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It's not a bunch of baloney. If you have used Nexus 5 post-lollipop you will experience significantly decreased battery life. http://blog.gsmarena.com/benchmarking-android-5-0-lollipop-b... Project volta doesn't mean improved battery life. There are many factors to battery life that are not addressed by Project Volta.

It's a major release with ton of changes - there are going to be bugs. That doesn't mean entire release was useless.

Besides this article isn't about execution quality - it is about where Google's alleged lack of focus is - it said Lollipop was all about Material design focus where as in reality feature focus wise it was a well balanced release.

If you have used Nexus 5 post-lollipop

Is this kind of a glass half empty thing? The dramatically more popular Galaxy S5 saw a significantly improved battery life. If we just include those data points, and average across users of Android, it was a huge net win for users.

This article is clickbait garbage (again a "contributor"), and it allows people to ply their grievances as if they are canonical.

This. Strange to see so much hate on Google. I've never seen that anywhere else.

The problem is Google is coupling improvements in performance and battery life on the backend with additional bloat on the frontend with all their design/animation stuff. So we're not actually getting any real gains here.

Agree, I've observed the same for L on Nexus 5, and battery life is not the only problem there, there seems to be a system memory leak that constantly eating up free memory until even the launcher is killed... I had way more free memory, and no leak on JB.

Since there might be a bunch of Nexus 5 "me too" users reading this. The immediate solution to the memory leaks and battery issues are to reboot into recovery and clear the cache every 2 weeks or so. This is what I've been doing for a month and it hasn't been so bad as before.

Same. Disabling dynamic floating preview (keyboard) also helps. For an extra boost, though it may be a stretch for some, get in dev mode and disable animations.

>"The immediate solution to the memory leaks and battery issues are to reboot into recovery and clear the cache every 2 weeks or so."

This reminds me so much to Windows 95 ...

"This reminds me so much to Windows 95 ..."

That statement is so wrong... I switched to linux from Win95 because the bluescreens sucked so bad. No comparison really.

While that may be a 'solution', that is absolutely insane.

> Project Volta focused on Battery Life

According to Google. According to independent benchmarks, battery life got worse on a whole slew of devices.

> They changed the entire runtime to ART for performance

But did it actually get faster? Not by much.

> Material design was a much needed solution to coherent UI across Google's properties

Are the UIs coherent across Google's properties? Half a year on the answer is still no: Implementation is spotty across the first-party apps, many of which directly violate the guidelines given to developers.

More than likely, material design bloat ate any improvements in performance or battery life introduced by backend optimizations.

As I understand it, Material (and Microsoft's Metro, interestingly) aims to be better on battery compared to predecessors if only because it's a simpler UI with larger plain blocks of color, minimal decorations, and far fewer "expensive" effects like gradients or translucence\transparency. That doesn't mean said wins aren't immediately consumed by other parts of the system, even other parts of Material UI widgetry. Regardless, the simpler flatter design frees up some resources (battery, ultimately) which can then be used for other things, like smooth animations and transitions.

Compared to Holo, Material adds a lot of generated shadows and animated elements. Holo was fairly 'flat' already, and far simpler.

"But did it actually get faster? Not by much"

It's a new runtime, and expected to get better and faster. If you don't like it that much, and you sound like you really HATE Android, maybe you should use something else. You'll feel better.

I think it's kind of unfair to accuse me of hating Android because I criticise it. I've been using Android since 1.6, always been a big fan, but as a power user and a developer I'm much more aware of Android's shortcomings than any Apple fanboy could possibly be.

Maybe I've conflated your response with others here who seem to have a huge dislike for Android and an obvious bias against anything Google. If that's not you then I apologize for the misunderstanding. I can understand being realistic about a platform and providing criticism, but a lot of the comments here can truly be characterized as hate.

>> "And they are focusing on moonshot projects for exactly the same reason that article claims is Google's problem - being complacent."

MS Research has been doing this kind of thing for years. Most of the projects never go anywhere. Google isn't the first company to do R&D - they're just really public about it to try and improve their public image.

Google is trying and delivering a whole lot more than MS Research ( did MS ever have a public prototype for anything?) - Glass, Self Driving Cars, Google Now are all tangible things that show concrete effort to make entirely new products and also make existing products better. They may not all be instant consumer hits but the point was about complacency - and this isn't complacency, it's the exact opposite.

