Nothing in Android makes sense except in the light of its original vision

by siglesias • 14 years ago

98 58 14 years ago

barrkel• 14 years ago

I suspect the freedom for carriers is at the root of the similar freedom for users to change launcher, change default applications for the home button, dialer, etc. If reducing the former means reducing the latter, I'm against.

lmkg• 14 years ago

That actually sounds like a bad idea from the outset. There are exceptions (Apple), but my general observation is that hardware companies are bad at writing software, especially user-facing software. Making a consistent platform by writing a compatibility layer is a rock-solid concept, but expecting hardware vendors to be the ones writing software on top of that layer seems misguided.

On the other hand, while they're not good at making the user-space software, it's something every OEM will think that they want to do. So if the goal is to get widespread adoption, it's a good hook.

To be fair, most companies are bad at writing software, regardless of type, and even software companies aren't always good at writing software. I don't blame hardware companies, it's just not their core competency, and a hardware-engineering mindset is a poor fit for software design.

redthrowaway• 14 years ago

>hardware companies are bad at writing software

Oh god yes. I work for a major hardware manufacturer. We are by far the dominant supplier in our field. We are making a web app that allows our customers to control, operate, and mange our products. It's garbage. Let alone the fact that it's written in Java using seam convos, there was just no thought whatsoever put into UX. For instance, if you press the back button, it takes you to the previous page. So far, so good. However, if you try to perform some (any) action after that, you get a Java stack track and, weirdly, a "your session has timed out" error.

I brought this to our development lead, and his official, written response was, "lots of web apps break if you use the back button. If you use the back button during a ticketmaster checkout, you get an error. This isn't a problem."

Again, our hardware is fantastic and we have well over 50% market share in a massive industry. We just don't have the institutional give-a-shit to go with it on the software side.

zecho• 14 years ago

Yeah. I've seen Cisco software with buttons that do absolutely nothing. Click them all day long. They do nothing. The documentation says they do something, but they do not. Or GUIs that don't allow you to resize the window, despite the fact that a third of the GUI is cut off.

I get a sick enjoyment out of watching our sysadmins flip out about software GUIs designed for the hardware they're running.

vacri• 14 years ago

... cisco?

We were having lots of trouble with our office ADSL, and decided to buy a cisco modem from our ISP ("because if they sell it, they must be able to support it, right?"). I was a bit nervous because I know a little about cisco gear, but not enough to be confident to configure a router.

This model was advertised as 'easy webif', and the ISP isn't a shoddy fly-by-nighter, so I took the gamble. Turns out the 'easy webif' was effectively IE-only and required java (refused to run in any of the linux browsers I tried)... took about a minute to intialise itself... and could barely configure the device (port forwarding? no, you can't do that here...). I have honestly never seen a worse webif in my life.

Ended up returning it. Discussing it with a friend, he said that the webif isn't ever supposed to be used, it's just there as a tickbox to satisfy beancounters.

swalsh• 14 years ago

My first inclination was Qualcomm. They have a pretty heavy share of the CDMA market, and are sporting some funky user portals that make heavy use of Java.

pazimzadeh• 14 years ago

Fun fact: The title is likely an adaptation of the quote "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" by Theodosius Dobzhansky.

there3• 14 years ago

I had to scroll back up while reading this to see how old it was. The bug linked to is now closed, and the interview is from last year. Android 4 does use the GPU for more GUI operations and Google has mandated that 3rd parties must not modify the default theme (http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/01/06/google-imposing-gui-rest...).

Xuzz• 14 years ago

That's not completely true. They can't (feels weird to say "can't" and "mandate" for an open source project) now replace the Google UI, but they certainly can add their own modifications. (And that's only on 1% of devices, too, running Android 4.0.)

Also, while the GPU is now used to accelerate the UI, it is still simply not as smooth. The single-core Nokia Lumia 800 with Windows Phone is noticeably smoother at scrolling than my top-of-the-line Galaxy Nexus was.

I'm excited for where Google is going with Android, but it's still not quite there yet.

there3• 14 years ago

They can't (feels weird to say "can't" and "mandate" for an open source project)

Open source isn't relevant here because that mandate is for any vendor wanting to distribute Google's proprietary apps (Market, Maps, Gmail, Google account sync, Face unlock, etc.) with their device. Every carrier and hardware vendor except Amazon falls into that category and is going to have to do whatever Google says to continue licensing those apps.

Yes, they can continue making their own themes, but unless app developers specifically choose to use it with DeviceDefault, those apps will use the unmodified Halo theme which must now look the same on every device.

dcurtis2• 14 years ago

Android 4 does use the GPU for some things, however scrolling performance is still nowhere near as good as it is on iOS.

