“In March 2012, I publicly called it quits with Android. This raised a bit of a stir, that coming from such a long history of being an open-source advocate I would forsake a platform I had spent so much time using and was so philosophically aligned with,” Jason Perlow writes for ZDNet. “Things began to go sour with me and Android in 2011, which I referred to at the time as the year of Android multiple personality disorder.”
“In 2011, Android handsets and tablets ran on totally different OS builds, Gingerbread and Honeycomb. The overall poor quality of the hardware, as well as the horrible stability of the Android tablets of this period, was a reflection on this situation, which was eventually proven to be untenable,” Perlow writes. “Both of my Android smartphones turned out to be victims of carrier and manufacturer abandonment.”
“You’d also think that going with an actual Google flagship device would avoid some of these problems. You would be wrong. In July 2012, I declared my Verizon Samsung Galaxy Nexus to be a lemon,” Perlow writes. “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I bought a pair of iPhones for my wife and myself, and a Nokia Windows Phone not long afterwards.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: How could anyone with a conscience be “philosophically aligned with” yet another obvious ripoff of an Apple paradigm-destroying revolution? Don’t say, “open,” because everyone with at least two brain cells to rub together knows that’s a total joke. There’s very little “open” about Android beyond how it holds its arms to accept malware.
The fact is that “Android” is a rushed, half-assed iOS knockoff that wasn’t initially designed to be a touchscreen computing device.
Those who settle for knockoffs deserve their fate:
• Inferior performance
• Inferior battery life
• Rampant, debilitating fragmentation
• Insecurity that will only get worse (both on their devices and in their minds)
• Second-rate and worse apps, a smaller app library
• Developers after-thought effort
• An increasingly expensive (royalties for patent infringement, (RAM costs) platform which makes device assemblers cut even more corners
• Envy of iOS devices and their vibrant, thriving ecosystem
• Shoddy plastic devices from unfocused companies that manufacture everything from refrigerators to backhoes
• The conscious or subconscious knowledge of using a knockoff of an Apple device
• A markedly weaker choice of accessories
• Poor, inconsistent or non-existent vehicle integration
• Etc.Your ignorance and/or self-defeating hatred of Apple results only in hurting yourselves, Fragmandroid sufferers.
Here’s what Google’s Android looked like before and after Apple’s iPhone:
Related articles:
Apple’s iOS is twice as memory-efficient as Android – November 17, 2014
Before iPhone, Google’s plan was a Java button phone, Android docs reveal – April 14, 2014
Prior to Steve Jobs unveiling of Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android didn’t support touchscreen input – April 14, 2014
How Google reacted when Steve Jobs revealed the revolutionary iPhone – December 19, 2013
Speed and responsiveness: Apple’s iOS performs nearly two times better than Android – October 9, 2013
The unsung, intrinsic Apple advantage over Android – November 20, 2012
Apple to ITC: Android started at Apple while Andy Rubin worked for us – September 2, 2011
MDN has about covered it…maybe add:
• Android is for poopyheads.
“I publicly declare ….”. Who cares. What’s the matter with these self-important attention seekers.
Funny you should publicly ask.
Guilty as charged.
Got frustrated with articles with no new information. I publicly declare I own Apple stock.
No. If he wrote an article with that perspective and pimped it to MDN, then you’d have a point. Commenting is not even close to the self-important self-indulgent wailing of the article linked above.
After all that, he still gets a Windows phone?!?
That’s the amazing part, and which shows this guy’s mentality. After living for years with apps on both Android and iOS, he tries to got to Windows Phone, where apps are about as plentiful as oases in the Sahara?
He is constantly keeping up with the relevant players in the space. Unlike the large majority of users that buy one device/OS and stick to it like glue then comment on how bad the ‘other’ devices are.. Tech changes all the time, it is not surprising that there will be some that show an interest in actually using the new HW and then commenting.. No need to disparage this author. 😛
Android sucks!
BUT forget bashing android !
IOS 8 itunes music sync and icloud need some serioise attention !!!
Brocken itunes sync if u have your own songs or ripped songs from cds. Huge problem. Dont know why apple is not solving this?
Icloud is a an incoherent mess!
Instead of bashing android.. We shoukd put our energy pushing apple to fix these and other problems.
That will benifit everyone more than bashing android !
I am surprised at the star rating!
The problems i stated are real and need attention!
All u have to do is go to apple forums to find out !
Is this how u guys expect apple to even get better? Pushing problems under the carpet and give low rating to posts and people who bring them up ?
Behavior of some apple fans is truly Scary..
