Hacker News Reader

Comment by div | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com