If a corporation is holding back something that is not theirs to offer in the first place, then again, yes, it SHOULD be taken from them.
T-Mobile is charging people not based on how much data they use here, but on what they're using that data for. I'm quite confident this will not be upheld as legal by the FCC. And if that's the case, tethering is not something T-Mobile (or any carrier) has a right to either give OR take.
You're also missing the actual customer base they're going after. It's people employing workarounds to get around tether caps
T-Mobile only made tethering an issue because it's the only contractually legitimate reason they have left for going after heavy data users, who make no mistake are the real target here. They can deprioritize you, but they can't mess with your contract if you're using heavy data 'legitimately'. But if you're tethering, they can nail you for anything over 7BG, and then charge you for more.
So the better analogy would be a Chinese buffet where you can eat all you want with chopsticks, but only a 1/4 pound of it with a fork. Because much like how people can consume more data faster by tethering, people can eat more food faster with a fork, regardless of how true either of those statements actually are. Luckily you have the option to pay for more fork use, but most people just try to sneak in with their own utensils instead, so the restaurant also has a metal detector.
Thanks. Now I'm hungry.
Whether or not they can detect people bypassing tethering restrictions by using third party software is another story altogether. But I suspect there are ways.
Want to know what one of those third party packages is? CyanogenMod. So yeah, damn those 'thieves' for installing a more secure and stable version of Android on their devices and freeing themselves of T-Mobile and OEM bloatware.
Tethering detection is also unreliable and error prone. You can be flagged for tethering just for changing your user agent to access 'desktop' websites.
The only reason to have tethering restrictions is to sell you more services through the phone. Data is data, and 2tb of legitimate use will be just as disruptive to the network as 2tb of tethered use. And as I've said before, I don't believe these kind of restrictions on internet bandwidth are legally enforceable in the U.S., though it make take a case to set a precedent.
So who 'owns' the radio spectrum, and by what justification do they claim ownership? Should I not have a right to the spectrum surrounding my property? And if so, does that not give unconscionable power to the people who own the most physical property?
Well then, why hasn't T-Mobile simply cancelled the offender's service, especially if it's interfering with the service of their other users? After all, if the user is violating the agreement, then T-Mobile is well within its rights to cancel the contract.
Instead, I see a lot of talk about 'thieves' and 'rooting', which makes me wonder.
Yes. Especially if corporations are marketing that bandwidth in ways which will conflict with federal regulation. And I'm confident the FCC will rule that you cannot charge for the same bandwidth multiple times for different uses. That's why if you sue T-Mobile on that basis they'll back down as opposed to risk a precedent or any case which might move to the supreme court.
Oh, and if it's not available, it should not be offered by T-Mobile in the first place. But that's not what you mean, is it? You mean you shouldn't try to get anything that isn't spoon fed to you by the corporations, right? In which case thank you, because sheep like you are how I will be making my money.
to include that you cannot bring class actions against them so they can pull bullshit like this and not get their pants sued off.
That condition (class action waiver, typically accompanied by a binding arbitration clause) is typically part of the warranty contract, which means if they cannot show you that contract before you purchase the device/service, it's unenforceable in the U.S. And if they can, you can opt-out by simply writing so on the contract.
Now they'll tell you that you need to call some number or fill out some internet form to opt-out, but that's bullshit, because opting out does not require you to use their means to do so. But if you do, it also means not all the conditions you agreed to are on the written contract, so it's up to them to prove you didn't opt-out.
If you have a problem with T-Mobile, take them to small claims. It costs $15 to file in NY for claims at or below $1500. If more people did this T-Mobile would notice.
Its not practical to sell a limited resource at a single flat price.
Actually it's necessary.
The only way to absolutely guarantee a specific amount of bandwidth to a customer is to make sure no one else is using it when they need it. And the only way to do that is to either let it sit idle while that customer is not using it, or throttle other customers who are. But you can't do the latter if you guaranteed those other customers a specific amount of bandwidth too. The whole situation is just not financially feasible for either the carrier OR their customers. And much like a bank would die if everybody decided to withdraw their money at the same time, so would a network die if everybody decided to use it at its maximum capacity at the same time.
