

Nothing in Android makes sense except in the light of its original vision - siglesias
http://dcurt.is/nothing-makes-sense

======
edderly
Disagree

> And RIM’s BlackBerry was still the most popular smartphone in the world.

If your world was the USA. Symbian/S60 was the dominant smartphone OS.

> 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.

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).

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).

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.

The only way Google can reduce manufacturer freedom is to become truly non-
free, on the day that happens, Android will fork.

~~~
dcurtis
Thanks. I have fixed the error about RIM.

~~~
edderly
No problem, I've also toned down my reply.

~~~
hoi
Yep exactly, and that was why the Symbian Alliance formed. It was to prevent
microsoft from doing what they did to the PC world. This is also one of the
reasons ARM thrived instead of Intel.

The other lesson that is still being battled is patents, Internet protocol is
essentially free. Wireless is not.

The other main difference is carriers, they are the gatekeepers to the
valuable, yet resource limited spectrum that mobile phones need and therefore
have a much larger control over the value chain than ISPs do for the Wired
Internet.

~~~
shareme
NO! The Symbian Alliance Formed because Nokia wanted to control its
competitors to such an extent to make them never able to best Nokia. They did
that by doing closed versions of Symbian that were never open to the Symbian
Alliance.

~~~
hoi
That happened later, Symbian spun out of Psion. The first Symbian based phone
was the Ericsson R380. The biggest difference between all the members were
that the ones who took control of a UI built up more control. These were
effectively Nokia and Docomo, hence why Symbian was used so much in Japan on
their "feature phones" and S60 became strong.

UIQ used by many of the other manufacturers was never developed by any of them
and was effectively an orphaned UI company.

------
pazimzadeh
Fun fact: The title is likely an adaptation of the quote "Nothing in biology
makes sense except in the light of evolution" by Theodosius Dobzhansky.

------
lmkg
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.

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.

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.

~~~
redthrowaway
>hardware companies are bad at writing software

Oh god yes. I work for a major hardware manufacturer. We are by far the
dominant supplier in our field. We are making a web app that allows our
customers to control, operate, and mange our products. It's garbage. Let alone
the fact that it's written in Java using seam convos, there was just no
thought whatsoever put into UX. For instance, if you press the back button, it
takes you to the previous page. So far, so good. However, if you try to
perform some (any) action after that, you get a Java stack track and, weirdly,
a "your session has timed out" error.

I brought this to our development lead, and his official, written response
was, "lots of web apps break if you use the back button. If you use the back
button during a ticketmaster checkout, you get an error. This isn't a
problem."

Again, our hardware is fantastic and we have well over 50% market share in a
massive industry. We just don't have the institutional give-a-shit to go with
it on the software side.

~~~
zecho
Yeah. I've seen Cisco software with buttons that do absolutely nothing. Click
them all day long. They do nothing. The documentation says they do something,
but they do not. Or GUIs that don't allow you to resize the window, despite
the fact that a third of the GUI is cut off.

I get a sick enjoyment out of watching our sysadmins flip out about software
GUIs designed for the hardware they're running.

------
rdouble
_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._

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.

~~~
harshaw
Yeah but I got to put stuff on my resume like experience with windows mobile
2002 and Symbian UIQ :)

At Orange we toyed with pushing an Android precursor from Savaje. However, the
timing wasn't right - hardware wasn't powerful enough and Orange/FT didn't
have the balls or corporate DNA to establish something like the OMA.

At Orange (or probably any carrier) getting a device out the door was a
clusterfuck. You had to coordinate between the Device manufacturer (who never
had any flexibility in their software schedule), the various operating
companies who wanted phones in shop by Nov 1 for the Holiday or else, and
various PM's running about trying to get features on the phone to help with
their particular mandate (at the time it might have been music, IM, etc).

So yeah, anyone with half a technical clue could see that you could get shit
done faster with a common OS. WHat's amazing is that with a little bit of
juice from Google and a crack engineering team from Rubin they managed to
totally dominate the non IOS smartphone market in a couple of years.

People seem to have this odd view that Android is deficient because it doesn't
have some IOS optimizations. But look - if I told you to build something on
one set of hardware and make it great that's 10x easier than building an open
system. Yeah, closed systems may win in the end (and Apple is winning) but
ANdroid couldn't be Android without a wider perspective.

------
TurnitUP
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).

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).

~~~
rsynnott
Ah, no. On release, for a few months, the iPhone was _$500 with contract_.
Yes, really.

------
ZeroGravitas
This is one of the biggest myths of Android. Apple doesn't have manufacturer
skins, therefore they must be utterly and irredeemably evil.

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.

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.

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.

------
fauigerzigerk
The original vision is a good one and it works.

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.

Scolling works well on my Nexus S by the way.

~~~
bitwize
_Limited choice of devices._

GOOD.

 _Restrictive censorship rules for users and developers._

If the government isn't doing it, it ain't censorship. Look at what quality
filtering through an approval process did for the video game industry. The
same force is in effect on iOS, and the quality of iOS apps is consistently
pretty high, especially when compared to Android.

