraid to utter the green giant's name. I understand that hardware companies want to spend more time talking about their hardware, but all these launches feel lobotomized without a proper discussion of the software driving their devices. Tell me about your implementation of Android. Tell me why you think it's okay to launch a phone without the latest software. Reassure me that I won't be left behind the way that many 2014 Android flagships already have been, and explain to your users why they don't need smarter multitasking, improved notifications, and baked-in VR support. Yes, those are harder issues to discuss, but dodging them is what makes customers untrusting of Android manufacturers.
You want new features, buy a new phone. There is no money to be made supporting old handsets.
Android is clunky, has a history of terrible security, and invades your privacy thanks to Google. If I was trying to sell a smartphone, I wouldn't want to be associated with Android, either.
This is exactly how Android was designed by Google and intended to be implemented. If you don't like it buy another phone with another OS.
All the phones run Android. The cell phone companies are trying to differentiate themselves from each other. Why talk about a feature that is the same on all of them? The real differentiation is in look and feel, or slight variations in hardware specifications, or in price, or in branding, or even in stupid apps that come with the phone.
LG devices have standard connectors, microSD cards, removable batteries, and best of all: they are well supported by Cyanogenmod. My devices are always up-to-date and functional the way I want them.
You can't lock people in "hardware specs" the way Apple locks people to its IOS platform
I can live without new features. But can I live without security updates on an always connected internet device??
what makes customers untrusting of Android manufacturers
Yet Android dominates the market.
The average consumer doesn't care about the operating system of their phone. They probably don't even know what Android is in detail and they wouldn't care or notice that they are running an out of date OS or that there are different skins of Android. They just install and use the apps they want and then if the phone is slow they just buy a new phone.
... because these phones have a clean OS, regular software updates and no bloatware.
If you buy Samsung or Huawei or Sony or any of the many other phones from companies that don't comprehend software, the hardware may be good, but the software won't be, and the price will be inversely related to the software penalty.
These companies need to either spin up a competent software department or, just as good, get out of the software business entirely and just work to keep patches coming on their products, old and new alike. They'd lose face (a problem for Asians) but they'd gain market share.
Reassure me that I won't be left behind the way that many 2014 Android flagships already have been
The are telling you what they plan to do; which is exactly the same as they have been doing. There will be no updates.
Just because you don't like the message doesn't mean they are not being clear.
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Why would Sony want to market their phone by talking about how awesome Android is? Any smartphone you get (that's not an iPhone, obviously) will be running Android. If Sony's sales pitch is, "You should buy an Android phone!" it doesn't differentiate them from other phone manufacturers. It doesn't tell you why you should buy an Xperia phone.
So every phone manufacturer is trying to differentiate itself. They want to make their phone different from the other Android phones, and then their sales pitch is going to focus on those differences. For some manufacturers, those differences might be good, and for some they'll be bad, but there is a need to be different. Even Google's Nexus devices are, to some extent, marketing themselves on the premise that they're the reference design. You're getting the true, pure Android experience without all that pesky manufacturer interference.
If you root. I want to know one thing about a phone before I buy, can I root it.
Does this behavior have anything to do with the ongoing legal battle between Google and oracle over the API's?
Why advertise that which your product shares with your competition? You emphasize it's advantages. Simple marketing.
Have gnu, will travel.
Many of the handset OEMs have direct experience with being box-stuffers for Wintel PCs; and the ones that don't have had plenty of time to observe the ones that do.
Moral of the story, you are a low-margin, interchangeable, and largely expendable partner if you don't provide either the OS or the high-value components; with conditions moderately better for companies that can at least make money on SoCs or screens or batteries.
Plus, some vendors still cherish the delusion(despite 'smartphone' having been a thing for some years now) that phones are just 'consumer electronics' and so consumers will dutifully consume them based on the 'features' the vendor shoves in to differentiate the product, rather than just loading the applications that provide the features they want, as with a real computer.
Now, while I can't exactly blame the handset OEMs for wanting to avoid being just board stuffers who basically exist just to install Google's OS on Qualcomm's hardware; they have the crippling little problem that you can't put yourself in the position of being a value-added software contributor just by wanting to, or just by shipping software. You have to not suck at it. And that...hasn't exactly happened. Even after years of trying, OEM bloatware is considered to be doing atypically well when reviews describe it as 'subtle' or 'inoffensive' compared to stock Android.
