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Comment by houseabsolute | Hacker News Reader

Android team: failure has never looked this easy.

It would take too long to numerate the demonstrations of incompetence in the Android ecosystem. I guess I'll just point out a couple:

* How about that Update All button on the market application? Oh wait, there isn't one.

* Nice next and previous conversation buttons in mail. What's that you say? Neither is available on the screen itself, and the two actions are in different parts of the menu?

* Truly impressed with that universal copy and paste. Um, about that.

Seriously folks. The phone should never have launched with these deficiencies and the many others that better people than I have noted. But to allow it to stagnate and still not address them for so long? That's flat out contempt for the user.

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Those are all minor UI nitpicks. Android is open-source. If an "Update All" or better placement of Forward/Back buttons in Gmail app is so important to you, you should add it.

Enough minor UI nitpicks, and there are more than enough, begin to stack up. The "it's open source, fix it yourself" defense is tired, especially when given for a device I'd pay for (if I didn't have the good sense to own an iPhone -- or anything else -- instead).

Also, lack of copy and paste is not a "minor" nitpick. As I recall it's one of the things that iPhone haters would not stop harping about when Android first came out with the half-baked copy and paste it still has today. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofQqhJ_fa2M) Even if that wasn't the case, it's a major, serious deficiency in the device whose absence I would miss on a fairly regular basis if I didn't have it with my iPhone.

I have to reluctantly agree. I love my Droid, and prefer it to iphone, but the Cut&Paste is a mess.

Wait, what problem are you seeing with copy&paste? I use it every day across multiple apps and I've never noticed a single problem.

Couple of things for you to try:

* Copy-paste anything from the browser to elsewhere. You see how you have to go two-deep into a menu? For iPhone users, they just tap the text they want to copy, the drag to put the bounds at the right place.

* Try copying anything out of a received gmail message and pasting it somewhere else.

Nobody is forcing you to use it or to send in a patch. Android is an ambitious project that will probably leave the iPhone in the dust within about 6-12 months. Google has not even begun to be aggressive with pricing.

That no one is forcing me to use it is true, but completely irrelevant to the discussion.

> that will probably leave the iPhone in the dust within about 6-12 months

If I had a dollar for every time an open source advocate claimed incorrectly that their preferred solution would leave its proprietary competitor in the dust in "just a few months," I'd have a lot of money. Not so much in the opposite direction.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't open source software come to dominate every single industry except perhaps defense? Apple has some nice stuff but it's proprietary nature is a throwback to the 80s.

The consumer electronics industry?

I'd argue that much embedded systems code on consumer electronics devices was probably compiled with gcc.

Of my consumer electronics devices, about half are based on open source (appletv, nexusone, roku, linksys access point)... I don't know about my toaster, microwave, etc.

My blackberry is not, and I doubt things like tvs and dvd players are, but every day there are more benefits to companies using open source. The main threat to this is the GPLv3 license, but fortunately that's not getting too much traction.

Except that it should be pointed out that not all of the applications are open source; in particular, market and gmail (the two discussed here) are proprietary.

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