I've used my droid for a month, and most of the time it has been flawless. It doesn't have the dialing issue my blackberry tour had. I have only had to force quit a couple of times, and usually when I was exiting the app anyways. My only complaint is the keyboard and sometimes the phone comes out of sleep (setting a lock pattern prevents this) and dials people that I didn't want them to. Other than that, the phone has been great. Fast as I would expect, and plenty of apps to keep me busy.
I'm sorry, but every time I have checked out a G Phone or the Droid and tried to scroll through their menus, I am both thoroughly disappointed at how jerky it is and a bit shocked that for some reason, no other company has been able to pull off the smooth touch screen scrolling like the iPhone has. It gets me every time and is a big reason why I wouldn't purchase a Droid, as pathetic as that reason may be.
Huh? Companies other than Apple haven't been able to make scrolling work nicely because Apple folks don't want to hear Steve Jobs say, er, whatever magic words you have in mind?
What am I missing here?
[EDITED ~1m after posting to add: Perhaps what you mean is that the reason why Apple has been able to do it is that everyone there is scared of having Jobs tell them their user interface isn't good enough. But the previous poster's question wasn't "how come Apple were able to do this astonishingly difficult thing?" but "how come other companies haven't bothered to do this apparently easy thing that would make the user experience so much better?". Jobs's perfectionism can hardly explain that.]
Basically the phone detects that the app is locked up, and brings up a dialog asking you if you want to Force quit or Wait. If you force quit, it kills it (probably something along the lines of kill -9)
I wonder why this is even necessary - I understand on the iPhone this is an immediate kill -9, no user intervention required. This seems like the correct way to do this - to expect your average phone user to operate this like a PC power user is absurd. "Force quit" should not be in the vernacular for operating a phone.
The iPhone doesn't have to deal with this because it doesn't support multitaskeng, hence an app becoming "unresponsive" isn't such a problem. To be honest, I would be rather angry if the OS shut down my browser process just because some image-heavy website slowed it down for a few seconds.
One of the reasons I like Android is that I got more control over stuff and I know I'm not alone. Some people don't like the Apple "we know what's right for you" mentality. My point is, people are different, there's no "average phone user". This is not a question of technical skill as there's really nothing technical in "wait" and "force quit". Some people like to be in charge, some people don't, personally I do.
actually, the iPhone OS does support multitasking, and it's used quite heavily. you can start a call, then the phone app continues to run in the background while you start something else. the iPod app runs in the background playing music while you're running other apps. and so on.
even if iPhone didn't allow multiple apps to run at once, it would still have to deal with crashes. it handles them by unceremoniously quitting the dead app and sending you back to the home screen.
claiming that an average user should be able to know what to do with a dialog box that gives the options 'wait' or 'force quit' ... man, that sort of thinking by competitors is exactly why apple keeps winning all the time, isn't it.
If an app crashes on Android, of course there are no questions asked. We're talking about unresponsive apps, not crashes. And as far as I know, the iPhone only allows "system" apps to be background apps. You can't listen to Spotify while browsing.
About the other issue: I think Apple "keeps winning all the time" because of the combination of the consistent experience they deliver bundled with a competitive line of auxiliary services (such as iTunes or the App Store) and very strong branding. There's nothing wrong with that, but I don't think that artificially limiting the choices available to the user is a huge contributing factor.
Actually, iPhone will kill -9 unresponsive apps also. Try writing an app that sticks itself into a tight loop, then start giving the phone inputs (home button, touches, etc)... the OS will soon realize your app is out to lunch and kill it.
I can think of some sort of hypothetical scenario:
I'm using my Android phone loaded with some sector-specific application that's, let's say, not written so well. Occasionally, when I go scan something at the factory with it, it takes a while to process because there's more data than the author thought there would be (or something like that), and the application hangs for a few seconds before returning an answer that I need to do my job.
I'm just playing devil's advocate though, I have no idea how common that sort of thing is or if it should be the default behavior. Just that in an open environment, there might be some less than stellar applications that the user should be able to control, rather than the phone.
Devs don't work in a vacuum even though some think they do. If the app was released through the normal app store it probably wouldn't see the light of day in that state. The reviewers would reject it until they fixed it. If they are distributing through enterprise than they would be hauled in to the office to fix it.
No application should be so busy that is consuming all the resources.