The "unmodified Halo theme" is referring to the icons and interface elements included with the operating system that developers can use when building their apps.

Google even said this: "We have no desire to restrict manufacturers from building their own themed experience across their devices." (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2012/01/holo-everywhe...)

yesimahuman• 14 years ago

I guess that means my horrible cyan "design" on my Motorola Atrix (Gingerbread) isn't going anywhere..

there3• 14 years ago

Your article complained about manufacturers implementing custom, poorly designed interface changes which make testing difficult. Google remedied this by telling manufacturers they cannot modify Halo, and so every app developer can use Halo and get the same result on every device.

Google even said this: "We have no desire to restrict manufacturers from building their own themed experience across their devices."

That is talking about a different theme called DeviceDefault. Why would any app developer use DeviceDefault instead of Holo when it would make testing difficult and give an inconsistent look to their app?

edderly3• 14 years ago

It's worth reading Diane Hackborne on this topic https://plus.google.com/105051985738280261832/posts/XAZ4CeVP...

mrich3• 14 years ago

Have you actually used the Galaxy Nexus (which should be the only 4.0 phone) It has no lag/ stutter. The same goes for most of the dual-core Android phones.

TeeWEE2• 14 years ago

@dcurtis is right: In IOS (and Blackberry Cascades UI for example) the animation is done in another thread. For android its done in the UI thread.

However in older other aspects android is by far superiour to API and functoinality compared to IOS.

huggyface3• 14 years ago

At risk of being called on an Ad Hominem, the moment I saw this was from Dustin Curtis I completely discounted everything he has to say: He's trying to follow the path laid by Gruber and Arment, building web credibility on the back of endlessly criticizing Android while holding iOS as the beaken.

He has little credible knowledge about Android. Has never said anything interesting or insightful about Android. Why does he bother with Android? I don't get it.

There is a massive documented history of discussions with Android engineers (not some second-hand claim of a discussion that reveals absolutely nothing) where they argue their case regarding GUI compromises. This blog entry adds less than nothing because it simply tosses more effluence in the information stream.

edderly3• 14 years ago

Disagree

> And RIM’s BlackBerry was still the most popular smartphone in the world.

If your world was the USA. Symbian/S60 was the dominant smartphone OS.

> What Miner and Google gambled on, and it seems bizarre in retrospect, was that the carriers and the manufacturers would be good at customizing and improving the user experience of the base operating system.

No, the problem was that the available OS's had huge (leave it to the handset vendor) holes (Symbian), or that their competitors had control of the available 'easyish but hard' options (Nokia dominated Symbian). Or that the other options were crap (Windows Mobile), or required S/W engineering experience which was not easily obtained (generic Linux).

The miracle of Android was that though it had some gaps in it's implementation, was good enough, and sponsored by a somewhat benign entity (at the time).

However, the reason for the handset manufacturers trying to differentiate, no matter how incompetently, or not was that the problem that Android solved also holds a curse. That is that the handset manufacturers do not want to repeat the PC experience of comoditizing the hardware market - What has happened before will happen again - unless we try to retard things.

The only way Google can reduce manufacturer freedom is to become truly non-free, on the day that happens, Android will fork.

dcurtis2• 14 years ago

Thanks. I have fixed the error about RIM.

edderly3• 14 years ago

No problem, I've also toned down my reply.

gaius• 14 years ago

If your world was the USA. Symbian/S60 was the dominant smartphone OS

Symbian might have been a smartphone OS, but it was mainly deployed in featurephones.

pavlov• 14 years ago

Only Japanese Symbian phones would qualify as featurephones because they lacked the ability to install native apps.

The rest of the Symbian devices were real smartphones, for example the popular N95. (They didn't have QWERTY keyboards, but that doesn't make a smartphone.)

rdouble• 14 years ago

What Miner and Google gambled on, and it seems bizarre in retrospect, was that the carriers and the manufacturers would be good at customizing and improving the user experience of the base operating system.

It made sense in context. Miner was the head of the Orange/FT research lab in Cambridge. A lot of creative engineers worked there but they were hamstrung by the junky phone SDKs available at the time. Android would have been just what they needed.

harshaw• 14 years ago

Yeah but I got to put stuff on my resume like experience with windows mobile 2002 and Symbian UIQ :)

At Orange we toyed with pushing an Android precursor from Savaje. However, the timing wasn't right - hardware wasn't powerful enough and Orange/FT didn't have the balls or corporate DNA to establish something like the OMA.

At Orange (or probably any carrier) getting a device out the door was a clusterfuck. You had to coordinate between the Device manufacturer (who never had any flexibility in their software schedule), the various operating companies who wanted phones in shop by Nov 1 for the Holiday or else, and various PM's running about trying to get features on the phone to help with their particular mandate (at the time it might have been music, IM, etc).

