What's the point of Android now? | Hacker News Reader

What's the point of Android now?

blog.dustindoiron.com

25 pointsdustywusty34 comments

Your two complaints are that 1) your phone is slow and old, and 2) a specific app is poorly put together. Somehow, from this, your conclusion is that the entire Android ecosystem is broken/worthless/something.

That's ridiculous, to put it mildly.

The phone is not slow and old, the OS is a resource hog. Compare the specs to a Windows phone and see how smoothly it runs with similar hardware.

You have a point. The tighter you can control the hardware, the tighter the integration with the OS will be. Windows Phone, iPhone, game consoles, they can all make due with slower hardware than more general-purpose systems.

Android makes some tradeoffs to give their users choice. It has upsides and downsides, but the true benefit is that people can decide for themselves if they want beefier hardware to run the same relative speed but have more control over the OS, or if they want the other give-and-take. There's less overhead on iOS and WP7, but there's also less control.

I love the market we have right now. There's almost literally something for everyone. I just wish Palm was back in to round it out with WebOS.

Looking past his non-sequitur, it does seem like there's a legitimate issue with this app. The Nexus One isn't that bad of a performer (there are much worse Android phones that can still be bought), and the app doesn't seem, on it's face, to require high specs. Especially since it then redirects him to a web page.

I don't see these posts (and there are a few of them, for every phone, every OS, and every carrier) as people wanting to turn others away from the phone, but rather wanting to turn attention to the flaws. Flaws that can then be fixed by the maker of the system. Nothing turns a company's head faster than bad publicity.

To be perfectly honest, this is more of a straw that broke the camel's back problem. Nearly none of the (seemingly constantly) updated Google Apps provide the same seamless experience they used to. There are huge gaps between the product on the web and the product on your device. Being Google, this kind of stuff is inexcusable.

The Nexus One is old, I'll give you that. As I point out though, this is somehow still the average experience for any Android user. My phone isn't that far behind the top-end Android phones these days.

He is complaining that the best feature one should expect from an Android phone would be the seamless integration with Google's services. If even at that it fails to deliver a good experience, what's the point then.

And whoever complained he's using an old phone... I'm still using an iPhone 3GS (released 2009) with latest iOS. Why can't he complain about a phone that is almost a year newer?

I would be more inclined to take his "I'm outta here... moving to iOS" statement and the "seamless integration with Google's services" argument a little more seriously if the article had outlined even a short history of all Google services repeatedly failing to seamlessly integrate on the phone over a variety of situations. But one coupon, in one app, for one service, one time sounds more like someone just looking for any reason to say "screw Android... I'm getting an iPhone". Yes, he does say "countless other" apps have issues... that really isn't very specific nor does it show a pattern. I've had times when (for no apparent reason... other than maybe the phone trying to multitask too much) an app loads slow... when it worked fine before and after that. I'm not willing to accept that iPhones don't ever have similar hiccups... ever. I'm in a house divided so I get to see first hand the frustrating things that the iPhone and iPad can do.

But even that doesn't really matter to me. I hope he finds what he's looking for... whether it is with an iPhone, a Windows phone or even a new Android phone. I wish everyone luck in finding the phone/OS/carrier combo that works best for them. I'm just so glad that there are plenty of those combos for everyone to choose from.

Because comparing Android to iOS is different. With Apple, they only need to design an operating system for ~10 devices, most of which are essentially the same with minor differences. Apple has the ability to tweak iOS to meet their goals on their hardware where as Google is tasked with designing software for a wide variety of hardware. I'm not saying that Google should be held to lower standards, what I'm saying is, give them a break for not developing an Android version for each phone.

While an app experience is bad, it's no reason to ditch an OS. It's like blaming Microsoft because their version of Minesweeper isn't as good as 3rd party ones and ditching Windows for OSX or Linux.

Well... if seamless integration with the manufacturer (and only the manufacturer's) product stack is what he's looking for then he's definitely going to be happier with Apple.

That's Apple's modus operandi. What we sell you works very, very well; but you have to buy everything from us.

They really did do a bad job with that Starbucks coupon, it isn't integrated with the Offers app at all but for some reason they still pushed you to view it in the app. Not that I'm ditching my phone over it.

i agree, the offers app is useless.

why does offers need to be an app? it would work perfectly well in-browser. it's not android that's pointless, it's the tendency of users to expect an app for every little tiny feature that belongs on a website. and it's only worse on iOS.

I actually like having apps that might only launch another browser to take me to their mobile page.

Opening a browser and going to a website is great on a computer, and I'd hate to have a separate program to do that, but on a phone it's nice to have a shortcut right where everything else is. I like that when you click it, it does one thing.