The problem is carriers deliberately told the customer that their service was unlimited where it wasn't. Throttling policies are necessary, and should be detailed in the contract in no uncertain terms. Instead, carrier and cable companies would rather keep their throttling policies ambiguous for some reason.
My contract says unlimited phone data, with explicit exclusions for tethering.
Carriers are trying to maximize their profits by selling you the exact same bandwidth for different uses, which may not even be enforceable in the United States. So it's gonna be real interesting to see how the FCC rules on this.
I also didn't read the fine print on said unlimited data, but intrinsically understood that there were going to be some fair limits. And incidentally, I think curtailing 3,000 out of millions of subscribers, and especially anyone using terabytes of data (that's more than my home broadband allows me to use) is included in what I assume to be a fair limit..
Everybody has a different idea of what these 'fair' limits are, which is why we use written contracts to establish what those expectations are clearly before any agreement is made. And since unlimited data is a physical impossibility, T-Mobile, and all other carriers who make such claims, are lying about what they can offer. That's what we call FRAUD here in the United States, though I'm pretty sure other countries have similar laws.
You don't sign an agreement to eat in a buffet, but there's an understanding that if you start stuffing chicken wings in your pockets you might be thrown out.
All the buffets I know of advertise all you can EAT, and you don't need to sign anything (unless you pay by check or credit) because you agree to that contract once you pay and start eating. Stuffing food in your pockets is therefore a violation of that contract. Using T-Mobile's unlimited data on the other hand is NOT a violation of contract, because each party has a different idea of what is fair and reasonable which was not clearly established in the written contract. So your analogy doesn't hold.
Some of the most customer hostile companies I've ever encountered are accredited by the BBB and have incredibly high ratings there. Not T-Mobile (C+) though. They were rated F in 2013, and aren't accredited like Verizon (A) and AT&T (A+).
A subscriber agreement IS a contract (despite what cable/carrier companies want you to believe), and adding terms to a contract is exactly what you can do. So if T-Mobile sold you a device and provided service after those changes were made, it can be argued they implicitly agreed to the modified contract. These agreements are signed by providing the service, much like EULAs are signed by using the software
The problem is this clause is ambiguous. T-Mobile could still provide data at any speed or bandwidth they decide. After all, it didn't say unlimited bandwidth. And if data IS referring to bandwidth, then it's a physically impossible condition that T-Mobile could be held liable for making claims about.
'contract', 'unlimited', these words refer to specific well defined things. Don't let carriers define them for you.
Despite the excellence of their hardware, Samsung software is so bad it actually adds negative value to their products. Their unnecessary modifications to Android increase their support and engineering costs and decrease the performance, security, and reliability of their devices. And their corporate culture is so inimical to software engineering that they will never be able to produce a software stack that's worth anything. No doubt in my mind. Too many Samsung developers have the same stories to just write those situations off as isolated incidents.
So given that's the case, what's to be gained by moving to Tizen, an OS which Samsung isn't even willing to install on their flagship devices? Performance? Security? Battery Life? Ease of Programming? Business Opportunities? Developer Support? At least Samsung gets to avoid the Android patents fees, but how does it benefit customers and developers?
If you're the sort of person who believes any and all business is merely a way to make profit and nobody who creates a company ever actually cares about the task they perform, then sure. Reality is more complex than that.
Indeed, which is why you need to consider a corporation's priorities (and perhaps read my other post here) before you get in bed with them. Google's priority is ads, and any issue which does not provably and directly affect that will have little to no thought or resources invested in it. Again, look at the services Google has dropped, and the ones they've kept.
iOS is in the minority in China. Even at the time of the iPhone 6 launch iOS market share was only 20%, but iOS market share always spikes around the time of a new iPhone launch, then falls back down in the other quarters.
As they say in America: Show me the money, because we're discussing Android's financial success here, not its ubiquity. The value of a platform is not in how many people have access to it, but in how many people are willing to invest their time and money in it.
And China is a special case
Of course China is a special case. A very LARGE special case full of money:)
Google isn't willing to play ball with the communist government so the services that make Android most useful are all blocked there.
Actually, China is the one who took their ball and went home, blocking Google services and trying to establish their own software ecosystem.
Despite this, Android still dominates.
Dominates what exactly?
