

Neglect of issues affecting developers and power users of Google Glass - jimrandomh
https://www.glass-community.com/t5/Discussions/Neglect-of-issues-affecting-developers-and-power-users/m-p/122098

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jimrandomh
Text for those who can't get through the paywall:

I realize that the Glass software development team has their hands full with
kernel-panic/boot-loop issues and with getting video calls working again, but
as a developer and power user I'm feeling really neglected and abused. The
ability to pair with a Bluetooth keyboard and run regular Android apps is
important to me. It hasn't worked since November (XE11). The auto-updater is
extremely aggressive and can't be disabled (once you're in the gradual-rollout
set), and every update breaks API compatibility, without warning, even where
warning would be easy to give; so you can't trust that Glass will work for a
demo. There are no Google developers participating in the Glassware Developers
forum. The GDK still doesn't support voice menus on cards.

I waited past the end of my Glass 30-day return window and 120-day CC
chargeback window because I thought things were going to get better. Instead,
they got worse. I have yet to see a version that works as well as XE11 did.
(Except that once a device has had XE16 installed on it, XE11 won't boot
anymore.)

So, there are a few options for Google at this point. Option one, the default
option, is to just plow forward with the current developers and the current
strategy. Frankly, I don't see this plan working out. There are clearly
process problems, the pace of development has been glacial, and competition is
coming.

Option two is to continue with a different development team, or with a lot
more manpower added to the current development team. I get the impression that
either the software development team is less than half the size it needs to
be, or half the development team is working on secret projects that we're not
seeing and not addressing current pain points.

Option three is to make Glass open source. Right now it's exactly as closed as
it legally can be, and this is causing a ton of pain; there are many issues
affecting us developers that we'd be happy to go ahead and fix, but can't.
Google having started from Android, which is open source, and closed it,
really feels like a betrayal of principles. If there are plans to eventually
open it up, then accelerating those plans would make a lot of problems go
away. I've burned a lot of hours trying to get Google to pay attention to bugs
which I probably could've fixed in just a few hours myself. (A leak would also
work.)

When I first heard about and when I first got Glass, I was unreservedly
enthusiastic. Little by little, that turned to anger, as updates broke it in
uses where I had put a lot of effort into getting it working, and Google was
completely unresponsive to my complaints. Now I'm just resigned. I'd like to
see Glass get back on track, but the lack of progress or communication is just
unimaginably frustrating.

This has been a problem for the entire six months I've had Glass. It came, it
worked just long enough for me to set up some really neat things and get
emotionally invested, then Bam! XE12 comes along and breaks it. Start looking
into workarounds, battle the auto-updater which won't let me stay at XE11,
then Bam! Screen dead. Warranty replacement turnaround takes 23 days. Figure I
can wait for XE14, two months drag into three months drag into four months,
XE16 comes out. Instead of a fix for XE12's issues, it renders XE11
unbootable, won't pair with a bluetooth keyboard, removes support for gestures
in regular Android apps, and crashes all the time. But before getting to the
point of finding out it's unusable, it takes some work: got to hunt down new
versions of all the relevant software, because 0% of third-party software is
compatible. So after I've gotten set back up with an only-half-working
launcher and see how broken things are, I start making some noise, and Bam!
Closed: WontFix. So I start making some more noise. Crickets. Oh, here comes
XE17! But not for you, it's missing from the downloads page. Two days later it
auto-updates, and nothing's changed - still crashy, still can't pair with
either of my keyboards, still can't navigate Android apps with gestures.

At this rate, I half-expect Google I/O to find some way to brick my phone.