It's just my opinion, and I know not everyone shares in it, but I abhor mobile browsers. On a screen that small you either sacrifice viewing space or easy access to navigation. I keep my bookmarked sites stored in my app list, because launching an app is rote versus launching the browser app then opening the bookmarks menu then selecting the bookmark.

The problem with this app, from what I got from the author, is that it doesn't launch a browser window, but instead has a complex and slow app, then redirects you to a browser. If it simply opened the browser window, I don't think this article would have been written.

Google's trying to build the future.

They don't care about your ancient phone that was designed last decade. Get over it.

Of course they don't. Unfortunately people who bought it last decade do.

I'm sorry but Apple does not care about the 3gs either. Use it and it is slow and miserable. And come summer, you'll have the same experience with the 4s.

Sure...

My anectdata refutes you. I have a 3GS that is working just fine with the latest version of iOS. It's obviously not as fast as a 4 or 4s, but "slow and miserable?" Not even.

Well I bought my phone last year and there is already dwindling support for it (no OS updates, just extra HTC crap), not to mention that the same model is still on sale as new now.

Many people buy smartphones on a 18 month - 2 year contract and often will wait until the price has dropped a bit to buy it. So I think 3-4 year old phones should still be well supported if they want to gain people's trust.

My T-Mobile contract ended this month and I am very much looking forward to switching to an iPhone

Summary:

Guy complaining about his Nexus One being slow. It should be, that phone was designed to run up to Android 2.x and has long lost any support for system updates. It wasn't even originally designed to run Android 3.x. There's a whole lot more about your phone's compatibility than "still duking it out specifications wise", in his own words.

Edit: Oops, yes, no claim to run ICS. Either way, he's using an incredibly dated phone. The comparison isn't far off from trying to run iOS 5 on an iPhone 3GS.

When did he say he was running ICS?

The complaint was that a simple app was needlessly unusable on his phone.

He is ranting that the Google offer app ask him to use the browser to redeem. For most Google offers, you can redeem directly from the app (it gives you a bar code), some of them maybe due to the settings of the vendor requires other means such as this one.

Every iPhone 3GS that's been sold for the last 6 months runs iOS 5 and I believe the majority of pre-iOS 5 3GS users have upgraded to it.

And how does it perform? Does it have all the same features?

I believe it runs fine: the 2009 iPhone 3GS processor is slower than the 2010 iPhone 4, but parses/pushes 1/4 the amount of pixels. From experience, while neither of them are particularly fast at CPU-bound operations, the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 are plenty fast enough for daily use on iOS 5 and are still quite smooth for things like scrolling and animations.

Mine has all the features (sans siri) and works fine.

I'm running Offers on my Motorola Droid just fine, and haven't encountered any of the problems he reports.

My iPod touch from 2008 runs ios5 just fine. My HTC thunderbolt from last april runs some already massivly outdated whatever version. And he is complaining about more than just his outdated phone, he gets an app, and all it tells him to do is visit the website?

Plus, he has a very good point, yeah his phone is old and slow, but he's not trying to play a new game, he is DOWNLOADING A COUPON. Wal-mart phones can do that these days. Also, needing to buy a phone every 3 months just for it to be useable, is not what they call a good "user experience"

Nexus One was release approximately a year ago. Is it really an unfair expectation that it should be able to download coupons in a non-painful way?

The Nexus One was released January 2010. You might be thinking of the Nexus S that was released last year.

I think you're thinking of the Nexus S. The Nexus One was released on January 2012, which is 2 years ago.

Correction: over two years ago. Anyone who bought a Nexus One at release is out of their 2-year contract by now and eligible for the full subsidy on any new phone with any carrier.

Did any carriers offer a subsidy for the Nexus One? I was under the impression that everyone who owns one bought it outright.

That's assuming you bought your phone at launch, people are still buying plenty of phones both android and iOS that are well over a year old and they are still being actively marketed.

To put that in perspective MS still supports a 10 year old OS and the majority of Windows Applications will still work with it.

It's not that dated. As he says it fits nicely in the midrange of phones still being offered.

Here is a brand new 2012 Samsung Pocket. The Nexus One is still way ahead of this thing: http://www.mobileburn.com/18826/news/samsung-galaxy-pocket-i...

The Pocket features a 2.8-inch, 240 x 320 pixel touchscreen and is powered by a single-core 832MHz processor.

That said, running Google Offers on my Nexus One (CM 7) was just fine over wifi (I am no longer on its original carrier and I use it as a wifi iTouch-like device). I couldn't find the Starbucks offer but all the other offers seemed to let me purchase then and there in app.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com