Base market share? Sure, but who cares? And even then the market is subdivided between the different versions of Android, then the modifications made by the manufacturers, then the modifications made by the carriers. And I can assure you that not even most of them are reliably compatible with each other.
But profitability, stability, or even usability? Not by a long shot.
I have no particular love of Apple. I think the political and technical restrictions they put on their devices are bulls***, and may even be illegal. And they've been screwing the pooch on software quality since iOS7 and Mavericks, to the point it may actually be worse than Android now. But they had their s*** together at one point.
Android never did. It never had a unified vision of what it should be. The developers never considered audio latency and rendering speed to be a priority. The tools were so bad that people succeeded in making apps despite them. The situation has gotten better, but that's largely because it couldn't get any worse.
I've had three Android phones. Not one of them worked reliably, and the third broke mission critical software on an update. I couldn't care less about platform popularity. If I can't reliably use my apps, it doesn't matter how popular or cheap a device is. And honestly if people prioritized the former over the latter, we might not be in the crappy software situation we're in now.
This problem is definitely an IOS problem since people who had no problems on their device and then updated to the new IOS because they were tired of constantly being nagged to do so suddenly found their internet stops working at regular intervals and have to reboot. This problem has been going on seriously since IOS 7 and seems to have gotten worse in 8 and none of the updates Apple has put out to IOS have really addressed the problem and people are mad that these problems are not being addressed.
Then unless they want to stick with Apple, they should return the device and ask for a refund, and if refused take Apple to Small Claims.
Small Claims is a simple, effective, and fair way to hold a vendor accountable, and a software update which renders your device unreliable IS their responsibility. Seriously, more people need to start doing this, because the current state of affairs has vendors arbitrarily doing s*** like this because they aren't being held accountable.
Indeed. Their priorities color everything, and I would carefully consider them before forming any contractual obligations.
Except for Microsoft, whose priorities I can no longer explain. They used to prioritize developers and user experience, and so our interests aligned, but something happened after Windows 7. Now they remove features and make breaking changes in their software platforms almost yearly, and run the most developer hostile app store I've ever encountered. They managed to make an excellent tablet UI, only to frack up the desktop with it, and now they're doing the same thing in reverse and fracking up the tablet UI with more desktop like features.
These days the only platforms which prioritize developers are multi-platform frameworks like Unity, which is why I stick with them. This also highlights just how unaligned vendor interests are with developers, as we wouldn't even need things like Unity if platform vendors were more open to porting, but they're only interested in the value developers can add to their platform.
Android was never about making direct profit, it was always about ensuring Google was able to profile users to generate more effective ads.
FTFM
The problem is unlike Apple, Google does not make their money on device sales, and so has no incentive to enforce quality until its lack starts to impinge on their ad revenue. Google makes their money on ads and analytics, and everything they do prioritizes it. Don't believe me? Just look at the Google services which have been discontinued.
Outside of English speaking countries and Japan it's in the minority everywhere.
patent trolls to this day mostly impact large companies who are patent trolls themselves.
Tell that to all the mobile app developers who've been targeted. In fact, because of the way the law works, it's often more profitable to go after lots of smaller targets for quick settlements which can have them paying royalties well past the patent's expiration date than it is to go after just a few large targets who can fight back with lengthy litigation and in the process disqualify you from going after those smaller targets after the verdict is in.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to google for numeric strings in any useful way
Sure it is. I do it all the time. The trick is to add additional context, such as, oh idontknow, 'Android' or 'fix' or something. Then again, if Google was concerned about findable names, they wouldn't have named their major languages 'Dart' and 'Go':)
this notion that white is better because you shove stacks of paper around on a desk, that's what your phone should do too (Material Design).
There are as many legitimate environmental and physiological reasons to use white backgrounds as their are black, but because Google can't control any of these factors, they should leave such settings upto the user.
I'm not sure Apple gives you more choice in this matter however. Remember, Apple is a company which doesn't even allow you to change the mouse pointer in OS X, and won't honor their support contract if you (somehow) do.
So can the OEMs. They don't actually need Google's assistance to fix this. Google absolutely needs theirs. And they won't do it. If they were willing to do updates, they'd move to 4.4.
