Disagree<p>> And RIM’s BlackBerry was still the most popular smartphone in the world.<p>If your world was the USA. Symbian/S60 was the dominant smartphone OS.<p>> What Miner and Google gambled on, and it seems bizarre in retrospect, was that the carriers and the manufacturers would be good at customizing and improving the user experience of the base operating system.<p>No, the problem was that the available OS's had huge (leave it to the handset vendor) holes (Symbian), or that their competitors had control of the available 'easyish but hard' options (Nokia dominated Symbian). Or that the other options were crap (Windows Mobile), or required S/W engineering experience which was not easily obtained (generic Linux).<p>The miracle of Android was that though it had some gaps in it's implementation, was good enough, and sponsored by a somewhat benign entity (at the time).<p>However, the reason for the handset manufacturers trying to differentiate, no matter how incompetently, or not was that the problem that Android solved also holds a curse. That is that the handset manufacturers do not want to repeat the PC experience of comoditizing the hardware market - What has happened before will happen again - unless we try to retard things.<p>The only way Google can reduce manufacturer freedom is to become truly non-free, on the day that happens, Android will fork.
That actually sounds like a bad idea from the outset. There are exceptions (Apple), but my general observation is that hardware companies are bad at writing software, especially user-facing software. Making a consistent platform by writing a compatibility layer is a rock-solid concept, but expecting hardware vendors to be the ones writing software on top of that layer seems misguided.<p>On the other hand, while they're not good at making the user-space software, it's something every OEM will think that they want to do. So if the goal is to get widespread adoption, it's a good hook.<p>To be fair, most companies are bad at writing software, regardless of type, and even software companies aren't always good at writing software. I don't blame hardware companies, it's just not their core competency, and a hardware-engineering mindset is a poor fit for software design.
<i>What Miner and Google gambled on, and it seems bizarre in retrospect, was that the carriers and the manufacturers would be good at customizing and improving the user experience of the base operating system.</i><p>It made sense in context. Miner was the head of the Orange/FT research lab in Cambridge. A lot of creative engineers worked there but they were hamstrung by the junky phone SDKs available at the time. Android would have been just what they needed.
When Apple launched the first iPhone it was sold for $500 without contract. Within months Apple had cut the low end model and dropped the price by a third to $400. For the iPhone 3G Apple would jump in bed with AT&T, introduce subsidized models, sales would explode and the rest is history. The Apple and AT&T partnership would lead to the Google Voice fiasco and delayed tethering feature rollout and the (still ongoing) download restrictions and low quality videos over youtube. It would be another 3 years before Apple released another iPhone model priced below $500 (the 8GB iPhone 3GS in fall of 2011).<p>The obvious point is that the cell phone industry is hard to break into and the most successful players adapt the realities of the marketplace. It's no surprise to anyone that Google changed Android to make it succeed. (Unless you're MG Siegler; I'm still waiting for the blog post on how he hates iOS because Apple sold out).
This is one of the biggest myths of Android. Apple doesn't have manufacturer skins, therefore they must be utterly and irredeemably evil.<p>On the other hand, if you actually look at it objectively, manufacturers filled in many genuine gaps and made the early Android OS look much better than the default. Various innovations they introduced have been brought back into core Android and/or stolen by CyanogenMod etc. From a business perspective, a lot of Android's permissiveness towards their hardware and network partners has obviously succeeded beyond most people's expectations.<p>So the skins have both good points and bad and there are shades of gray but mostly you get the loud opinion of Android geeks (who want the very latest stock as a point of principle) and Apple geeks (who will tear down anything that Apple doesn't have e.g. big screens) usually with the assumption that what they think is important is the only reality.<p>It's also worth noting that Android is clearly aiming to be more than just a phone or tablet OS, so customisation is probably required to support e.g. car computers.
The original vision is a good one and it works.<p>You need to consider the cost of preventing bad devices and bad UI extensions. The cost is just what you see in iOS: Limited choice of devices. Restrictive censorship rules for users and developers. No checks and balances.<p>Scolling works well on my Nexus S by the way.
The only thing this where this guy is right is the scrolling issue. But he doesnt explain why this is. Android was created initially as a non-touch OS. When they had to support touch they could not totally rewrite how animation was done. This resulted in one thread doing event handling and animation. This is difficult to fix in Android's UI Architecture. And phones hardware often makeup for this fact.<p>So scrolling is indeed a bit worse than IOS, but its not really painfull anymore.
You should give this guy a Galaxy Nexus.<p>Also the UI extensions on top of android are actually one of its strong points. Differentiation is the key here. And they are not so bad.<p>The point here is: You do not have to be the best to rule the market! And Google knows that.<p>However the Galaxy Nexus is the best phone out there, much better than any iphone.
I think the reason why Android has become so popular with the manufacturers is because they're free to customise the OS. If Android was just a one interface, one direction platform I don't think any of them would have taken it up.<p>Mobile phones are still a very competitive market and manufacturers want to differentiate their products to attract customers from another
I had to scroll back up while reading this to see how old it was. The bug linked to is now closed, and the interview is from last year. Android 4 does use the GPU for more GUI operations and Google has mandated that 3rd parties must not modify the default theme (<a href="http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/01/06/google-imposing-gui-restrictions-on-android-4-0-devices/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/01/06/google-imposing-gui-rest...</a>).
I suspect the freedom for carriers is at the root of the similar freedom for users to change launcher, change default applications for the home button, dialer, etc. If reducing the former means reducing the latter, I'm against.
I wonder... if almost everyone knows and complains about the smoothness in Android being not as good as iOS(consistently, I mean)... Isn't Google aware of this? Or does achieving impeccable smoothness come at a cost(increased memory usage?).. which means that Google are in the crossroads here, trying to balance fluid UX and efficient memory management?<p>Or is it because Apple and Microsoft have been leaders in software engineering for more than a couple of decades and may have mastered the ins and outs of Operating Systems.. and since it has been only 5-6 years that Google has been working on Android, are they still competitively behind Apple and MS in this regard? and so that we can hope for improvement?
Symbian was also designed with integration with hardware in mind and providing core API's for manufacturers and carriers to build a UI on top of. This is why the early owners of Symbian were a plethora of manufacturers and operators. Symbian even tried to designate 3 specific UI frameworks (touch, candybar and QWERTY) named Quartz, Pearl and Crystal.. but the shareholders revolted and went their own UI way (hence S60, UIQ & MOAP).<p>Disclosure: I worked at Symbian between 1999-2003
> <i>The hardest part of building advanced mobile phones, he reasoned, was writing the lower-level software that the operating system uses to communicate with the hardware, including the radio baseband and audio/video controllers</i><p>Wouldn't that hardware- and network-specific code be more easily written by the handset manufacturers and network providers than a third-party software (only) company?
I can't possibly imagine how any phone could be smoother than the Galaxy Nexus. Yes, it's taken a long time to get it in 4.0 and it's available to almost no one, but it is finally fixed in my opinion.