Microsoft became complacent with WinMO, even few office releases were meh. Windows stagnated until security blunders forced them to react. Google on the other hand isn't being complacent with GMail (Inbox), Android (Lollipop), Chrome (v41) or Search (Google Now).

Microsoft famously launched the Surface tabletop computer :)

>> "Google is trying and delivering a whole lot more than MS Research ( did MS ever have a public prototype for anything?) - Glass, Self Driving Cars, Google Now are all tangible things that show concrete effort to make entirely new products and also make existing products better."

Glass flopped. Self-driving cars haven't been released and there are plenty of people working on that (Google just makes a big PR thing out of it) and Google Now is great (although hardly one of their moonshots?).

>> "Google on the other hand isn't being complacent with GMail (Inbox), Android (Lollipop), Chrome (v41) or Search (Google Now)."

Inbox is certainly interesting but most people I know don't like it. I did like it but moved away due to rising features. Lollipop killed my battery life and slowed my device to a crawl. Chrome has become sluggish and bloated. Like I said Google Now is great but only if I give Google all my data and give up all my privacy (search history, location history).

Lollipop killed my battery life and slowed my device to a crawl.

Given how profound you seem to think most everything of Google sucks (seen in a multitude of posts of yours throughout this thread), I'm curious what device you have that Lollipop "killed"? I'm going to call bullshit

HN has seen a HUGE influx of Microsoft shills, and it's getting disconcerting.

And an almost immediate karma punishing (-11 in less than a minute), despite this story sitting on the second page. Does Microsoft give an extra bonus if you sign up for HN? The astroturfing PR efforts have gotten quite a bit more pronounced. It feels like the glorious Slashdot days of old.

No love for MS here. Nexus 5, Nexus 7. Battery and speed. The 7+lollipop was a bummer for me, I used to be kinda proud of it. Now it needs ongoing maintenance (cache clearing).

All complex software has bugs, and Android has become enormous (I tried to update AOSP earlier this month and gave up after about 40GB of repo deltas. This enormous activity, itself, completely invalidates the garbage linked post).

This post and a large percentage of the comments, and the moderation, is essentially a "shit on Google" post, somehow trying to make Microsoft look better in some relative sense. It is terrible fanboy noise.

And the gent I responded to just picked up someone else's grievances. I would wager good money they have no Android device "ruined" by Lollipop. They just want to legitimize their walls of anti-Google screeds.

EDIT: I've really riled up some astorturfers. Any post I make is almost immediately attacked.

Well, for what it's worth, your posts are quite reasonable and balanced. And I think your observations are accurate, I've noticed the same things.

I have to agree with you about the MS shills. Seems pretty bizarre, especially with all of the hate on Google that appeared instantly here. They also include incredible love for MS products, which I don't see anywhere else. Sure feels like an astroturf campaign.

Agree. Inbox is an OK product but nowhere close to expectation. It's a product of mixing ideas, not a product of revealing essence.

Daniel Eran Dilger, the apple fanboy had a brilliant observation on John Sculley's Apple:

"In general, Sculley's Apple consistently produced ambitious but unrealistic technology plans that attempted to over-achieve at a price that failed to capture a sustainable segment of the market. " (http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/7C942A13-E006-4EBB-A4...)

Yes, I think Larry Page is another John Sculley.

Edit:

Actually I think GoogleX projects are fine, b/c they are in fact PR projects: couple of billions here and there to maintain a hi-tech myth. Money well spent!

The problem is the products like realtime search, Buzz and G+. They are ill designed, poor planed, poor executed and have 0 substance.

Yes i agree Google-X plans are ambitious.It's really hard to tell how unrealistic are they, but they did achieve some pretty brilliant results(self driving car driving 700K miles, Google loon progress[1]), And as for price, Google do seem to be mindful of prices. As examples: their self driving car, used as a taxi would be very affordable,Google loon is aimed at the 3rd world(so they surely planed for costs),Their glucose lens don't seem expensive(electronics are usually cheap) - but surely sell for a good price.

[1]http://www.quora.com/How-is-Project-Loon-doing

>> I think GoogleX projects are fine, b/c they are in fact PR projects

Two much collaboration with serious companies for that to be true. Unless you're saying everybody invests time and money in such PR efforts.

"PR project" is subjective and doesn't need to be the same for all parties involved.