Again, Google is fully able to hold OEMs accountable. If an OEMs doesn't agree to Google's terms, then Google shouldn't license them Android. And what about all the update problems people are complaining about here regarding Google branded devices? Seems to me Google is just as bad here.
Google is remarkably transparent about its goals and intentions. Sometimes I think the level of transparency backfires because everyone assumes there must be something else being hidden. People are so accustomed to assuming that corporations veil their true purposes, but I actually can't think of a case where the internal and external stories differ in any significant respect. And it's not like Google execs could be keeping a lot of stuff from the engineers like me, because we're the ones who actually make all of the key product decisions.
Then you're probably not aware of the wage fixing Google was involved in to keep the salaries of 'engineers like you' down.
The security upgrades are all in the services app, which has no UI, and maintains backward compatibility. You can update it without updating any of the apps that rely on it, if you don't like the new versions.
I just searched the Play Store on my Note 3 4.4 for 'Google Play Services' just to see if this update could fix my issues. Top five results are:
1. GServiceFix (which isn't even from Google)
2. Google Play Games
3. Google Drive
4. Sound Search for Google
5. Google Play Music
So I guess not, but what I'm more curious about now is how a non-Google app got the top spot.
What was removed was the monthly view
Oops. Probably shouldn't have commented on an app I don't personally use, but the reduced functionality argument still stands.
Many users refuse to install updates because they drastically alter the functionality and appearance of the apps. You're bundling security fixes and feature updates into a single channel and giving users the same old choice as with the OS - update or get fucked. Read the reviews for Google Calendar, Google Plus, Maps, etc. I believe Calendar was the latest one - no more weekly view. The app was drastically altered making it unusable for many people.
Google has been consistently removing user functionality with each update. Calendar now lacks weekly view. Removing apps in Google Play's My Apps now has to be done individually (yet strangely you can still choose to install them in a group). Lockscreen Widgets are a thing of the past. And this reduction hasn't been isolated to Android. Just look at the current Chrome Bookmark Manager Google is trying to push on us, with design priorities such as having 'more delightful' images to look at.
And sometimes apps are disabled entirely. Updating my Note 3 to 4.4 required a root to get the phone recording app I use (which worked fine in 4.3) working again. And I know this has nothing to do with 4.4s security features because the app works fine on the Note 4 4.4. Rumor is it's due to a bug in the Note 3's 4.4 which I doubt can be addressed by anything other than an OS level fix.
Which reminds me of the other problem in the Android ecosystem: Everyone has someone else to blame. T-Mobile, Samsung, and Google all claim it's the other company's fault, and nobody is willing to be held accountable. And yet when apps stop working because of this mess, people hold the app DEVELOPERS accountable for not fixing 'their' bugs.
If Google can require OEMs to install Google Play Services, then they can require OEMs to roll out security fixes (some of which need to be patched at the OS level) within a reasonable timeframe. Moving functionality into Google Play Services does nothing more than remove that functionality from open source Android, and make the general experience even more bloated and sluggish. Now any app which relies on WebView needs the closed source and propitiatory Google Play Services to run.
So much for open source Android
Google needs to just start holding handset manufacturers accountable, which they are fully able to, but choose not to.
Why aren't all you nerds rooting devices and using whatever OS/kernel/apps/bloatware/radio/store you want? So many people here complain endlessly about carriers and poor support.
Because they bought these devices to save time, not waste it on making a device/service they paid for work.
And even with the spare time and ability, installing WhateverOS won't solve their problem unless it reliably supports the features they need (in my case, the sPen).
And even if WhateverOS supports those features, most manufacturers/telecoms claim that such software modifications (even just rooting) void the hardware warranty (a lie in NY, if not the entire US), and refuse to repair/replace the device.
And even if they can add those features to WhateverOS, it still depends on having a hardware spec to target, which most manufacturers won't release.
I guess with enough time and ability you could just reverse engineer the hardware and write your own OS. And I guess with enough money in addition you could just create the hardware yourself too. But how far do you want to go down this rabbit hole? All choices have a cost, and I'd rather be spending my time and money writing software for a device rather than trying to get it to work in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
If a corporation is holding back something that is not theirs to offer in the first place, then again, yes, it SHOULD be taken from them.