I am heavily invested in apple..but if this is the mentality, it is trully scary .. specially if it extends to managemnt at apple too !??
It’s because you’re being disingenuous and crudely trying to direct attention away from an argument instead of addressing it.
Tales of a supposedly broken iTunes does not make android suck any less.
1-Read the first line of my original post !
2- im not redirecting attention to something irrelevant!
Read the last line of my original post !
Tales? I am experiencing that problem.!
There is no solution offered by Apple!
Ios 8 has a huge problem syncing non itunes purchased music, your own or ripped from cd. and messes things up to a point where one has to delete all my music from iphone/ ipad .. And resync while keeping fingers crossed.. … And next thing you know magically things are screwed up again and back to square one !
Music disappears…playlists get confused… Album covers get mixed up !
I did not have this problem till ios 8 cam out!
Go to apple forum and see for yourself how many have this problem rather than stick your head in the sand and call the problem a tale!
Your reaction is the proof in the pudding !
I’m surprised assman hasn’t yet jumped all over this thread.
Wow, everything MDN wrote about Android was once said about Mac and its users with regards to Windows not too long ago. How the apple HAS turned! 😀
Seems a bit over done, hardware is definitely android. That said, I still love ios more. I don’t like a closed ecosystem though. I have an ipad an a sony xperia z2, I can say hands down he sony is far more premium phone than my old iPhone 5s. It also has the specs to blow it say. The low ligh performance an waterproofing are incredible. I wish apple actually let other phone makers use ios (I know that’s wishful thinking). That said I won’t be switching back to ios unless apple really steps up their hardware game. After all that, I’ll say 95% of android phones suck! the xperia series, lg, an htc’s premium lines are very nice. Besides the note 4, Samsung isn’t even on the map.
Yojimbo… Not sure what issues you are experiencing… I still buy 95% of my music via CD’s.. and have yet to have a single issue syncing to any of my 4 iOS devices… I see this with people at my workplace constantly, and it’s usually a misunderstanding of HOW to sync.. Select your songs, and click sync… It’s nearly dummy proof..
When you make something idiot proof, nature makes better idiots to overcome it.
And Two Sides.. Are you basing that argument on “tech specs” or actual in person, daily usage performance?? If I remember, there was an article that was posted recently stating 1gb ram in an iPhone is more efficient, and offers more performance, than 3gb in an Android. It’s NOT wishful thinking. That would be a MISTAKE to open it up.. Android phones have higher specs because they need more performance to run a schlocky OS.. Just like Android devices also went bigger screens NOT due to customer demand.. It was to make more room for bigger batteries so the phones didn’t die in 3 hours..
Yes real hardware, I have no doubt the a8 is more efficient but performance is performance. You mean to tell me qualcomms snapdragons are crappy? That’s why they are among the highest demand processors on the planet. Power is power just like in the car world you won’t get the power out of a 4 cylinder as you would from a v12. If apple actually produced 3gb of ram in a unit that would be quite impressive.
Not all os are created the same, sonys layout is very minimalistic, more so then even apple. I get two full days out it, to say all of them are the same is just dumb and ignorant. I like both devices for their own reasons, the whole high horse routine works with people who fall for it. Basically what I’m saying is apple owes it many to step up the specs.
I’ve had the iphone since the first gen when it came out around the Motorola razor. I’ve had the 3G, 3GS, 4s an 5s. Same goes with iPads. I still enjoy them I’m just a irritated at apple for not stepping up with specs an the ignoring problems with ios such as dreaded wifi problem. Things like this are making lose faith in a company I used to swear by, maybe it’s just because Jobs is gone.
…coming from such a long history of being an open-source advocate…
Many here at MDN have proven that Android is NOT, and never was, actually ‘open source’. It’s only ‘open’ as much as Google allows it to be ‘open’. It remains substantially proprietary until such time as Google decides to let it go public. IOW: The ‘open source’ argument is dead.
Then there’s the fragmentation problem: What do you call an operating system that CANNOT be updated on most of the hardware that runs it? What exactly IS that? ‘Oops, you’re stuck with what you bought, forget about updates, you sucker.’ Whatever it is, it’s not a good thing.
I could toss the word ‘SECURITY’ into the conversation, but I’ve never seen the point of beating a dead horse. *snark* 😉
If you are claiming Android is not open source because the core Google API that adds to AOSP Android is ‘proprietary’ you’re also commenting that any company producing commercially sold APIs for Linux or any other OS currently considered Open Source makes that OS also non-open source.
