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Comment by veeti | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing that a group of volunteers can do a much better job at improving the stock AOSP experience than huge companies like Samsung or LG. The official software on some of the Android flagships out there is seriously awful. Best of luck to them.

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The biggest problem is that Samsung and LG think they need to customize & brand the phone to be recognizable as their own product. They're spitting in the face of OSS when they go and half-ass their own versions of standard components. Things are even worse when you get carriers into the mix trying to provide their own unique user experience.

A great example of how this can blow up in their face is a recent T-Mobile visual voicemail app. Not only is it slow, buggy & constantly crashing but they had the audacity to place advertisements in it. For some reason, customers didn't like being forced to use their time & metered bandwidth to view shitty ads (the "Click here to upgrade your memory!" sort) while using a service that they had already paid for. If you look at the Play Store, you'll see brazillions of 1-star reviews complaining about this. Fortunately, T-Mo listened & removed the ads. The app is still slow & buggy. I still can't uninstall the Slacker app or remove the Fox News bookmark from the browser but at least I don't have to stare at advertisements while waiting for my voicemail to crash.

Manufacturers & Carriers need to recognize that the value they bring to the table with Android is by providing good hardware, low prices & good service, not crapping up an awesome phone with reminders that Samsung & Verizon are the Best Thing Ever.

Manufacturers do that, even in the face of evidence that they're terrible at it, because they really want to avoid ending up like PC manufacturers. Consumers treat PC makers as interchangeable suppliers of largely similar products, forcing them to compete on price, so they have very small margins.

Samsung is very keen for you to think of your phone as a Samsung phone, not as an Android phone made by Samsung. So to them it makes sense to reinvent standard components, even if it doesn't make the user experience any better. And Samsung does seem to be managing this, though I don't think any of the other Android OEMs have.

Cyanogen may be better for the end user, especially the technically savvy end user, but the metric of success for manufacturers' Android variants are a mixture of end user experience and other factors like brand differentiation. It's possible that they're achieving exactly what they're trying to, which basically boils down to being able to produce an ad that shows off the features that their phones have that their competitors' Android phones don't. Once the sale is made it doesn't matter too much how awesome the user experience is or isn't.

It's short term thinking like that, that leads to people actually accepting Apple's "walled garden".

There's quite a few features in both AOSP and OEM skinned devices that were inspired by community ones. The most obvious one I can think of offhand is quick controls in the notification area to toggle wifi and other things (especially the way Samsung did it is identical [though uglier] to how it is in Cyanogen).

Cyanogen: http://betanews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/cymod2.jpg

Samsung Touchwiz: http://r.phonedog.com/shared/images/2011/8/169026-a-TouchWiz...

No company that wants to stay in business can afford to completely ignore user experience. Samsung, for example, is every bit as concerned as Apple about this and every recent study I've shown puts their phones ahead of Apple in user satisfaction. Samsung, HTC, LG, Sony etc very much want to do everything they can to make sure that people that buy from them today think of them first when it comes time to upgrade.

Maybe the very bottom barrel discount generic Android device makers don't care about this but you get what you pay for.

Brand differentiation is important, but there are more ways to achieve that than, say, "shovel a crappy skin over ASOP"; "timely upgrades to new versions of Android" would be a good one (most vendors fail", minimising crapware (one point I give Sony), and "form factors and hardware features I like" (with two young kids, the waterproof Sony phones have a leg up here for me).

Actually, I don't find it surprising at all. If you knew anything about the decision making structure and culture at companies like Samsung and LG, you'd assume that it's a total camel factory (camel: a horse designed by committee). These guys on the other hand are very very close to the users and know what people actually will actually find valuable and use. They aren't just putting features in their OS because research shows that those features market well and will help sell handsets.

How does that explain the good quality phones which come out of (atleast) Samsung.

Why do you think that? Would you find it amazing that a group of volunteers could do a better job of developing <app or site> than huge companies like Microsoft or Hewlett-Packard?

Samsung has a different agenda with their software, so while it may suck to you and to the tech savy crowd it may bring Samsung new customers, or make them money in a different way.

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