Comments on: A Letter to Google from a Concerned Android

By: Antonio Wells

Antonio Wells — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 18:29:27 +0000

Unfortunately the phone you chose was a bad one. Android has grown so much since 1.5 and 2.2 is so much better with all the features you mention plus more. I would recommend buying an Android 2.2+ phone as your next Google powered phone. If you need recommendation, tell us your cellular carrier, country, price range and your personal common uses for a phone.

By: satish

satish — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:24:27 +0000

I think android 1.5 is a big flop. I am deeply disappointed with the purchase of LG GW620 which has cupcake 1.5 OS. Just imagine a smart phone with a weight of brick has a weakest battery. Add to drawback,absence of few basic features like bluetooth file transfer,no flash player,no video calling etc
Morever the OS is unfriendly and has limited upgrading capability.
Google has lost my patronage for this blunder.
True waste of money.

By: thecolorifix

thecolorifix — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:45:04 +0000

YES! This is absolutely the worst part of Cupcake.

By: Royalness

Royalness — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:17:18 +0000

Am Jaam, you do not pay for using bluetooth, gps, wireless location and screen brightness. At least not in money, maybe in battery life.

The only function that would suit your argument would be the ability for applications to automatically enable or disable roaming and I agree that that is one of the only options that shouldn’t be determined by apps.

For the rest, after the cupcake update, I constantly find myself annoyed when I need to enable/disable GPS. I need to go all the way through the menu and manually change it. This is not an open platform.

By: Jaam

Jaam — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:01:07 +0000

For Europe is does sort of make sense – especially when you consider roaming charges – they are extremely expensive, thus it is good to know that those sort of connections areas where you can be charged for doing something is logged off from being used automatically. This way at least you get the choice and can make the decision on whether you want the expensive charge or not.

By: Tane Piper

Tane Piper — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:12:16 +0000

This is one of the areas that the iPhone might have got right with permissions. If you going to do anything that costs the user it will ask permission first. I know the comment is we don’t want it like Vista, but in a way it makes sense if the phone wants to access “expensive” hardware such as Wifi or GPS too.

Hopefully this can be sorted quickly with a 1.51 release.

By: Andreas K

Andreas K — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:02:31 +0000

Well, if Google wants to give the user more control about their apps, they should provide means to control (as in view, and allow/disallow) Internet traffic.

Without such a thing, any simple game that claims “Internet access” for the highscore can be hidden botnet client. Or it could start browsing for kiddieporn (or other stuff that disables legal safeguards )

Bluetooth and GPS both have icons in the Notification bar if used or activated, so the danger of allowing an app to switch that is rather small.

Basically, if this is a measure to bring back more user control, it’s laughable. It’s like insisting that an user that is chained to a truck has full control which shoes to use while he tries to run behind the truck. Irrelevant.

By: Mike Cardwell

Mike Cardwell — Tue, 05 May 2009 23:15:39 +0000

If you turn GPS on, it uses no extra battery. It’s only when an application actually asks it for your location that it fires up and starts to use battery.

If your app requires GPS, then what you do is:

1.) Detect is GPS is enabled
2.) If not, display a message telling the user to enable it and then fire an intent to display the particular setting screen so the user can enable it.

I’m a developer and a user, and I’m happy that the sandbox has been changed to secure these various system settings. Especially the setting for using data whilst roaming.

By: Royalness

Royalness — Tue, 05 May 2009 13:31:36 +0000

I’m still so frustrated that in a week or so I’ll have to remove half my Locale situations. This is the goodness I’m loosing:
- Battery > 70% = screen brightness 100%
- Charging = screen brightness 100% + GPS on
- Battery < 30% = GPS off
- Battery < 20% = Screen Brightness 0%
- Default = Screen Brightness 50%
- Sleep = Screen Brightness 0%
I know that in a week I’ll curse my phone for running out of battery, because I’m not going to have my screen brightness on 0% and my GPS off by default.
I also know I’ll curse my phone when I look at my phone at night while I’m still half asleep and the screen blinds me or if I look at it at night and find that the battery ran out, because the GPS was still on.

By: BoD

BoD — Tue, 05 May 2009 07:48:55 +0000

Clément: again you have to think about usability. Do you really want to turn Android into… *Windows Vista* (shudders)?

BoD

By: Clément Hermann (nodens)

Clément Hermann (nodens) — Mon, 04 May 2009 23:03:06 +0000

As a user, I fully agree with Chris Kelly : a pop-up would be a good way to tell the user whether the app should be allowed to change a setting or not. The SuperUser app (for root-enabled phones) does that greatly, poping up each time an application try to use su command, and asking the user what to do. More, it can remember an authorization if the user choose “always”. the app authentication system in android is great, let’s use it. Android is supposed to be open !

By: Chris Kelly

Chris Kelly — Mon, 04 May 2009 15:47:59 +0000

As the developer behind GasBot, I’m fortunately not directly effected by these changes, but they still perplex me none-the-less. In GasBot, I’ve always just detected what the user has enabled and used that for location information. I never toggled anything directly.

However, I still think that the ability to automatically toggle these settings is extremely important. Google said they didn’t want to allow apps to do it by themselves so they disabled it completely which seems like overkill to me. Why couldn’t they simply detect a call to the APIs set to toggle and pop up a dialog saying something like “Would you like to allow the application [App Name] to turn [On/Off] your [GPS/WiFi/etc]” and give the user the options of Yes or No? That seems like it would take care of everything because the user would know what’s being toggled, and which program is doing it.

Although I have to say that when it comes to Android, it seems like Google rushes something out without truly thinking it through completely and just deals with it later after they get complaints. Not exactly a compelling business model.

By: Moussa

Moussa — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:30:37 +0000

I understand the Bluetooth being broken, because those were not public APIs. But they should have another way to accomplish the same. With the GPS, this is complete BS from Google, because these APIs were public and worked fine in Firmwares 1.0 and 1.1. There is no reason for them to change them to read only all of a sudden. This is why they have the uses-permissions for applications, so that if a user does not want an app to be able to toggle their GPS settings, it is for the user to do decide that they don’t want it, not for Google to decide. I agree with a previous post about allowing users to select what permissions they want to allow apps to use, and then it would be up to the developer to detect this list of selected permissions and then enable only those features that use them, so that it won’t be confusing to the user.

By: Royalness

Royalness — Mon, 04 May 2009 10:05:35 +0000

@Bod
I agree that the user should permit a certain application to use either cellular triangulation or GPS/WiFi, but that doesn’t justify removing the ability to automate these settings. There are a lot of applications that ask the user if they want the app to enable GPS for location detection or not and there are also apps where location detection is optional. If a developper offers good support for his or her app, then he should be responsive to requests by users to implement these options (I remember the debate with shopsavvy, because it automatically enabled WiFi). It is up to the interaction between the user and the developper to decide if an application can make these changes. If the developper doesn’t listen, then his app won’t get used as much and if the user has no problems with automatic enabling then there is no reason to make it optional (think about Sky map, it enables GPS when you open it, but that’s the entire point, to get a GPS fix. When you close the app again it disables GPS again).

The quality of the application should be decides by the interaction between developper and user and should not be dictated by Google.