Why the Razr isn't a Motorola-Google wonderphone | Hacker News Reader

Why the Razr isn't a Motorola-Google wonderphone

extremetech.com

15 pointsmrsebastian13 comments

Custom skins layered on top of vanilla Android are such an antipattern it hurts.

It sucks for device manufacturers because it is costly to build.

It sucks for consumers because the manufacturers have an incentive to drop support for any device sold asap WRT software updates.

It sucks for developers because custom components are not standard across devices.

The only point in favour of custom skins is that it theoretically allows manufacturers to differentiate and as a result offers more choice to end users.

In reality though, I suspect very few end users to pick their Android based on the custom skin it comes with, and I'm sure many would be pissed if they realized that custom skin is the reason for them not getting free ota upgrades to something they gave a nice chunk of cash for.

In a functional open-source ecosystem third parties would be pushing their innovations and enhancements back upstream for the benefit of everyone. Instead it's just a bunch of downstream, second-rate UI hacks that are different just for the sake of being different.

I think it's crucial that the mobile OS ecosystem is not dominated by any single player, but I find myself in the extremely unexpected and awkward position of rooting for Windows Phone.

I basically feel the same way, but I used WP7 at SxSW this year and it was a very disappointing experience. Even the apps that they were demoing to show how great WP7 is crashed with ugly "NullReferenceException" dialog boxes. (Crashing is one thing, but it's no help to the user to barf up a stack trace, however beautifully that stack trace may be formatted.) The Zagat app was one of the ones they were flogging, and it was pretty much unusable.

OK yes the handling of that error message is terrible in that special way that only Microsoft can be terrible at handling error messages. . .

But apps crashing with NullReferenceExceptions? WTF!? Sounds like Microsoft needs to start a program where each major app developer gets a personal visit from a Microsoft representative armed with a free copy of ReSharper and a long, baleful stare.

I know people who do pick their phone due to the custom skin it comes with. I've heard many people say good things about the HTC Sense UI, although I don't care much for it myself. Custom skins provides a way for manufactures to differentiate, but it certainly does seem to give them a maintenance problem.

It's a prisoner's dilemma. The Android ecosystem and all its inhabitants would do best if everyone kept the proprietary customizations to a minimum. But any one manufacturer can stand out from the crowd by doing stuff like custom skins. Which means that someone inevitably will. So everyone has to follow suit, and everyone ends up being worse off because the end result is a difficult-to-support, fragmented ecosystem.

"...I suspect very few end users to pick their Android based on the custom skin it comes with..."

I, for one, have decided to only go with Google flagships from now on. So, in a sense, I pick them based on the custom skin it comes with: vanilla.

I do think it's partly Google's fault. I imagine they didn't anticipate this becoming such a problem. They probably should've made the system modular enough and restricted the scope of the skins enough to make it a lot easier to upgrade the OS without having to update the skin, or at least making the changes trivial.

That said, I really don't think most people care that much, and the ones who do root their phone and install whatever ROM they want. As a Droid X owner, I've been amazed at what the dev community has been able to do, even with a locked bootloader.

"The only point in favour of custom skins is that it theoretically allows manufacturers to differentiate and as a result offers more choice to end users."

But is this even a real choice? It's not like the skins bring much to the party other than inertia and entropy. I doubt that they drive much in the way of sales. I also doubt that Android versions drive many sales, but there are substantive reasons for users to be on the latest possible versions that have nothing to do with the UI -- security foremost among them. It sometimes seems like nobody at Google really thought through the implications of their phone strategy.

On top of all this, the hyper-masculine Droid branding/styling is out of step with the market and even with where Google is going with ICS - emphasizing manliness is about as gauche as the mostly abandoned tactic of marketing gadgets specifically for women. It was at least some kind of hook in the days when the Droid had little competition, but next to a modern Samsung, it looks outdated.

It was the right move for the first Droid phone, but I agree that the time has passed.

Amen to this article. I know all to well as a former Motorola Cliq customer how badly Motoblur makes your phone feel like the neglected stepchild of the Android ecosystem.

It launched with a heavily modified 1.5 version of Android (with a bunch of 1.6 functionality backported). This was at a time when Android 2.1 had been out for a while (edit: mid-November 2009). I remember asking the T-Mobile saleperson if there were plans to get 2.1 on the phone. He assured me he knew people beta testing it for release probably next quarter.

14 months later Moto released a buggy-as-all-heck version of 2.1 for the Cliq. Never followed up with a bug release that fixed all the instabilities of the phone.

Sadly the Cyanogenmod community started to care about the Cliq only a few months before I bought a Galaxy S2.

I just can't trust Moto to keep up at all. Fool me once and all...

There is nothing insightful in this article. The same comments are repeated ad nauseaum in the Android fan sights' article comments.

If you ran up to someone in a Verizon store and tried to convince them not to buy the Razr because it won't have ICS until February, they would laugh in your face.

Who thought this was going to be? The purchase hasn't gone through, and even then, best estimates for any sort of closer working relationship was very late 2012 or 2013. Besides, locked bootloader, Blur? There was never any doubt that this was another typical Moto/HTC release. I bet it won't see ICS for a few months too.

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