Category Archives: General

[This post is part of a series on my initial Android impressions.]
Just to be clear, my Android criticism is because I want this shit fixed in the last promising mobile platform standing, not because I hate it. Platform specific comments are based on the default MT4GS Android 2.3.4 with Sense 3.0 ROM, rooted and largely de-bloated. And now for the hate.

Android doesn’t come with a file manager. It doesn’t come with a terminal emulator, or a task manager, or almost any of the things one has come to reasonably expect an operating system to have. This makes it excessively hard to share instructions, since everyone is using interfaces broken in slightly different ways, and means the first few days of using a new device are spent on “Damnit! why won’t it do $Basic_function? Now I have to sort through the crap pile in the app store until I find one that actually works.” (which, come to think of it, is likely the objective.)
The file handler functionality is as good as any desktop platform (I don’t actually know if it is based on XDG like most other *nixes, or some homegrown solution) so it wouldn’t debilitate third party solutions to have sane defaults, and the argument that most users wouldn’t want all of those functions is completely specious… it took me a couple hours to strip most of the unwanted crap off my new phone, and that crap was certainly less useful than the things I’m complaining about being missing.
Also, most of the third party solutions suck. I’ve been using ConnectBot for a shell, which is better than the other free options I’ve tried, but handles the keyboard differently than every other program, and thus has problems with entering symbols like “|” and “>” which are sort of important on the command line. Likewise, after several seriously disappointing alternatives, I’ve settled on ES File Explorer for file management (also a solid [s]ftp/smb client), which is a little quirky about permissions and different file systems, and is nearly unusable in landscape mode (a rant for later), but is generally adequate. I’ve heard there may be some paid alternatives which are significantly better, but the idea of paying for this kind of basic functionality is infuriating – it is basically the same situation of coughing up for a Mac then having to buy one of a dozen Finders from some random dude for $20 before you could use it.

[This post is part of a series on my initial Android impressions.]
Just to be clear, my Android criticism is because I want this shit fixed in the last promising mobile platform standing, not because I hate it. Platform specific comments are based on the default MT4GS Android 2.3.4 with Sense 3.0 ROM, rooted and largely de-bloated. And now for the hate.

The task/process model Android uses is total bullshit. Task switching via the launcher is clumsy, and having things popping in and out of memory at random creates performance instability and the worst kind of non-determinism. To make an easy-to-demonstrate example, hit the “Internet” button – is it just bringing the screen back up, or starting over reloading the page you were on? You don’t know unless some form data disappeared, but the page probably does. This is especially significant in a mobile device, where user input is time and energy intensive, and, more importantly, the close button has a strong implication of “get up off my battery” that isn’t necessarily being honored.
This also runs afoul of the “never lie to your user” axiom; there is a difference between running and non-running processes, and trying to ignore that distinction, unlike every other multitasking platform, is going to cause more confusion that it saves.
This is again partially fixable via third party software – I’ve been using Gemini App Manager to hunt down badly behaving processes. Unfortunately, Gemini App Manager is seriously clunky, and between the profusion of RAM-eating background processes endemic to Android (and Sense…), and the number of apps designed with the expectation that they be allowed to sit in the background doing nothing useful, it isn’t really practical to keep an eye on what is running. I haven’t found anything that helps with the lack of a proper task switcher, and the “Recent” list from holding the home button or bringing up the notification screen is not even close to a solution.
This is, in my opinion, the most fundamentally broken thing about Android, and will be the hardest to fix in a sane way, especially without running afoul of someone else’s ridiculous patents. I’ve mentioned before that Google’s recent spate of UI hires gives me hope on this front, especially Matias Duarte who designed good solutions for task switching on a number of other mobile platforms, but for the time being it makes me irritable.

[This post is part of a series on my initial Android impressions.]
Just to be clear, my Android criticism is because I want this shit fixed in the last promising mobile platform standing, not because I hate it. Platform specific comments are based on the default MT4GS Android 2.3.4 with Sense 3.0 ROM, rooted and largely de-bloated. And now for the hate.

This is somewhat related to the market profiteering, but is a distinct and separate problem. Between internet ads that work because the built in browser is fully featured (yay? Flash), and “ad supported” software, the advertising situation crosses from merely irritating into usability problems. I don’t fundamentally have an issue with ad supported software and services, especially free games, but when 1/3 of the screen is covered with moving, changing, bandwidth-consuming advertisements, it has transitioned from “supporting the developer” to “disrespecting the user,” and that isn’t OK. At least google doesn’t have an Advertising API baked in to the platform like certain other popular mobile platforms.
On a rooted phone, AdFree Android takes care of the bulk of the problem, but misses some things, and is a substantaial hassle just to block enough ads to use your phone. I’m not sure what you would do if you couldn’t or didn’t want to root.

[This post is part of a series on my initial Android impressions.]
Just to be clear, my Android criticism is because I want this shit fixed in the last promising mobile platform standing, not because I hate it. Platform specific comments are based on the default MT4GS Android 2.3.4 with Sense 3.0 ROM, rooted and largely de-bloated. And now for the hate.

Android’s developer community is poison. With Maemo and WebOS, the objective was making and sharing software you wanted to use. With Android, the idea seems to be to extract as much money as possible from suckers. More infuriating, on the other platforms, Free software was available for free as a matter of course. With Android, there are at least three assholes trying to charge $1-5 for dalvik-wrappered versions of every useful bit of F/OSS and other noncommercial licence code (ex. Look how many pay apps are based on the “anything but commercial use” licensed SNES9X codebase). I may not be concerned about casual piracy, but it pisses me off when money changes hands for other people’s work.
Finding a suitable sub-community hasn’t been terribly successful either; XDA-Developers is the best I’ve found, but is full of [l]users, and NookDevs, while promising, seems to be both nook specific and mostly defunct. Furthermore, the native code build system is so broken I’m having trouble DIYing binaries (as opposed to “apps”) more complicated than hello world on my own. Is there an intact community of people who just want to hack that I haven’t found?