Saving Android From a Second-Rate Future

2) You cannot force your definitions of Android on people to get them to buy "the one true Android". People buy what they like. They like the S3 better than the Nexus. Talk about different priorities. S3 is starting to get the Jelly Bean update too.

3) There is something called emphasis in good designs. Android was designed to let people have choice. It was designed such that Samsung can ship TouchWiz and users can effortlessly install $ANOTHER_LAUNCHER to get the experience they want on the same phone.

4) Developers have dealt with complexity arising from diverse devices before. It is not a big deal. If you are crying about testing effort you aren't doing it right. If you care about reaching to 50% and growing number of Android users you are just going to have to do it right and invest in testing your app on most phones by releasing timed betas or buying your own dozen of phones. Remember it's been done before, done right and done by god knows how many developers that have good apps in the Play Store.

5) You can't crib about higher maintenance costs if you buy a big house. You similarly can't crib about differences in Android skins if you bought into a diverse ecosystem. Good news is you have a choice - care about purity, updates etc. - get the Nexus. Care about bleeding edge hardware, 2GB RAM, quad core CPU - get the S3. Care about iPhone-esque build quality - there is One X. As long as there is something I like there is no problem. If I don't like something in iPhone land - I have no recourse. That's their emphasis in design - less choice.

Android is working as designed - sure there are those upgrade issues that can be made better - but for the most part it is not the normal users who are complaining. As long as they can get things done with their Gingerbread phone they are happy. The next one down the line will get them a Jelly Bean phone that can still run the stuff they bought.

Does this mean that if I apply a custom theme to my Windows7 install it is no longer "true" Windows7?

Older phones not getting Jelly Bean is a silly complaint at this point, can't we get past this?

I just really don't get these type of articles, I can only assume they are link bait since they rarely make any sense. Then there's the entertaining comments as people argue over their phones as if it matters somehow in their lives.

And here I am commenting on it, argh, the cycle never ends!

Is this guy trying to convince me of something? What's the point of this article?

At least the author justified his stance by describing the devices he's purchased. This has become the tech industries "I'm not racist because I have black friends" statement that is starting to appear in so many places now.

Is TouchWiz Angry Birds really that different from MotoBlur Angry Birds or CyanogenMod Angry Birds?

Fragmentation is not that big of an issue among the Android users and developers I know. A craptastic multimedia stack was a much bigger negative.

I say this from a household with 4 Android devices and no Apple ones, incidentally.

Yes, the iPhone is massively successful, but there's billions of people in the world who will never own one, and that's the market that Android is capturing so well. And to do that, they don't need to be perfect.

"Every iPhone comes with iOS exactly as Steve Jobs intended, which means developers know precisely what they’re getting."

On Android, that's not the problem. All Androids, as uglified by OEM add-ons as they might be, are highly compatible with applications. All Androids running the same API level of Android, even the Kindle Fire, run all the applications that use those APIs. There are optional APIs that some apps depend on, but those dependencies are also completely unrelated to OEM customization of Android.

The problem is that "customized" Androids are hard to upgrade. That means that, while all the iPhones that can run iOS 6 will be running iOS 6, there are many many models of Android devices that will never be upgraded to Jelly Bean. And that reduces the value of a lot of the Android installed base relative to Apple products in the field.

That alone solves the dev problem with Java ME that you would potentially need to do hundreds of separate builds for different devices and so on. With Android you have one version for all devices.

From that perspective, Android has gone beyond Google's wildest expectations and it solved at a basic level many of the Java ME problems, but that's not even close to the same goal that Apple had when they made the iPhone.

Why are people surprised that a system that was designed from day one to be what it is today isn't the same as iOS?

Turns out, the RAZR M that's available like, everywhere, is also the same way. Huge screen, smallest bezel I've ever seen, same form as the iPhone 5.

I was a lot, lot, lot more worried about Android a year or two ago. A year or two ago Blur was god damn awful. And irremovable. And there were NO phones on the market that offered an updated experience or an unlocked bootloader. Today, we have the Nexus line. We have Motorola and Samsung offering "Developer" edition phones that we can load our own OS onto.

tl;dr Android customization has been reigned in, though likely because of consumers buying in patterns and HTC/Moto/Samsung realizing that fewer and cleaner modifications in Android allow them to perform updates faster.

(also, I think Google would do themselves a favor in more than one way by accepting T-Mobile Theme Chooser into Android proper so that Motorola/HTC/Samsung could use that to provide visual differentiation instead of brewing their own theming jars.