Why I don’t like Android so much

Or better why I don’t like basically all phone/tablet OSes. But as I am having most stuff on droid I have most issues with it.

So lets take look why I don’t like the thing and what annoys me a lot.

Vendor support

Nowadays when you buy your computer or anything else it gets more often morally old rather than out of scope. This means your HW is capable of doing all taks you would expect from it, but you are upgrading anyway for some small advantage (usually less watt consumption and so on). If you would decide to keep your old hardware and not to upgrade you should be pretty fine with getting all the fancy and shiny updates both for features and security fixes.

Just for simple test you can grab some old P4 1GHz cpu and give it latest Windows and it will install and boot (and probably behave way better than the Windows ME you bought with it in first place :D) the same applies here with running latest linux distros. So what am I proving here is that when you take computer hw from year 2000 you still get it running with most of the stuff secured and supported if you want to.

With the Android the situation is completely different. Each vendor (HTC, Samsung, Motorola) has its own branded version of Android where they are providing their updates only. By providing I mean you get lucky if you get one year of some semi-updates and maybe even one version bump if you are super lucky (eg 1.6 -> 2.2). This leaves you with hardware which have more computing power than the above mentioned P4 first generation without any chance to use software that can ensure your safety (malware, viruses, etc.) and usefulness (bugfixes, meh for restarting tablet every 2 hours when watching youtube). So you as consumer are in situation when you HAVE to buy a new phone if you want to be safe.

One can always buy the Google branded phones/tablets where the support is bit better, those machines get the updates for 2 years before you have to throw them away for new model (which is most ideal for american customer that gets new phone every two years for contract renewal) but still compared to laptops and PCs its huge waste of working resources.

The vendor not providing support is not such big deal by default if all their patches were included into the android core and drivers so anyone (eg. Cyanogenmod) would be able to just pick up where they stop and provide you support with their release. But on quite some HW it is not possible. Samsung does not provide drivers, Motorola locks bootloader (Yay and they are even bought by Google!)…

Multiuser support

Or actually no multiuser support at all.

On a phone it is not such biggie as you mostly don’t allow other people to mess with your phone but on tablet the situation is completely different. You want your kids or other relatives to mess with the thing and play some angry birds or whatever else they have full access to your contacts, history, credit card (if you used the play to buy something).

So basically the user management situation is similar to time around Windows 98 where there was just one login on the computer and everyone in family used that.

Instead of having nice and contained space for your own browsing history, naughty photos of your girlfriend, credit card data, contacts, … everything is meshed up together and you can’t ensure your own privacy there.

The only way out of this is probably looking forward to Vivaldi tablet (the KDE one, not sure if this is still the name) or buy one tablet per person.

Mutitasking

Android basically does not work in normal mutlitasking environment one is used to know from desktop computers. The core reason for this used to be not having enough RAM (really pointless at the point the devices have 1-2GB+).

So normaly everything you start is opened and runs in your background where you can switch between those up to the point you get out of memory. Then the unused processes start to be closed. This can be worked around by using some task manager to kill the apps you want to kill and not those least used, but it is external app and not system solution.

Also in some cases as android is separating the term app and process and multiple launched apps can share one process if you hang one you shoot down everything :-)

Summary

So that are the 3 itches I personaly have on Android. Let me know how do you feel about the platform in comments as I am interested how it is perceived by others. Maybe I am just paranoid or something…

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5 Responses to Why I don’t like Android so much

  1. mimi.vx says:

    Latest windows on P4 .. no .. win8 not support this cpu

  2. Rich0 says:

    Unless you’re running xfce I think your linux experience on that old P4 won’t be nearly as good as you think it will be, but I agree with your points.

    Android’s main strength is its diversity, but up until now Google has only released about one Nexus model per year that actually gets OS upgrade support. So, it is really a diversity of poorly-supported products and a one-size-fits-all supported one.

    Google also does not generally support Nexus phones for two years. The Nexus One was abandoned 1.5 years after it was first sold (never got ICS). The Nexus S is doing better, though its most recent update was less than a year after it was last sold (the Nexus S was still the latest and greatest Nexus model only a year ago) – it remains to be seen if the Nexus S gets any additional updates.

    The rumors on the next line of Nexus phones are that they’re only guaranteed to get one major upgrade. Granted, that is about 1-1.5 year’s worth.

    The problem is that the Nexus phones often aren’t as nice as the hardware being sold contemporaneously – the Nexus One was really the only groundbreaker. It seems likely the next LG Nexus won’t have an SD slot, and will have at most 16GB of flash (8GB for the cheaper model). The 8GB model will have less flash than the nearly two-year-old model I have now as a result, and that feels cramped.

    Hopefully the new Nexus program will improve things somewhat, but long-term support of Android phones in general is amazingly poor.

  3. scarabeus says:

    Well my point was really with the Windows there TBH, as I ran that on one machine for while. Also I have Pentium-M 1.4 with KDE4 and it is also not as bad as one would expect.

    The diversity is nice, not having support sucks a lot.

  4. Zeroedout says:

    The multi-user situation can be done with a GTA04 [1] running SHR. It would take a bit of setting up, but nothing more difficult than anything else Linux. Process killing works just like on a desktop. Heck I’ve taken calls and sent sms messages from LXDE, XFCE, and openbox running on Debian with a GTA02; though that wasn’t particulary finger friendly. My point is there are distros that will let you get as close to desktop as you like :)

    [1] http://projects.goldelico.com/p/gta04-main/