T-Mobile is charging people not based on how much data they use here, but on what they're using that data for. I'm quite confident this will not be upheld as legal by the FCC. And if that's the case, tethering is not something T-Mobile (or any carrier) has a right to either give OR take.
You're also missing the actual customer base they're going after. It's people employing workarounds to get around tether caps
T-Mobile only made tethering an issue because it's the only contractually legitimate reason they have left for going after heavy data users, who make no mistake are the real target here. They can deprioritize you, but they can't mess with your contract if you're using heavy data 'legitimately'. But if you're tethering, they can nail you for anything over 7BG, and then charge you for more.
So the better analogy would be a Chinese buffet where you can eat all you want with chopsticks, but only a 1/4 pound of it with a fork. Because much like how people can consume more data faster by tethering, people can eat more food faster with a fork, regardless of how true either of those statements actually are. Luckily you have the option to pay for more fork use, but most people just try to sneak in with their own utensils instead, so the restaurant also has a metal detector.
Thanks. Now I'm hungry.
Whether or not they can detect people bypassing tethering restrictions by using third party software is another story altogether. But I suspect there are ways.
Want to know what one of those third party packages is? CyanogenMod. So yeah, damn those 'thieves' for installing a more secure and stable version of Android on their devices and freeing themselves of T-Mobile and OEM bloatware.
Tethering detection is also unreliable and error prone. You can be flagged for tethering just for changing your user agent to access 'desktop' websites.
The only reason to have tethering restrictions is to sell you more services through the phone. Data is data, and 2tb of legitimate use will be just as disruptive to the network as 2tb of tethered use. And as I've said before, I don't believe these kind of restrictions on internet bandwidth are legally enforceable in the U.S., though it make take a case to set a precedent.
So who 'owns' the radio spectrum, and by what justification do they claim ownership? Should I not have a right to the spectrum surrounding my property? And if so, does that not give unconscionable power to the people who own the most physical property?
Well then, why hasn't T-Mobile simply cancelled the offender's service, especially if it's interfering with the service of their other users? After all, if the user is violating the agreement, then T-Mobile is well within its rights to cancel the contract.
Instead, I see a lot of talk about 'thieves' and 'rooting', which makes me wonder.
Yes. Especially if corporations are marketing that bandwidth in ways which will conflict with federal regulation. And I'm confident the FCC will rule that you cannot charge for the same bandwidth multiple times for different uses. That's why if you sue T-Mobile on that basis they'll back down as opposed to risk a precedent or any case which might move to the supreme court.
Oh, and if it's not available, it should not be offered by T-Mobile in the first place. But that's not what you mean, is it? You mean you shouldn't try to get anything that isn't spoon fed to you by the corporations, right? In which case thank you, because sheep like you are how I will be making my money.
to include that you cannot bring class actions against them so they can pull bullshit like this and not get their pants sued off.
That condition (class action waiver, typically accompanied by a binding arbitration clause) is typically part of the warranty contract, which means if they cannot show you that contract before you purchase the device/service, it's unenforceable in the U.S. And if they can, you can opt-out by simply writing so on the contract.
Now they'll tell you that you need to call some number or fill out some internet form to opt-out, but that's bullshit, because opting out does not require you to use their means to do so. But if you do, it also means not all the conditions you agreed to are on the written contract, so it's up to them to prove you didn't opt-out.
If you have a problem with T-Mobile, take them to small claims. It costs $15 to file in NY for claims at or below $1500. If more people did this T-Mobile would notice.
Its not practical to sell a limited resource at a single flat price.
Actually it's necessary.
The only way to absolutely guarantee a specific amount of bandwidth to a customer is to make sure no one else is using it when they need it. And the only way to do that is to either let it sit idle while that customer is not using it, or throttle other customers who are. But you can't do the latter if you guaranteed those other customers a specific amount of bandwidth too. The whole situation is just not financially feasible for either the carrier OR their customers. And much like a bank would die if everybody decided to withdraw their money at the same time, so would a network die if everybody decided to use it at its maximum capacity at the same time.
The problem is carriers deliberately told the customer that their service was unlimited where it wasn't. Throttling policies are necessary, and should be detailed in the contract in no uncertain terms. Instead, carrier and cable companies would rather keep their throttling policies ambiguous for some reason.