The fragmentation argument is overblown, the infographic commonly used to ‘prove’ this is one that shows the user share of every Android device in comparison to each other and has little bearing on the actual number of devices that will run any particular App.
As the celebrity photo debacle that was big news this year. Security is a shared responsibility between the user and the OS/ecosystem. Android just happens to need more responsibility on the user end in the majority of cases. 😛
If you are claiming Android is not open source because the core Google API that adds to AOSP Android is ‘proprietary’ you’re also commenting that any company producing commercially sold APIs for Linux or any other OS currently considered Open Source makes that OS also non-open source.
This isn’t an area of my personal expertise. Others here are FAR more knowledgable and taught me about the situation. But I will point out that the crux of the matter is that Google has full control over what Android code hits the street. They NEVER have allowed all of ongoing Android code production out into the public, ‘open’, sphere. Google fully controls Android. It doesn’t qualify as open source, despite the rhetoric. The Android project is NOT on equal footing with actual open source projects.
Hell no, fragmentation is NOT overblown. Enjoy a couple articles on the subject, one of which is mine. The fragmentation graph is points out the nighmare:
http://mac-security.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-lifes-like-on-other-side-nausea.html
http://opensignal.com/reports/2014/android-fragmentation/
As for the celebrity photo ‘debacle’, it was the culmination of six years (2009 – 2014) of phishing and dictionary attacking user accounts. The naked celebrity photos from those six years were collated and dumped onto the Internet en masse.
Yes, phishing and crap passwords remain big news of every recent year. This had nothing to do with Apple security, as has been pointed out be both Apple and security experts. That’s in spite of Apple indeed having an iOS security flaw uncovered in the summer of 2014.
IOW:
– Please don’t be ignorant.
– And please don’t spread mythology about Android being remotely ‘secure’. It’s not. You can stick to using Google Play and STILL get thoroughly PWNed. That’s crap security, thanks directly to Google.
Meanwhile, when Apple screws up security, you know I’m going to point it out and write about it.
Actually Google does NOT have total control of what gets added to AOSP similar to how other open source Linux projects have no control over what gets added to their ‘cores’ but retain the ‘right’ to consider changes to that ‘official’ core. Google Android is AOSP with Google’s added APIs and as such they have control of those added portions exclusively. Other Android OSes derived from AOSP do not include any of the Google products or Google Play access.. Part of the misunderstanding seems to be the confusion people have between AOSP and Google Android being the same. As such Google Android is not to be put on equal footing with ‘other’ Open Source projects as you state.
As a developer that will distribute Apps via only Google Play it drastically cuts down the potential target devices since as I noted above only those that use Google Android will have access to the Google Play store. By default all devices that use Google Android have the option to use 3rd party App stores turn off, protecting new users by a large margin. Both the articles for which you have given links, use the infographics I mentioned in my prior post. They simply represent the market share of each device in respect to each other and in no way describes the actual common capabilities of those same devices. If you exclude all devices that are NOT Google Android the chart would look a lot more ‘solid’. This is what I mean by overblown. The majority of developers will develop Apps with the intention of sale on Google Play and Amazon App Store.
The OpenSignal article section on Screen fragmentation focused on the actual screen size and not the resolution of the devices which is what is important when developing the UI especially with static size images/backgrounds.
The sensor fragmentation is limited in the sense that the majority of Apps will rarely make use of the ‘fringe’ sensors listed. This to me this is akin to expecting iOS developers to need to keep in mind support for any new ‘add-on’ sensors. (e.g. thermographic sensor) when developing their Apps.
I will give on iOS being more ‘secure’ presently, but my point earlier as stated was that security is a shared responsibility between the user and OS/ecosystem. iOS just made it easier for users to forget that. My apologies the example leaned towards iOS vs phishing and directory attacks.
I don’t think I’m being ignorant, but I will have to give my opinion when I think the comparisons are being made in a skewed way. For those that get thoroughly PWNed as you say, they tend to be the ones that for one reason or other download a ‘copy’ of popular titles. Even in those cases the App in question rarely lasts a week in the Google Play store. Weighing in the other direction, there should not be excessive FUD implying Android is devoid of security. Security is still evolving so I’m not going to generalize that future OS/ecosystems will remain only as secure as they are now.
Good to hear you’re keeping the watch. 😀
Thank you for an EXCELLENT reply. I bow to your greater experience and wisdom. 😀
With Lollipop, I think Google has taken a good step into improving Android security.. http://www.zdnet.com/pictures/android-5-0-lollipop-embraces-the-enterprise/