"Collaboration" means nothing in the business world. How many serious partners did Apple have when developing Copland, Taligent?

Most recently I can think of HoloLens (http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us) and the Surface Hub (http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-surface-hub/en-us). Kinect was also a research project. Cortana also uses a lot of MSR tech. So do the Surface tablets, especially with handwriting recognition.

I agree with your point, but looking at the projects,there's a clear difference between the companies: most of MS's projects(maybe except hololens) have large business value risk, on top of the technical risk.

On the other hand, most of Google's projects don't have much of a business value risk. If they'll work well, most likely they'll make good deal of money(unless the competition wins - but i believe Google also thinks hard on making projects hard to copy , or some other substitute challenges the market - but hey what can you do?)

There's a lot of weird language and engineering research that they do that then propagates back into the developer ecosystem--I think you aren't giving near enough credit there.

I only just realized the Simon Peyton Jones (of GHC fame) works at Microsoft Research.

Microsoft research vs Google is an interesting case, especially considering that Google's glucose sensing contact lens project originaly started at microsot research, but Novartis is licensing them from Google.

>> Most of the projects never go anywhere.

Just in case you needed some backup for this point:

Google X started sometime in 2009-2010. In the time its been around only one project - the project around "Engineered Architecture" was successful and the team was able to form a company called Flux (https://www.flux.io).

Funny, they're being sued now by the architect they brought in with the idea for the program:

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3039930/fast-feed/architect-sues...

> Also remember that Google brought us HTTP/2 when Microsoft and Apple were completely ignoring the web.

You only have that half-right, Microsoft hasn't been ignoring the web for several years, but Apple still is. The problem for Microsoft is that it can't move the web anymore. The center of gravity is in mobile and they don't have any market share there. Apple doesn't want to move the web, their walled garden is making much more money for them and there's no need for competition.

MS still has lion's share of the desktop and enterprise though - they could have put out something open like SPDY with IIS and IE support built in and that would have made a difference.

Apple is damn right for ignoring the web, JS is an extremely immature language (I say that working with it everyday, even with ES6 and experimental ES7 features).

Developing a real app with JS, where you have rewrite everything that's already in UIKit, Foundation, etc from the ground up, sucks ass. Your app is automatically slower, less APIs to work with, and is extremely limited in technologies. It can't do layout or many features better than the frameworks that countless engineers at Apple built and work on.

It's waaay less about walled garden and more about quality and the philosophy of the web. Is the web supposed to be what many of us want it to be? I love that browsers are being beefed up, but it increases the attack surface for hackers, increases more points of failure in your application because of some weird quirk by one vendor, there will be 20 people with 20 different frameworks and 20 different ways on how to do an app the right way, and most important, newbies will become extremely overwhelmed by the noise and lack of direction in on the platform.

If the web was a better platform, apps would not be so successful. But it's not (for now), it sucks so horribly and keeps me frustrated. We need more companies like Facebook (React) and Google (less so because of their scatter brain strategy: Angular, Web Components, Polymer, whatever Gmail and Youtube are built on) that shape the web

And now you got it completely wrong. Where did stuff like canvas, CSS animations and transforms appeared and who was driving that?

Need some updated examples. Those are very old features. It's nice that Apple has done some good things on the Web but they are not a leading actor and we shouldn't pretend that they are.

> Also remember that Google brought us HTTP/2 when Microsoft and Apple were completely ignoring the web.

That's a terrible example since both companies contributed to the standard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2

Huh?

>The httpbis working group considered Google's SPDY protocol, Microsoft's HTTP Speed+Mobility proposal (SPDY based),[5] and Network-Friendly HTTP Upgrade.[11] In July 2012 Facebook provided feedback on each of the proposals and recommended HTTP/2 be based on SPDY.[12] The initial draft of HTTP/2 was published in November 2012 and is based on a straight copy of SPDY.[13]

It rather looks to me as if Microsoft arranged the article, as it is rather partisan, and then organised the comments - so the article and comments taken together indicate that Microsoft is still the old Microsoft. It is fairly easy to distinguish between the genuine comments and the deceitful ones. Typically, the latter have a somewhat unpleasing tone.

Click bait at its finest

They did a lot of great low-level yet user-facing work (butter, volta) but it seems like ART complete fruits are still to be seen.

Inbox is a copy of MailBox and Accompli's mail app...sometimes we have to give credit to others...

why downvotes when I said truth?