They're phone companies. They're going to want to talk about phones. Samsung has been meddling with forking/making a new phone ecosystem to get away from Google.
Google is the Android company. Don't conflate.
I've used a lot of Android devices, and still use them with my current Galaxy S5 running CM13. It's obvious that despite all Apple's shortcomings in its walled garden approach, their ecosystem is a lot more unified and provides a consistent user experience compared to Android-based phone manufacturers. Among Android devices, I have to say Samsung's blend of Android is definitely one of the worst. The UI is broken, inconsistent garbage and it takes a very long time to turn off all the on-by-default annoyances that the phone keeps reminding of all the time. Simple things like connecting to a wifi hotspot is a pain in the ass if you have a "recognized" network in the range, too.
-SR
What is this so called "Android" you speak of?
Sent from my Moto Z Droid
Its marketing 101. Even if its true, admitting that its Android-based is the same as telling you that their product is just like everyone else's.
You want new features, buy a new phone. There is no money to be made supporting old handsets.
You mean "features" like security updates? Or existing features that don't work quite right out of the box? Yeah I don't really give a crap if the vendor makes money on those or not. If they don't provide updates I won't buy their product in the first place. So at least from me there is no money to be made in NO supporting old handsets.
There is no need for VR on a phone. The people pushing this are fools.
"Clunky" is subjective, personally I find stock Android to be very intuitive compared to iOS.
Maybe but very few devices have stock Android on them. As for me the Android devices I own are definitely more of a pain to use that the iOS devices I own. Possibly I have the wrong ones but my experience with Android is that it requires (and allows) considerably more fiddling than iOS. Whether you like that or not is a matter of personal preference.
Android's security has historically been just as good/bad as iOS's as well. The difference is that carriers and OEMs prevent upstream security updates from being installed for Android. Blame them for that.
If the security isn't available on the device then it may as well not exist. It is not important if Google or the handset maker or the telecom is to blame. The whole system has to work or it is worthless.
I don't know of any datamining that Google does that also isn't done by Apple.
Apple isn't in the advertising business to anywhere near the degree Google is. As a result Google does CONSIDERABLY more data mining than Apple does because Apple doesn't need to do nearly as much. Whether you have a problem with this or not is a matter of personal perspective. Apple screws you in different ways than Google. Pick your poison.
First thing I do before buying an Android phone is make sure there's a root method and supporting decent mod. First thing I do after buying an Android phone is root it, remove the crap the manufacturer put on there, and install decent mod.
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The obvious problem with the iPhone is that nobody makes a good one right now. Step through all the various Android manufacturers, and among all the heaps of garbage you can find some pretty good ones. With iOS, there simply aren't any good ones, at least in 2016. It doesn't matter if you found a nice one 8 years ago, or if they're going to have a good model a few years in the future: you can't use the good ones today.
It's pretty much the same as the desktop. No manufacturer stays on top, so the user needs their OS to work on dozens of manufacturers' products, so that whoever is making the good one that year, you can run your software on it. For any particular big manufacturer (Apple included) there's something like a 5-10% chance that your product happens to be reasonably competitive right now. That means if your OS isn't portable, I'm going to be disadvantaged 90-95% of the time! Some people care about that, and some don't. I think it eventually worked out to about 15% of the market not caring if they're usually behind the curve. Apple's niche.
And that tells you what's the big error in the Android market right now: manufacturers, nobody wants your ___ experience, because whatever it is, is pre-ordained to be a flavor-of-the-month anyway! Everybody wants the generic experience. What we search for, is if our current phone is about to die, who this month, happens to be making the best replacement unit? (Where "best" means speed (? that one always seemed weirdest for handhelds, but maybe because I've never had a slow one) or cost, or long-lived battery, or whatever.)
"Samsung or Huawei or Sony or any of the many other phones from companies that don't comprehend software" If they don't comprehend software how do they build their hardware? Linux is engineering it's own demise. It's openness in allowing people to fork the code, create new functionality, or change existing functionality has resulted multiple distributions all containing their own little differences. And with all the various flavors there is no centralized support mechanism in place to manage the delivery of software updates. There is also no guarantee that the version of Linux being run will continue to exist if the principles driving the development decide to move on to something else and leave people with a dean end OS. And before anyone says that the users have access to the code and provide their own support I would point out that companies don't usually have dedicated OS developers on their staffs. Average users will certainly not be able to take over OS level maintenance. And the large majority of software developers who think they are qualified to maintain an OS would discover that their application development skills are woefully inadequate when it comes to OS development. Most of them would have trouble configuring and compiling an OS starting only with the source code.
