Android is a $#!~ OS

by Antonio Wells Apr 23, 2010 9:00 AM – 8 Comments

Bare with me regarding the title of the post, the meat of the article is to educate newbies to Android who may be frustrated with aspects of the mobile operating system. This is not the rant bashings of an iPhone fanboy. This is a conversation I had with a pev’d user who made the comment on our Facebook page so I asked why he felt that why and provided Android Advice™ feedback.

Here are J Anil Kumar concerns:

1. There are only basic apps in this phone as a basic Nokia phone (not smartphone) has.
2. Android market was not there in the phone whereas the manual says install apps from market
3. USB mass storage is not found and has to follow certain steps to get it recognized by system. Whereas on other phone it gets recognized easily.
4. Almost all of the Apps that I found from Internet and installed kept on crashing always including the Google applications.
5. USB will not be recognized after installing 5 to 10 apps, the phone keeps on saying charging (if charge is less)/chime sound. I have to reset to factory setting to get the USB working.
6. Samsung was unresponsive even after several attempts to get help from them.
7. Most of the apps were not installable as the OS was 1.5.
8. I tried contacting Google, they were also like dead meat.

I think the basic IPhone is far better than IPhone in all sense even though there is no flash support and not being open. This was my first ever smartphone. I will never ever buy an Android phone so also any phone from Samsung. I was an ardent Google fan because of their Google search, apps, pack etc. But here I felt cheated by Google and Samsung. Google is making a fool of customers by saying OS is open source and the app suite is closed. I feel if they charge some fee for the apps, I am ready to pay. I have repacked the phone and is happily using my Nokia 5310 which was thinking of replacing with I5700. I will be sending this “Great Phone” to Samsung at my cost for them to keep in their showcase as a symbol of best customer service. Hope this will suffice curiosity.

Here’s what we addressed:

1. & 2. Many times it is dependent on what country are you from as that may be the reason you can only see basic or only Free apps in the Market. Some countries cannot get to the Android Market at all so it really depends on your location and sometimes wireless carrier.

There are truly some Awesome Android Apps out there as evident on our website. We even highlight the Best Android Apps in our App of the Week.

3. & 5. It sounds like you a either have the Samsung Moment or Behold 2. I must agree, intuitively getting Samsung phones to recognize the USB storage is a nightmare. You would need to download and install specific Samsung drivers first then it will recognize. Here is a good guide along with drivers to show you how: http://www.junefabrics.com/android/driver.php

4. & 7. This is probably a genuine issue with Android as the OS is currently fragmented with more than 3 major versions on phones to date (Google is working on improving that). Some developers write there apps for specific versions of Android and higher, if a lower version happen to install them outside the Market, they may crash.

8. True, Google won’t respond to anyone unless your Engadget… They only recently started hiring telephone customer support folks to handle issues otherwise they rely on you to search and find the answers on resources like AndroidTapp.com or in their forums.

I’m sorry you had a horrible experience with Android but hopefully a future phone will sway you back as I believe the phone you had was the root of most of your issues. Have you had frustrations with Android? If so express them in the comments and keep up with our Android Advice™ column which solves many of those common and newbie questions.

Tags: Android, Android Advice, Google Android

Categorised in: Android Advice

8 Comments

By JMG on April 23, 2010 at 10:39 am:

All of these comments are useless to address without a make/model/carrier, first of all. Second, why isn’t he calling his carrier? It isn’t Google’s fault (or the Android OS, for that matter) if the carrier scaled back and restricted features.

My replies would be a little different.

1 – Blame your carrier. They are the ones who restrict Android installs, in working with the phone manufacturer. Did you try the phone in the store, or did you just grab one that said “Android” and walk out with it.
2 – Blame your carrier. Sounds to me like they disabled access to the market.
3 – Blame your phone manufacturer. Works perfectly for Moto, HTC, so on – this is not an Android issue.
4 – Software has versions. You need to check these things before installing things from the internet. The Market restricts viewable applications by version, which is better for the average user. See comment #2.
5 – Sounds like the phone is pretty terrible. What made you choose that one?
6 – Sounds like a problem with Samsung, doesn’t it?
7 – Which is why you should have chosen a phone that used a recent version of Android. Would you buy a new computer today that ran Windows 98? Or would you look for a computer that was designed to work based on something more modern?
8 – This one boggles me. These problems are NOT Android problems. They are problems created by having…

A) A crappy phone.
B) A carrier willing to sell you a crappy phone
C) A manufacter that won’t support their crappy phone.

NONE of these are “Android” problems. They are problems caused by the manufacturer and carrier screwing with the Android base. So put the blame where it belongs, and call out your carrier on it!

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- By Mike D. on April 24, 2010 at 3:37 am:
  
  YOU’RE NOT HELPING!!!!! Believe it or not, the average person expects a consumer device bought from a carrier store to come out of the box ready to use, much like one might expect an automobile might function “out of the box” from an auto dealership which, like a carrier store, is independently owned but has an affiliation to a larger network.
  
  I don’t think that’s unreasonable to expect. If there is that much blame to pass around surrounding Android, then perhaps there’s something to Apple’s method of closed architecture. If I’d had this guy’s experience (sounds like a sub-par carrier in a foreign country, two strikes at the outset) I would probably hate Android too, and I wouldn’t care what anybody said to me, I wouldn’t even look back.
  