My contract says unlimited phone data, with explicit exclusions for tethering.
Carriers are trying to maximize their profits by selling you the exact same bandwidth for different uses, which may not even be enforceable in the United States. So it's gonna be real interesting to see how the FCC rules on this.
I also didn't read the fine print on said unlimited data, but intrinsically understood that there were going to be some fair limits. And incidentally, I think curtailing 3,000 out of millions of subscribers, and especially anyone using terabytes of data (that's more than my home broadband allows me to use) is included in what I assume to be a fair limit..
Everybody has a different idea of what these 'fair' limits are, which is why we use written contracts to establish what those expectations are clearly before any agreement is made. And since unlimited data is a physical impossibility, T-Mobile, and all other carriers who make such claims, are lying about what they can offer. That's what we call FRAUD here in the United States, though I'm pretty sure other countries have similar laws.
You don't sign an agreement to eat in a buffet, but there's an understanding that if you start stuffing chicken wings in your pockets you might be thrown out.
All the buffets I know of advertise all you can EAT, and you don't need to sign anything (unless you pay by check or credit) because you agree to that contract once you pay and start eating. Stuffing food in your pockets is therefore a violation of that contract. Using T-Mobile's unlimited data on the other hand is NOT a violation of contract, because each party has a different idea of what is fair and reasonable which was not clearly established in the written contract. So your analogy doesn't hold.
Some of the most customer hostile companies I've ever encountered are accredited by the BBB and have incredibly high ratings there. Not T-Mobile (C+) though. They were rated F in 2013, and aren't accredited like Verizon (A) and AT&T (A+).
The FTC has also gone after them as recently as 2014 for adding services customers (including myself) didn't order or need.
And yet they remain in business.
A subscriber agreement IS a contract (despite what cable/carrier companies want you to believe), and adding terms to a contract is exactly what you can do. So if T-Mobile sold you a device and provided service after those changes were made, it can be argued they implicitly agreed to the modified contract. These agreements are signed by providing the service, much like EULAs are signed by using the software
The problem is this clause is ambiguous. T-Mobile could still provide data at any speed or bandwidth they decide. After all, it didn't say unlimited bandwidth. And if data IS referring to bandwidth, then it's a physically impossible condition that T-Mobile could be held liable for making claims about.
'contract', 'unlimited', these words refer to specific well defined things. Don't let carriers define them for you.
Despite the excellence of their hardware, Samsung software is so bad it actually adds negative value to their products. Their unnecessary modifications to Android increase their support and engineering costs and decrease the performance, security, and reliability of their devices. And their corporate culture is so inimical to software engineering that they will never be able to produce a software stack that's worth anything. No doubt in my mind. Too many Samsung developers have the same stories to just write those situations off as isolated incidents.
So given that's the case, what's to be gained by moving to Tizen, an OS which Samsung isn't even willing to install on their flagship devices? Performance? Security? Battery Life? Ease of Programming? Business Opportunities? Developer Support? At least Samsung gets to avoid the Android patents fees, but how does it benefit customers and developers?
If you're the sort of person who believes any and all business is merely a way to make profit and nobody who creates a company ever actually cares about the task they perform, then sure. Reality is more complex than that.
Indeed, which is why you need to consider a corporation's priorities (and perhaps read my other post here) before you get in bed with them. Google's priority is ads, and any issue which does not provably and directly affect that will have little to no thought or resources invested in it. Again, look at the services Google has dropped, and the ones they've kept.
iOS is in the minority in China. Even at the time of the iPhone 6 launch iOS market share was only 20%, but iOS market share always spikes around the time of a new iPhone launch, then falls back down in the other quarters.
As they say in America: Show me the money, because we're discussing Android's financial success here, not its ubiquity. The value of a platform is not in how many people have access to it, but in how many people are willing to invest their time and money in it.
And China is a special case
Of course China is a special case. A very LARGE special case full of money :)
Google isn't willing to play ball with the communist government so the services that make Android most useful are all blocked there.
Actually, China is the one who took their ball and went home, blocking Google services and trying to establish their own software ecosystem.
Despite this, Android still dominates.
Dominates what exactly?