So yeah, anyone with half a technical clue could see that you could get shit done faster with a common OS. WHat's amazing is that with a little bit of juice from Google and a crack engineering team from Rubin they managed to totally dominate the non IOS smartphone market in a couple of years.

People seem to have this odd view that Android is deficient because it doesn't have some IOS optimizations. But look - if I told you to build something on one set of hardware and make it great that's 10x easier than building an open system. Yeah, closed systems may win in the end (and Apple is winning) but ANdroid couldn't be Android without a wider perspective.

manojlds• 14 years ago

The final suggestions makes me think that WindowsPhone is the perfect middle ground between Android and iOS

sounds• 14 years ago

I think the mildly-open nature of Android will be better marketing than Windows Phone - not overboard on openness, but not completely closed.

Hardware manufacturers and Cell providers won't support the extra cost of paying for the OS (in the long run).

This outcome isn't what I would like most, but it seems realistic.

stretchwithme• 14 years ago

Its a shame they didn't at least establish some rules on how manufacturers could modify the interface.

djhworld3• 14 years ago

If they did this none of the manufacturers would have taken on the platform though. Why should Google dictate to them what they put in their own products?

If Google wanted to standardise Android they should have never released it as an OS for all and produced the phones themselves.

hoi3• 14 years ago

Symbian was also designed with integration with hardware in mind and providing core API's for manufacturers and carriers to build a UI on top of. This is why the early owners of Symbian were a plethora of manufacturers and operators. Symbian even tried to designate 3 specific UI frameworks (touch, candybar and QWERTY) named Quartz, Pearl and Crystal.. but the shareholders revolted and went their own UI way (hence S60, UIQ & MOAP).

Disclosure: I worked at Symbian between 1999-2003

cpeterso• 14 years ago

> The hardest part of building advanced mobile phones, he reasoned, was writing the lower-level software that the operating system uses to communicate with the hardware, including the radio baseband and audio/video controllers

Wouldn't that hardware- and network-specific code be more easily written by the handset manufacturers and network providers than a third-party software (only) company?

drivebyacct2• 14 years ago

I can't possibly imagine how any phone could be smoother than the Galaxy Nexus. Yes, it's taken a long time to get it in 4.0 and it's available to almost no one, but it is finally fixed in my opinion.

brettnak• 14 years ago

I agree that the scrolling is pretty smooth. It's not quite as smooth as I think it could be but it's far beyond acceptable. I think when people say that scrolling doesn't "feel right" on a Galaxy Nexus is because of the distance you have to physically move your finger before it responds and actually starts scrolling. I think this is deliberate to prevent people from accidentally scrolling, but nevertheless, I think this is what people are seeing.

djhworld3• 14 years ago

I think the reason why Android has become so popular with the manufacturers is because they're free to customise the OS. If Android was just a one interface, one direction platform I don't think any of them would have taken it up.

Mobile phones are still a very competitive market and manufacturers want to differentiate their products to attract customers from another

huggyface3• 14 years ago

Android became popular with manufacturers because they desperately needed to all gang behind one platform to have any hope against the incredible success of Apple. While quite a few vendors signed onto Android even before the first handsets, they did so at no cost and in name only -- the original Android army were the absolutely miserable G1 and G2 (HTC Dream and Magic), and it stayed that way for some time. At the time I was sure the platform would fail.

As Apple grew, the necessity to commit to Android grew.

Boring parables about why Android made a mistake because it isn't like iOS are as old as both operating systems, during the same time that Android has done gangbusters. My wife has a Captivate Glide with Gingerbread and Samsung's TouchWiz on it. She loves it. She doesn't know or care what ICS is, gets constant updates for the mapping and market and book reading and video viewing, etc. For the average real, non-blogging human being the model works remarkably well.

djhworld3• 14 years ago

Yep, but if Google just said "Here is our OS, you may put it on your products, but you may not deviate from principles set out by us" none of them would have taken up on it.

Mobile phone hardware is generally the same across most devices these days and most of the "Joe Public" don't care what's on the inside - so the software is where the manufacturers try to differentiate themselves from each other as a selling point

richworks• 14 years ago

I wonder... if almost everyone knows and complains about the smoothness in Android being not as good as iOS(consistently, I mean)... Isn't Google aware of this? Or does achieving impeccable smoothness come at a cost(increased memory usage?).. which means that Google are in the crossroads here, trying to balance fluid UX and efficient memory management?

