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Comment by vidoc | Hacker News Reader

Over the last 3 years, I bought three 'google edition' devices (nexus 10, galaxy nexus, htc one m7) and I am less than impressed. I haven't experienced faster updates, and while I appreciate to run the vanilla android. Regressions and overall poor software quality have been my experience with their devices. They must be outsourcing large parts of the software they ship on their devices because I'm absolutely stunned things like this go through QA.

Here's the best-of: - The responsiveness of the nexus 10 tablet has been enjoying enormous spikes since day 1.

- Running into all sorts of problems with 'Mail app' and now 'Gmail app' using a third-party imap server. Lots of message with an HTML body or attachements are displayed blank.

- Skype, hangout, SIP, have been a disaster with all those devices. Sometimes due to horrible software (Skype), sometimes due to the hardware/OS (hangout with htc).

- Finally, lollipop is the freebsd 5.0 of android

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Running into all sorts of problems with 'Mail app' and now 'Gmail app' using a third-party imap server. Lots of message with an HTML body or attachements are displayed blank.

Google really, really wants you to use GMail, so the development effort they put into supporting other email setups is of the "just enough to make the sale" variety.

My solution to this specific AOSP issue is to use K9 Mail which (in my experience) is far better than the stock Android Mail app. (It was forked from the AOSP Mail app some years ago IIRC & has an active development community & github repo.)

I don't have any solutions to your other (perfectly reasonable) complaints unfortunately.

Android doesn't bring in the bacon and the Nexus devices bring in less, they don't care about the little things as long as everyone's devices have Google services installed on them.

"Finally, lollipop is the freebsd 5.0 of android"

What do you mean by this, exactly?

As I remember FreeBSD 5.0 (and 5.1 and 5.2 for that matter) were always labelled -RELEASE (and not -STABLE, that didn't happen until 5.3).

It was a chicken and egg kind of problem, where a lot of stuff in the new kernel was rewritten/redone, among other things to get rid of the GIANT lock and enable SMP support in the kernel. There was also a new threading implementation, a new I/O block layer and all sorts of stuff that needed more exposure.

What I mean by this - out of frustration because I want to love this new release - is that the 5.x release of android, on the couple of devices I upgraded is, buggier, laggier, and less stable than version 4.x. In terms of usability, I also noticed that they removed the ability to only display contacts that have a phone number: I can live with that but I can tell you my dad was furious about this. Another minor annoyance is that switching to a different WIFI network seemingly requires more taps than before. I've owned a few IOS devices in the past - an OS I am not a big fan of - but I am disappointed that Google routinely overlooks those kind of details that Apple certainly wouldn't.

Your comparison is interesting since everybody I know has said exactly the same of iOS 7.

In 5, its two swipes from the top, then tap the name of the WiFi network or the word WiFi (under the signal icon)

Seems pretty good to me.

In 4.4 I swipe down once then press and hold the icon.

Ah, yes, the-gestures-no-one-knows-about-unless-specifically-told.

1. Swiping down with 2 fingers brings you straight to the settings drop-down (vs. the notification drop-down). 2. The WiFi icon and the text beneath it do different things when pressed.

> I haven't experienced faster updates

I thought the Nexus devices were the first to get new updates. Does this not apply to Nexus 10 and Galaxy Nexus?

Among the 3 devices I had, I'd say the nexus 10 was the fastest to get updates, but it did so later than other 'newer' Google devices (e.g nexus 7, nexus 4). As for the other devices, several times, the much longer delays were officially explained as being the fault of HTC/Samsung. I still think google devices are a better choice but the faster updates are largely a myth.

Hmm, how are faster updates a myth? Samsung Galaxy devices don't run Lollipop still, months after release. Most Samsung tablets won't run anything newer than Android 4.2/4.3, even if they were released in 2014.

How are faster updates a myth? O.o

Because it's not always faster and there are always exceptions for some devices.

But still way faster than any non-Google device so not sure I agree that it's a myth.

I guess we are playing with words here. A specific google-device will have its OS update earlier than a similar non-google-device. Catch is, more recent google or non-google devices usually get the update earlier.

Google would like you to believe that you will get your update as soon as a newer version has been released, sort of in an Apple IOS update way. The reality is very different.

I bought a G1, The Google special edition.

It is still a perfectly usable device but gets no love or updates. Apps decay as new versions don't support it. I keep it in my room as an alarm clock with an incoming only Sim in it.

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