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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I like how people hold the freedom of the Android market against Android. "I want to force every developer to do things Apple's way, because change scares me." The solution to that is to write your own software, not to refuse to let people publish theirs. Want a consistent interface? Shut the fuck up and write some code.

Let me know when my iPhone (+) can turn off its ringer when I get to work, or when I can chat on IRC over ssh, or when I can share my location with my friends automatically. One app may have purple buttons or its own keyboard, but at least my phone can do something useful.

(+) Warning: literary device. I do not actually have an iPhone.

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I must second this. I use Locale on my ADP1 (better known as the G1), and it's one of the most impressive things I've ever seen on a phone. I never have to worry again with my cell going off in class, as it knows when my classes are and when to turn the ringer off. This is the precise kind of thing that Apple disallows by restricting you to a set of whitelisted APIs which explicitly do not allow you to mess with system settings or run things in the background. The freedom of the Android market is one of the reasons that I find Android to be a better platform even in a strictly technical sense-- you can simply do more with it.

Have you tried running an Android with multiple apps going at once, especially when its memory is close to full?

No multitasking on iPhone is a feature.

It's not really fair to compare an Android device with 32M of RAM to an iPhone with 256M or RAM.

Try multitasking on a Nexus One or an Archos 5 Internet Tablet. It works brilliantly.

What?

I've got an HTC Hero with 200-some megs of RAM. Open a couple apps, thing slows way down and gets choppy.

Change scares users. By forcing developers into one consistent UI, Apple has done the correct thing from a user-friendliness standpoint.

* Want a consistent interface? Shut the fuck up and write some code.*

This approach leads to the exact opposite of a consistent UI. Look at desktop Linux.

It's consistent for whoever wrote it.

If you want your definition of consistent, you are going to have to write your own software.

Is this a serious comment? If you write your own software towards your own definition, then, by definition, others have different definitions, thereby making things inconsistent.

> This approach leads to the exact opposite of a consistent UI. Look at desktop Linux.

Ever looked at the KDE desktop? It's much more consistent than both osx and windows.

The correct solution for Android would be for Google to release UI guidelines (perhaps these exist, I don't know) - but don't stop developers from innovating and then letting the users decide what is best.

at least my phone can do something useful

Meanwhile, my iPhone does useful things in ways which are usable.

But seriously, we get it already. You hate the iPhone with the heat of a thousand supernovas, and don't seem to feel bound by much of anything -- logic, facts, basic civility -- in coming up with ways to express that hatred. Meanwhile, life goes on and the world doesn't end just because somebody liked something you didn't like.

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