Or is it because Apple and Microsoft have been leaders in software engineering for more than a couple of decades and may have mastered the ins and outs of Operating Systems.. and since it has been only 5-6 years that Google has been working on Android, are they still competitively behind Apple and MS in this regard? and so that we can hope for improvement?

jan_g• 14 years ago

There are millions of users out there (including myself), who don't care about smoothness or (in my case) don't even notice any difference between an ios or android scrolling. Also, you have to take into consideration the fact that majority of users had considerably slower feature phone before buying android phone. To them, android is blazingly fast.

huggyface3• 14 years ago

if almost everyone knows and complains about the smoothness in Android being not as good as iOS

To the average user it is a complete non-issue: It's one of those things that you have to essentially point out to them. It is an issue for iOS boosters, however, because it's what they see as Android's Achilles heal.

ZeroGravitas• 14 years ago

This is one of the biggest myths of Android. Apple doesn't have manufacturer skins, therefore they must be utterly and irredeemably evil.

On the other hand, if you actually look at it objectively, manufacturers filled in many genuine gaps and made the early Android OS look much better than the default. Various innovations they introduced have been brought back into core Android and/or stolen by CyanogenMod etc. From a business perspective, a lot of Android's permissiveness towards their hardware and network partners has obviously succeeded beyond most people's expectations.

So the skins have both good points and bad and there are shades of gray but mostly you get the loud opinion of Android geeks (who want the very latest stock as a point of principle) and Apple geeks (who will tear down anything that Apple doesn't have e.g. big screens) usually with the assumption that what they think is important is the only reality.

It's also worth noting that Android is clearly aiming to be more than just a phone or tablet OS, so customisation is probably required to support e.g. car computers.

fauigerzigerk2• 14 years ago

The original vision is a good one and it works.

You need to consider the cost of preventing bad devices and bad UI extensions. The cost is just what you see in iOS: Limited choice of devices. Restrictive censorship rules for users and developers. No checks and balances.

Scolling works well on my Nexus S by the way.

bitwize• 14 years ago

Limited choice of devices.

GOOD.

Restrictive censorship rules for users and developers.

If the government isn't doing it, it ain't censorship. Look at what quality filtering through an approval process did for the video game industry. The same force is in effect on iOS, and the quality of iOS apps is consistently pretty high, especially when compared to Android.

Scrolling was total ass on my Epic 4G until I loaded some custom ROM where they did some sort of low-level magic to deliver an "ICS-like" experience on a Gingerbread code base.

It still sucks, though, because unless you have a GNex, to get this UX on Android you have to visit some forum where l33t kids hang out and dink about with your phone, flashing its ROMs and potentially bricking it, and only then can you have something that vaguely suggests an iPhone in smoothness.

With Apple, it comes with a butter-smooth UX right out of the box.

fauigerzigerk2• 14 years ago

If the government isn't doing it, it ain't censorship

It is tantamount to censorship once you have chosen iOS, because that choice makes Apple the government of your content.

But whatever you choose to call it, fact is that they restrict content based on value judgements that go well beyond anything you could ever call "quality assurance". They ban everything controversial regardless of quality.

TurnitUP• 14 years ago

When Apple launched the first iPhone it was sold for $500 without contract. Within months Apple had cut the low end model and dropped the price by a third to $400. For the iPhone 3G Apple would jump in bed with AT&T, introduce subsidized models, sales would explode and the rest is history. The Apple and AT&T partnership would lead to the Google Voice fiasco and delayed tethering feature rollout and the (still ongoing) download restrictions and low quality videos over youtube. It would be another 3 years before Apple released another iPhone model priced below $500 (the 8GB iPhone 3GS in fall of 2011).

The obvious point is that the cell phone industry is hard to break into and the most successful players adapt the realities of the marketplace. It's no surprise to anyone that Google changed Android to make it succeed. (Unless you're MG Siegler; I'm still waiting for the blog post on how he hates iOS because Apple sold out).

rsynnott2• 14 years ago

Ah, no. On release, for a few months, the iPhone was _$500 with contract_. Yes, really.

TeeWEE2• 14 years ago

The only thing this where this guy is right is the scrolling issue. But he doesnt explain why this is. Android was created initially as a non-touch OS. When they had to support touch they could not totally rewrite how animation was done. This resulted in one thread doing event handling and animation. This is difficult to fix in Android's UI Architecture. And phones hardware often makeup for this fact.

So scrolling is indeed a bit worse than IOS, but its not really painfull anymore. You should give this guy a Galaxy Nexus.

Also the UI extensions on top of android are actually one of its strong points. Differentiation is the key here. And they are not so bad.

The point here is: You do not have to be the best to rule the market! And Google knows that.

However the Galaxy Nexus is the best phone out there, much better than any iphone.

Gotttzsche• 14 years ago

huh, i think i just gave him kudos; what the hell was that?

Nothing in Android makes sense except in the light of its original vision

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