Google has conquered the world with its Android mobile OS. Now that they’ve wiped the floor with their competition, will they get down to business and actually finish the OS they started? I’m not so sure…
Updates
Google initially built Android in the era when updates were done in major monolithic blocks. This was the BlackBerry era, where phones lived and died on the software they were shipped with. Fast forward nearly a decade, and Android isn’t in much better shape. With phone prices creeping ever upward every passing year, it doesn’t make sense to have to buy a new phone every two years. When you’re spending $850-1000 on a phone, you expect it to last. These are ultrabook prices here, and you can easily get five years of use from a quality computer. One of the biggest reason PC’s have the longevity they do though, is directly tied to how their OSes were designed.
When we look at Windows and Linux in general, drivers and other hardware level software elements live at a different layer than the OS itself. You can update each OS independently of the drivers, never needing to get Intel, Nvidia, or AMD’s approval first. And yet somehow we have to get Qualcomm’s, Verizon’s, and AT&T’s buy in with phones? Why? It doesn’t have to be this way though, and it wasnt this way on Windows Phone, nor is it with iOS.
Google has a very odd relationship with its OEMs, basically forcing each of them to build their own version of Android from the skeleton that is AOSP. Every phone manufacturer has to have its own team of software developers to tweak and bug fix the base that Google provides. This really offsets a great deal of cost from Google, and unfairly so. When you look back at the windows ecosystem, Microsoft provides a fully featured OS, that OEMs don’t customize at all. OEMs simply ensure that the devices they utilize have the proper drivers installed, and focus 99% of their energy on hardware innovation, and power management utilities. In the phone market, it’s closer to a 50/50 split, with phone manufacturers needing huge teams of developers to make AOSP useful. You can’t just install AOSP on some hardware and call it a day, but you can totally do that with Windows 10.
Google needs to take ownership of their OS. As it sits, every botched update, every out of date phone missing security patches, and every still-born phone in the world, is Googles responsibility. Microsoft released security patches for Windows XP nearly 15 years after release and people still think thats not good enough, yet Google gets a pass. Google can’t be bothered to send automatic patches to anything that isn’t a Pixel. Google is so focused on harvesting user data, tracking cell tower information (even on inactivated phones), and busy invading your privacy, that they forgot to care about your security. Your security doesn’t make Google money though, so it is and may always be a red headed step child for them. They’ve got better things to do though, like shill YouTube Red. Every. Time. I. Open. The. App.
Enhancements, missing features, spinning wheels…
While Android has received a new revision every year since its first release in 2008, the content of those updates has often been skin deep. Google has this long running history of changing things for the sake of change, but never actually improving what they already have. They change the color of the system, change the look of notifications, redo the app drawer, move the Google bubble from the top to the bottom of the screen, and change the search from square to a pill and then to a rounded rectangle. How is this better? They keep making minor visual tweaks and calling it a new OS instead of actually making it more useful, or improving its performance. Instead of improving their communications client, they rebrand, and rehash. Google Talk turned into Google Hangouts. SMS was added to hangouts. Google Voice did SMS also. Then they took away SMS from Hangouts, and abandoned Google Voice for several years before updating it again. Then they updated Google Voice finally, and released Allo for chat, and Duo for video…
Google has Hangouts, Allo, Duo, Voice, and Messages (SMS only)…5 different apps for communicating with people. There’s a reason everyone uses Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp instead. Google can’t make up its mind. Google Play Music and YouTube Music…two services doing the same thing, and Play Music hasn’t seen a meaningful update in 2 years. Sense a trend? Google is embedded in a permanent state of community abandonment. Release a product, then ignore it for years. At least Microsoft understands the need to cancel failures proper (even if they take too long to do so).
Features Google still hasn’t added to Android yet: restart options, a dark theme, native icon pack support, messaging/communications API for unified messaging, night mode (just now added in Oreo), battery life enhancements, performance enhancements (still slow on flagships sometimes), etc. Besides missing features, in some cases we have areas where Google has actively gotten worse!
Gboard, their newest iteration of the stock Android keyboard struggles with spelling. For example, Gboard has zero suggestions for what to do with “rediculous”, a common misspelling of “ridiculous”. Even though it’s off by only one letter, Gboard thinks it’s correct, yet when you Google the word, you see “did you mean ridiculous?” in the search results. Google’s AOSP keyboard gets it right, but their newer keyboard fails. I guess it’s progress because it has integrated GIF support right? Wrong. Google is too busy making ugly adaptive icons instead of fixing what’s wrong with Android. They’re busy making the Pixel 2 super smooth and efficient on their own hardware, meanwhile ignoring the fact that Android still runs poorly on the other 98% of Android devices that people actually buy. They’re busy making $1000 chromebooks that no one wants instead of making an OS that anyone wants. Android tablets? Look over there, ChromeOS!
Android on tablets was basically abandoned entirely, like everything else Google does. They didn’t even bother to add split screen multitasking to Android until they killed tablets entirely. The Pixel C was the last Android tablet, and it didn’t ship with split view. Now that we have split view, the Pixel C is dead. Basically every useful feature we’ve got on Android was borrowed from Samsung, Apple, or Microsoft. Google is fresh out of ideas, and apparently fresh out of talent. People say that smartphones killed tablets, I say Google killed tablets, because they never gave it a chance. The best tablet you can buy is an iPad, or a Surface Pro; because Google didn’t even bother to show up.
Where do we go from here?
I’m to the point where I’m hoping Microsoft releases a smaller 7 inch or so ARM device with LTE that can make phone calls, but runs Windows 10 proper. I find myself wanting an OS whose developers actually want it to succeed. I can’t switch to Apple because they prevent you from using 3rd party apps as true defaults (you can’t set Chrome as the default browser, links in text or email open in Safari), and Apple has its own flaws that irritate me (updates slow down old devices, battery life, etc). This isn’t about Apple though. I’m a Google user, fed up with Google, and am starting to weigh my options for escape from the walled garden.
I used to be the kind of guy who flashed ROMs, swapped one custom bootloader for another, and tweaked my phones incessantly to get the best experience possible. This all started as a desire to improve Android’s performance and escape the bloat of carrier apps back in the early days of Android. By the time Android 4.4 was out, I mostly quit bothering, as the experience was “good enough”. Fast forward to 2018, five years later, and I’m flashing ROMs again. Why now? I’m experimenting with a Google-free Android experience, and while a lot of incredible apps are impossible to get outside the play store, the experience is pretty amazing, despite the downsides. I don’t recommend that anyone flash ROMs; in fact I’d advise everyone I know to avoid it. It’s a royal pain to do, voids your warranty, and possibly bricks your device if you mess it up. While I’ve stuck to builds of Lineage OS (the dusty remains of Cyanogen, may you rest in pieces), I’ve discovered how much faster and more efficient Android is, sans Google. Sure you can flash the Play Store and Google Services, but I’ve avoided doing so for the sake of experimentation. Avoiding Google is purely political at this point. What amazes me though is how a bunch of developers can make what is in my opinion, a better Android, in their spare time. It’s a pretty damning indictment of the ecosystem’s so called benevolent “do no evil” overlords.
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