Scrolling was total ass on my Epic 4G until I loaded some custom ROM where
they did some sort of low-level magic to deliver an "ICS-like" experience on a
Gingerbread code base.

It still sucks, though, because unless you have a GNex, to get this UX on
Android you have to visit some forum where l33t kids hang out and dink about
with your phone, flashing its ROMs and potentially bricking it, and only then
can you have something that vaguely suggests an iPhone in smoothness.

With Apple, it comes with a butter-smooth UX right out of the box.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
_If the government isn't doing it, it ain't censorship_

It is tantamount to censorship once you have chosen iOS, because that choice
makes Apple the government of your content.

But whatever you choose to call it, fact is that they restrict content based
on value judgements that go well beyond anything you could ever call "quality
assurance". They ban everything controversial regardless of quality.

------
TeeWEE
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.

So scrolling is indeed a bit worse than IOS, but its not really painfull
anymore. You should give this guy a Galaxy Nexus.

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.

The point here is: You do not have to be the best to rule the market! And
Google knows that.

However the Galaxy Nexus is the best phone out there, much better than any
iphone.

------
djhworld
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.

Mobile phones are still a very competitive market and manufacturers want to
differentiate their products to attract customers from another

~~~
huggyface
Android became popular with manufacturers because they desperately needed to
all gang behind one platform to have any hope against the incredible success
of Apple. While quite a few vendors signed onto Android even before the first
handsets, they did so at no cost and in name only -- the original Android army
were the absolutely miserable G1 and G2 (HTC Dream and Magic), and it stayed
that way for some time. At the time I was sure the platform would fail.

As Apple grew, the necessity to commit to Android grew.

Boring parables about why Android made a mistake because it isn't like iOS are
as old as both operating systems, during the same time that Android has done
gangbusters. My wife has a Captivate Glide with Gingerbread and Samsung's
TouchWiz on it. She _loves_ it. She doesn't know or care what ICS is, gets
constant updates for the mapping and market and book reading and video
viewing, etc. For the average real, non-blogging human being the model works
remarkably well.

~~~
djhworld
Yep, but if Google just said "Here is our OS, you may put it on your products,
but you may not deviate from principles set out by us" none of them would have
taken up on it.

Mobile phone hardware is generally the same across most devices these days and
most of the "Joe Public" don't care what's on the inside - so the software is
where the manufacturers try to differentiate themselves from each other as a
selling point

------
there
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
([http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/01/06/google-imposing-gui-
rest...](http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/01/06/google-imposing-gui-restrictions-
on-android-4-0-devices/)).

~~~
dcurtis
Android 4 does use the GPU for some things, however scrolling performance is
still nowhere near as good as it is on iOS.

The "unmodified Halo theme" is referring to the icons and interface elements
included with the operating system that developers can use when building their
apps.

Google even said this: "We have no desire to restrict manufacturers from
building their own themed experience across their devices." ([http://android-
developers.blogspot.com/2012/01/holo-everywhe...](http://android-
developers.blogspot.com/2012/01/holo-everywhere.html))

~~~
there
Your article complained about manufacturers implementing custom, poorly
designed interface changes which make testing difficult. Google remedied this
by telling manufacturers they cannot modify Halo, and so every app developer
can use Halo and get the same result on every device.

 _Google even said this: "We have no desire to restrict manufacturers from
building their own themed experience across their devices."_

That is talking about a different theme called DeviceDefault. Why would any
app developer use DeviceDefault instead of Holo when it would make testing
difficult and give an inconsistent look to their app?

------
barrkel
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.

------
richworks
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?

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?

~~~
jan_g
There are millions of users out there (including myself), who don't care about
smoothness or (in my case) don't even notice any difference between an ios or
android scrolling. Also, you have to take into consideration the fact that
majority of users had considerably slower feature phone before buying android
phone. To them, android is blazingly fast.

------
hoi
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).

Disclosure: I worked at Symbian between 1999-2003

------
cpeterso
> _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_

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?

------
manojlds
The final suggestions makes me think that WindowsPhone is the perfect middle
ground between Android and iOS

~~~
sounds
I think the mildly-open nature of Android will be better marketing than
Windows Phone - not overboard on openness, but not completely closed.

Hardware manufacturers and Cell providers won't support the extra cost of
paying for the OS (in the long run).

This outcome isn't what I would like most, but it seems realistic.

------
Gotttzsche
huh, i think i just gave him kudos; what the hell was that?

------
stretchwithme
Its a shame they didn't at least establish some rules on how manufacturers
could modify the interface.

~~~
djhworld
If they did this none of the manufacturers would have taken on the platform
though. Why should Google dictate to them what they put in their own products?

If Google wanted to standardise Android they should have never released it as
an OS for all and produced the phones themselves.

------
drivebyacct2
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.

~~~
brettnak
I agree that the scrolling is pretty smooth. It's not quite as smooth as I
think it could be but it's far beyond acceptable. I think when people say that
scrolling doesn't "feel right" on a Galaxy Nexus is because of the distance
you have to physically move your finger before it responds and actually starts
scrolling. I think this is deliberate to prevent people from accidentally
scrolling, but nevertheless, I think this is what people are seeing.