Base market share? Sure, but who cares? And even then the market is subdivided between the different versions of Android, then the modifications made by the manufacturers, then the modifications made by the carriers. And I can assure you that not even most of them are reliably compatible with each other.
But profitability, stability, or even usability? Not by a long shot.
I have no particular love of Apple. I think the political and technical restrictions they put on their devices are bulls***, and may even be illegal. And they've been screwing the pooch on software quality since iOS7 and Mavericks, to the point it may actually be worse than Android now. But they had their s*** together at one point.
Android never did. It never had a unified vision of what it should be. The developers never considered audio latency and rendering speed to be a priority. The tools were so bad that people succeeded in making apps despite them. The situation has gotten better, but that's largely because it couldn't get any worse.
I've had three Android phones. Not one of them worked reliably, and the third broke mission critical software on an update. I couldn't care less about platform popularity. If I can't reliably use my apps, it doesn't matter how popular or cheap a device is. And honestly if people prioritized the former over the latter, we might not be in the crappy software situation we're in now.
This problem is definitely an IOS problem since people who had no problems on their device and then updated to the new IOS because they were tired of constantly being nagged to do so suddenly found their internet stops working at regular intervals and have to reboot. This problem has been going on seriously since IOS 7 and seems to have gotten worse in 8 and none of the updates Apple has put out to IOS have really addressed the problem and people are mad that these problems are not being addressed.
Then unless they want to stick with Apple, they should return the device and ask for a refund, and if refused take Apple to Small Claims.
Small Claims is a simple, effective, and fair way to hold a vendor accountable, and a software update which renders your device unreliable IS their responsibility. Seriously, more people need to start doing this, because the current state of affairs has vendors arbitrarily doing s*** like this because they aren't being held accountable.
Indeed. Their priorities color everything, and I would carefully consider them before forming any contractual obligations.
Except for Microsoft, whose priorities I can no longer explain. They used to prioritize developers and user experience, and so our interests aligned, but something happened after Windows 7. Now they remove features and make breaking changes in their software platforms almost yearly, and run the most developer hostile app store I've ever encountered. They managed to make an excellent tablet UI, only to frack up the desktop with it, and now they're doing the same thing in reverse and fracking up the tablet UI with more desktop like features.
These days the only platforms which prioritize developers are multi-platform frameworks like Unity, which is why I stick with them. This also highlights just how unaligned vendor interests are with developers, as we wouldn't even need things like Unity if platform vendors were more open to porting, but they're only interested in the value developers can add to their platform.
Android was never about making direct profit, it was always about ensuring Google was able to profile users to generate more effective ads.
FTFM
The problem is unlike Apple, Google does not make their money on device sales, and so has no incentive to enforce quality until its lack starts to impinge on their ad revenue. Google makes their money on ads and analytics, and everything they do prioritizes it. Don't believe me? Just look at the Google services which have been discontinued.
Outside of English speaking countries and Japan it's in the minority everywhere.
Better tell China, as they didn't get the memo.
patent trolls to this day mostly impact large companies who are patent trolls themselves.
Tell that to all the mobile app developers who've been targeted. In fact, because of the way the law works, it's often more profitable to go after lots of smaller targets for quick settlements which can have them paying royalties well past the patent's expiration date than it is to go after just a few large targets who can fight back with lengthy litigation and in the process disqualify you from going after those smaller targets after the verdict is in.
Rackspace fights patent troll in the name of every mobile developer everywhere
Unfortunately, it is not possible to google for numeric strings in any useful way
Sure it is. I do it all the time. The trick is to add additional context, such as, oh idontknow, 'Android' or 'fix' or something. Then again, if Google was concerned about findable names, they wouldn't have named their major languages 'Dart' and 'Go' :)
this notion that white is better because you shove stacks of paper around on a desk, that's what your phone should do too (Material Design).
There are as many legitimate environmental and physiological reasons to use white backgrounds as their are black, but because Google can't control any of these factors, they should leave such settings upto the user.
I'm not sure Apple gives you more choice in this matter however. Remember, Apple is a company which doesn't even allow you to change the mouse pointer in OS X, and won't honor their support contract if you (somehow) do.
So can the OEMs. They don't actually need Google's assistance to fix this. Google absolutely needs theirs. And they won't do it. If they were willing to do updates, they'd move to 4.4.