  Reply
By Mooseknuckle on April 23, 2010 at 12:47 pm:

Google claims to support exchange mail yet android doesn’t support industry standard ActiveSync security policies. Meaning, most people won’t be able to sync their work email & calender to their phones. This is completely unacceptable since every other smartphone on the market can do this.

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- By Android Tapp on April 23, 2010 at 1:15 pm:
  
  There’s an app that supports all the policies at the page you listed, Exchange by Touchdown
  
  The protocol is documented here:
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd299443.aspx
  
  There are a number of policies that can be provisioned.
  - Require complex password
  - Enable password recovery
  - Failed password attempts
  - Minimum password length
  - User input timeout
  - Password expiration
  - Password history
  
  If possible:
  - Require encryption
  - Require encryption on storage card
  
  Except for one catch : if you require SD card encryption, we simply prevent any attachment downloading, since android does not support an encrypted SD card, and if we did encrypt it, it would be still useless, since other apps wouldnt be able to open them anyways (info from Exchange by Touchdown developer).
  
  Reply
  - By Mooseknuckle on May 11, 2010 at 1:48 pm:
    
    I should have said native support for Exchange/ActiveSync security policies. It is completely ridiculous to shell out an additional $20 for an app to access my corporate exchange server when almost all other smartphones out there have this ability baked in (I.e iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, or Palm). If you check out Android Issue: 4475 (http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4475), you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. Google teased this feature out of the box. Purchasing a 3rd party app is not the answer. This feature NEEDS to be natively supported otherwise Android will never penetrate the corporate world.
    
    Reply
By Mike D. on April 24, 2010 at 3:37 am:

I ordered a T-Mobile G1 about a month after it came out. I’ve had to do some tinkering, but as a grizzled veteran of a PC user, I’m used to that. Some titchy stuff with Android I’m anxious to see fixed:

(1) Fragmentation – I know it’s being worked on. Please hurry, it looks like PC vs. Mac in here.

(2) App Storage – Quadruple the amount of space presently alloted for this; I understand the coders are having difficulties making the app sandbox bigger. I had to uninstall like 5 games to download Zenonia – this just isn’t right.

(3) Touch response – I’m not sure if it’s hardware or software, but the iPhone’s tracking on the touchscreen is really impressive in a way that Android’s isn’t. I often have misfires where the screen thinks I’m pushing places I’m not, and the touchscreen can’t read a diagonal line drawn on its surface very well. Needs improvement.

(4) Openness – I’m not altogether opposed to a closed platform – Apple generally does a very good job with it. I like a more open platform conceptually, but there are myriad small benefits that come from a closed one, like device interoperability: all devices running iPhone OS behave identically and have identical services. Contrarily, Android runs the gamut from Googlephone Nexus One to Google-branded Droid to Google-ambivalent Samsung Behold 2 to Google-hating AT&T phones I don’t even know the name of because I think they’re so stupid.
This potentially makes Android a meaningless brand – the point of a brand is to convey quality without having to prove it every time. If you put a great brand on a low-quality product, it degrades the brand. If you do this a few times, the brand is without meaning and possibly becoming a warning signal.

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- By Ross on June 2, 2010 at 1:56 pm:
  
  “This potentially makes Android a meaningless brand – the point of a brand is to convey quality without having to prove it every time.” –Mike D.
  
  This is one reason I’m switching to Verizon. I really appreciate what they’ve done with their DROID line. Unlike “myTouch” (which I guess is still better than Sprint’s nothing, but doesn’t even cover the entire lineup of T-Mobile Android phones) it actually does create that unified platform for Android devices. This “with Google” nonsense is not cutting it.
  
  Reply
By Evan on April 27, 2010 at 12:26 am:

I got my HTC Dream from ROGERS over a repair/warranty dispute concerning my sony ericsson. It really wasn’t the phone I wanted right from the get go, but I figured if I didn’t get anything out of them for all my trouble, I’d go insane; no really doesn’t everyone love ROGERS?

Anywho, I thought the phone worked pretty well out of the box, but was disappointed with the overall product; 3 home screens, lackluster free apps, hard to navigate market etc. Then, I was no longer able to make outgoing calls. It seems they made a phone that was unable to complete 911 calls under certain circumstances. How this was my fault at all, or why I HAD to play a roll in fixing it, is beyond my comprehension. Nevertheless, I set out on my quest to install this hard to find, unintuitive, and data destroying update so I could start over all again.

Apparently I won’t be getting any android versions over 1.5, and that sucks; I get to miss out on a bunch of apps that might have been able to redeem this phone in my eyes. Some people are telling my to blame my carrier; surly it’s not google;s fault! The fact is, that in some way shape or form, Google, HTC and Rogers all collaborated to produce and give me this phone, and it’s terrible.

I currently still use my HTC Dream; I really can’t afford another phone. Everyday I still wish I had my simple sony ericsson. Never did it develop weird password failures forcing me out of my phone, nor was it ever difficult to find a phone number. I walk away from this experience never again wanting anything to do with android, HTC, Rogers or a google phone. In my opinion this is a failed experiment; if these three giant companies can’t please a customer now, why should I think they ever will in the future?

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