Neglect of issues affecting developers and power users of Google Glass

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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.