This isn’t an iOS vs. Android thread, although I’m aware this might come off that way to some. I’ve been using Android phones since the Galaxy S4 and at the time it felt like Android was far and ahead the best smartphone OS at the time. It was objectively better than iOS in 2010 in just about every metric apart from UI fluidity.
I’m not so sure about that any more. I still do prefer Android - the UI, the customizability, the ability to sideload apps, etc. That said, why is it that every single time Android gets a feature that truly makes the phone more usable, Google goes ahead and guts that functionality, only for Apple to actually give a shit about that feature a few years later and do it way better.
Just off the top of my head, I can’t believe Google screwed up:
- Android Beam
- Google Now on Tap (not to mention all the things it did that Google Assistant can’t)
- Hangouts (not necessarily Android but it could have easily been better than iMessage)
- Nearby Notifications
- Android @ Home
- Bump!
I get that Google as a company is out to make money, but do they really have to shut down any functionality that isn’t directly generating revenue?
Ironically if their products were not so fragmented and short lived, some of them would likely make money.
I mean do you really need to develop a new chat app every 2 years?
Google wouldn’t know a successful venture if it bit them in the AdSense.
Loads of money today or bust.
So they have chosen bust for basically every idea.
Short-term profits allow for faster growing of wealth than long-term profits
So many Google things get half assed and then never get updated. I used an iPad today and it was kind of crazy having the autofill service just work. On Android I always need to click between user and password several times, do a long hold to select autofill and have THAT do nothing. Do a long sigh, open up Bitwarden and copy the password and return to the app only to find the autofill popup offering to fill in the password now. It’s been that bad since day 1 and is pathetic they have never updated what would be such a nice feature.
So yeah, I’d agree sometimes they are pretty incompetent.
I’m fairly sure they only tested the Autofill feature for their own Google Password Manager, and even that one only works 75% of the time in Firefox
I love my Fold 4, but as a life time iphone user, this is one of my many frustrations with Android.
The thing I like most about the auto fill on iOS is that 9.9 times out of 10 you get the little key icon in the top right of the keyboard to open up your icloud key chain, bitwarden, etc. You don’t have to wait for any kind of auto fill to figure itself out you just kinda do it.
Google’s policy with the Android OS is for it to be Good Enough ™ and let the hardware and apps (both of which are mostly bankrolled by other people) make them money. But seeing as the only alternative smartphone OS in the market refuses to acknowledge that the phone belongs to me after I buy it, good enough has to do.
Hangouts was great. Respond to messages in browser, group chats that worked, and a well integrated video calling feature. It was essentially WhatsApp on steroids. Not to mention being able to reply with obnoxiously big emojis before that was a mainstream thing.
I got a whole bunch of friends to switch over to it only for Google to kill it off and replace it with…nothing? I use Messages+Duo now but they’re far from a good replacement.
Google Now was another amazing thing that they killed off. That thing had a card which gave accurate predictions on journey time and notified you if there was unexpected traffic. The weather and news at a glance was really nice too. I changed launchers once it went away.
I don’t know how true this is, but I’ve had coworkers who worked at the company and felt that a significant problem was no real reward for maintaining or improving existing projects. If you wanted to get noticed, you had to start fresh, leaving nobody to care for the projects that were actually succeeding.
I’ve heard this a lot too. A few friends who work at Google always say the way to go from Mid Level to Senior, or from Senior to Team Lead is to create new functionality, despite the fact that it sacrifices old apps and feautres
This is the first time I’ve heard this about Google. Rewards and promotions for people who create successful things but nothing special for maintaining them once they are out in the wild.
Yeah, this is why i want to have a linux phone sometimes…
Can you even do that? Do you need a custom ROM written specifically for the device?
I thought Android was based on Linux anyway.
There are two things referred to as “Linux”. One is the full operating system, sometimes also called GNU/Linux, and one is the Linux kernel, which is just the “backbone” of the OS. Android is an OS that uses the Linux kernel, but it is not a (GNU/)Linux OS. There are some Linux distros for smartphones but they are very few and for only a very limited set of devices.
Android is basically “Android/Linux”, he wants “GNU/Linux” instead
Yep, you can install Linux on a phone, depending on the model and if someone’s made a custom Linux ROM for it - you can’t just download a Linux distro and install it directly, because this is the ARM architecture and the way it boots and the way drivers are handled is quite different from PCs (x86 architecture), which is why you need a custom Linux ROM with the bootloader, drivers, config etc all baked in.
PostmarketOS is one such ROM/distro, and you can install it on some popular phones like the OnePlus 6/6T, but there may be some limitations, such as the camera not working etc. It would be better to instead buy a phone that explicitly supports Linux, such as the Pinephone, the FxTec Pro1, some Sony Xperia phones (SailfishOS), or Planet PDA phones like the Gemini/Cosmo Communicator.
I bought my phone prioritising specs like 256GB storage, headphone jack, 120hz, cameras, etc, and I only realised later that I couldn’t install any custom ROM or even Magisk, as they weren’t written for my device.
So I’m a bit annoyed about that.
Don’t forget the FairPhone
I was talking about the pinephone
You can flash the rom on a lot of current android phones. But now you can get phones like the pinephone which ships with a linux os of your choice. I don’t know what os’s are available but there is more than one. I do know that Ubuntu is one of the main ones that gets installed though
There are two things referred to as “Linux”. One is the full ooerating system, sometimes also called GNU/Linux, and one is the Linux kernel, which is just the “backbone” of the OS. Android is an OS that uses the Linux kernel, but it is not a (GNU/)Linux OS. There are some Linux distros for smartphones but they are very few and for only a very limited set of devices.
No you’re completely right and these are great examples.
I get that Google as a company is out to make money, but do they really have to shut down any functionality that isn’t directly generating revenue?
I mean these are all revenue-generating functionality. Making people want to use Android generates money. That’s why they make it.
But yeah their incessant need to kill off their services instead of improving them makes me personally want to switch to iOS. Their only saving grace is that iOS ALSO sucks so badly at so many things, and that’s without getting into the ethical complications of Apple the company.
My hope is that PWAs usher in an era of platform agnosticity(?).
Googles current structure just isn’t good at maintaining products. It incentivizes creating something new and flashy over making a product good in the long term.
I’ve listened to some panels from some android developers and from some of their comments the communication between departments seems so disjointed.
but do they really have to shut down any functionality that isn’t directly generating revenue?
I wish they wouldn’t, but depending on internal accounting, they probably have good reason to.
Google Now on Tap was so awesome I happily would have paid for it.
I still get frustrated when I can’t just make my phone figure out a appointment from an email or whatever on the screen. Tap was so useful back then, and if they’d stuck with it and developed it with Google Lens, and AI stuff now, it could be fantastically functional.
But nope, we get slow, dumb Google assistant :(
What was Google on tap?
Google Assistant but less focussed on voice and more focussed on what it saw on your screen. Assistant can still do most of its features but you just have to hope it feels like doing it…
coughcough tablets coughcough
Oh new Google tablet was just released? Um, you go first…Things like this are why I left android in 2017.
I keep up with it but I enjoy iOS so much more. Even with its downsides.
It’s the tell-tale collective incompetence inherent to bloated corporations.
Their fail fast policy is not really suitable to anything customer facing.
Probably works great with advertising though.
These services you mentioned are not really Android specific. But yes, Google will kill any product that doesn’t get popular or make money.
However Android itself is better than ever, especially with Material You.
Which one of them isn’t Android specific? They were all features that once existed on Android and were taken away.
They are primarily web based services which also work on Android and iOS. They aren’t part of the Android OS.
