Friday, November 23, 2007

Best Android Critique so far

Unqualified Reservations blog has the best critique of the Android platform I have come across so far: Five problems with Google Android.

Some quotes from the blog:
In the Android design overview, everything in the middle two layers (framework, runtime, library) is closed. For example, you cannot add your own presence manager, your own media types, your own browser, etc. You could probably build some of these things at the user level, but compared to the built-in versions they will suck.
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But there is a substantial difference between a device in which programmers have to use the Android Java framework and one in which it is only the default option. The latter is strictly more powerful. And describing both as "open" is an unnecessary overloading of the term. (Perhaps Google, since it places such a premium on corporate honesty, could call its platform "fairly open" or "pretty open.")
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With a lot of work, with good layout and compositing and so forth, it is possible to make a raster UI look pretty good. The Android UIs look pretty good. But they don't look anywhere near as slick as the iPhone. When you don't isolate device coordinates completely from the programmer, they leak everywhere. You are constantly deciding whether that line is 1 pixel or 2 pixels thick. And your designers curse you all day long.
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What will Android 2.0 look like? How will an Android application recognize which version of Android it's running on? What happens when Nokia decides to use Android and add a few special classes of its own?

As the history of both Unix and Java shows, standardizing programming frameworks is not an easy task. They tend to drift and fracture, and become very hard to improve or evolve. If the Android people have thought at all about this, I see no evidence of it.
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I don't think the business model works.
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What incentive do they have to make Android 2.0 the greatest thing ever? Suppose Nokia adopts Android and starts bombarding Google HQ with an endless stream of feature and change requests. How responsive will they be? How long will it be before they start telling the pallid, slant-eyed Finns to just code it themselves, or go screw a reindeer? And if the Nokians choose the former, how likely is it that their patches will wind up back in the main Android codebase?


See also: Worst Android Critique so far.

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