I recently switched from Android to iPhone, i always had Android devices, but the poor quality devices, the non-working custom UIs and having my LG G3 stuck on Android 5 while on some parts of the world LG released Android 6 made me switch, and i'm not looking back
And so does your mom!
I want the complete set of code for *everything*, especially drivers and related firmwares. I don't want to be dependant on a manufacturer for updates.
I guess it really is true there's two sides to every story. Here's how I interpret the data: In a world where multiple vendors all run off the same base OS, they hype up what makes them unique, not the common denominator.
I'm on a Windows Phone, actually.
Apparently you think that Android is the bees knees. Fine, believe that if you wish, and you might even be right for customization and sheer control you have over it. But is is sluggish and it is clunky, even on recent flagship devices.
It should be LAW that if you BUY a phone then you should be able to Root the phone and do want with the software that does not mess with the actual phone software (which should be a separate downloadable ap package).
(oh and "design decisions" that make it hard to get Root should require that OEM to provide at no cost the needed materials to bypass)
I have got my smartphones from small, relatively unknown companies. Why? First, because they do most, and have most of the capabilities, of what big brand, snazzy phones do, at a small fraction of the price. Two, because they tend to keep customizations and bloatware down to a minimum. The price to pay is less frequent OS updates - but, then again, they are such good value, that buying a new one every so often is not a big deal. The likes of Samsung, Sony, etc. won't get a single cent from me any time soon, when it comes to smartphones.
Oh the irony. Let me paraphrase that "Pretty much all these devices are running Linux, but the way they are presented, you wouldn't be able to tell if that really is the case.
Buy yourself an Android(tm) branded phone case if you care that much about a fscking logo.
I have bought multiple Motorola phones because I like the service and experience that I have gotten through the years. Now that they are Lenovo owned that may change but until it does I will continue to buy Motorola. That is the long term play.
its a fucking phone, if you are carrying very important stuff on it, it wont matter if its the latest version, it will get raped (just like women in germany that live to close to a refugee center :P)
your concern about it being the latest version is LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAME
The stuff actually differentiating the Xperia brand is junk and bloatware:
Not Pig Sh## Fuel!!!
For drivers? I never apply MS driver patches. Dell or manufacturer. Try using MS video card drivers, and good luck to you.
Iphone updates, android updates through the carrier, that is to say not at all.
Google really has to lean on or bypass the carriers.
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After the latest update, my Samsung Galaxy S5 has so much bloatware that I almost can't use it anymore. The camera app refuses to take pictures unless I have an external SD card installed, and some apps refuse to download from the app store. 16GB RAM - 5.46GB OS - 7.11GB apps = 3.4GB left. After you include the Google Maps cache and voice mail cache and a few other things I have 1.1GB free. You can't move the built-in apps to the external SD card. My wife has the same phone, with no apps installed, and she can't install the latest update because it says there isn't enough free space to do the update.
This is preposterous. My next phone will be a Nexus for this reason. Samsung actually makes good hardware and has reasonable support, but their built-in apps are making the phone nearly useless. They are usually the worst in their class: there's always a free app that does a better job than what they provide.
is its the verge, cant take them serious
If they did market it as the best vanilla android phone you could get, I'd be all over it just for that very reason
So buy a Nexus.
That works as long as Google continues to sell Nexus devices. There already isn't a Nexus tablet since late May, and Nexus phones appear to be on their way out as well since a couple days ago. Or did you mean a used Nexus?
Where "best" means speed (? that one always seemed weirdest for handhelds, but maybe because I've never had a slow one)
"Speed" means not having to wait several seconds for the UI to unfreeze. Lag like this is typical of Nexus 7 (2012) tablets upgraded to Android 5 "Lollipop", especially if you don't clear the cache often. I think what's happening is that Android 5 loses all the RAM efficiency gained in the Project Svelte focus of 4.4 "KitKat", and apps end up terminated more often to reclaim memory. A bunch of applications saving state to the N7's relatively slow-to-write NAND storage in reaction to an onTrimMemory signal causes other applications to be blocked on storage access.
Google seems to dislike microSD.
I wonder how much of this dislike comes from the SD Card Association's having made a Microsoft patented file system a requirement for the microSDXC logo. I forget where I read it, but Microsoft reportedly made more money licensing patents to Android device makers than it ever made on Windows Phone 7 and later.