Again, Google is fully able to hold OEMs accountable. If an OEMs doesn't agree to Google's terms, then Google shouldn't license them Android. And what about all the update problems people are complaining about here regarding Google branded devices? Seems to me Google is just as bad here.
Google is remarkably transparent about its goals and intentions. Sometimes I think the level of transparency backfires because everyone assumes there must be something else being hidden. People are so accustomed to assuming that corporations veil their true purposes, but I actually can't think of a case where the internal and external stories differ in any significant respect. And it's not like Google execs could be keeping a lot of stuff from the engineers like me, because we're the ones who actually make all of the key product decisions.
Then you're probably not aware of the wage fixing Google was involved in to keep the salaries of 'engineers like you' down.
The security upgrades are all in the services app, which has no UI, and maintains backward compatibility. You can update it without updating any of the apps that rely on it, if you don't like the new versions.
I just searched the Play Store on my Note 3 4.4 for 'Google Play Services' just to see if this update could fix my issues. Top five results are:
1. GServiceFix (which isn't even from Google)
2. Google Play Games
3. Google Drive
4. Sound Search for Google
5. Google Play Music
So I guess not, but what I'm more curious about now is how a non-Google app got the top spot.
What was removed was the monthly view
Oops. Probably shouldn't have commented on an app I don't personally use, but the reduced functionality argument still stands.
Many users refuse to install updates because they drastically alter the functionality and appearance of the apps. You're bundling security fixes and feature updates into a single channel and giving users the same old choice as with the OS - update or get fucked. Read the reviews for Google Calendar, Google Plus, Maps, etc. I believe Calendar was the latest one - no more weekly view. The app was drastically altered making it unusable for many people.
Google has been consistently removing user functionality with each update. Calendar now lacks weekly view. Removing apps in Google Play's My Apps now has to be done individually (yet strangely you can still choose to install them in a group). Lockscreen Widgets are a thing of the past. And this reduction hasn't been isolated to Android. Just look at the current Chrome Bookmark Manager Google is trying to push on us, with design priorities such as having 'more delightful' images to look at.
And sometimes apps are disabled entirely. Updating my Note 3 to 4.4 required a root to get the phone recording app I use (which worked fine in 4.3) working again. And I know this has nothing to do with 4.4s security features because the app works fine on the Note 4 4.4. Rumor is it's due to a bug in the Note 3's 4.4 which I doubt can be addressed by anything other than an OS level fix.
Which reminds me of the other problem in the Android ecosystem: Everyone has someone else to blame. T-Mobile, Samsung, and Google all claim it's the other company's fault, and nobody is willing to be held accountable. And yet when apps stop working because of this mess, people hold the app DEVELOPERS accountable for not fixing 'their' bugs.
S*** really does run downhill.
If Google can require OEMs to install Google Play Services, then they can require OEMs to roll out security fixes (some of which need to be patched at the OS level) within a reasonable timeframe. Moving functionality into Google Play Services does nothing more than remove that functionality from open source Android, and make the general experience even more bloated and sluggish. Now any app which relies on WebView needs the closed source and propitiatory Google Play Services to run.
So much for open source Android
Google needs to just start holding handset manufacturers accountable, which they are fully able to, but choose not to.
Why aren't all you nerds rooting devices and using whatever OS/kernel/apps/bloatware/radio/store you want? So many people here complain endlessly about carriers and poor support.
Because they bought these devices to save time, not waste it on making a device/service they paid for work.
And even with the spare time and ability, installing WhateverOS won't solve their problem unless it reliably supports the features they need (in my case, the sPen).
And even if WhateverOS supports those features, most manufacturers/telecoms claim that such software modifications (even just rooting) void the hardware warranty (a lie in NY, if not the entire US), and refuse to repair/replace the device.
And even if they can add those features to WhateverOS, it still depends on having a hardware spec to target, which most manufacturers won't release.
I guess with enough time and ability you could just reverse engineer the hardware and write your own OS. And I guess with enough money in addition you could just create the hardware yourself too. But how far do you want to go down this rabbit hole? All choices have a cost, and I'd rather be spending my time and money writing software for a device rather than trying to get it to work in the first place.