Like all OS's, Android has its issues. However, the biggest issue Android has is Google. I don't think the search giant is quite in tune with what it takes to successfully run a commercial, consumer driven product like Google, and I think Google is going to kill Android. It's death by a 1000 cuts. There isn't any single problem that is going to kill Android. It's a bunch of little ones that collectively add up to difficult user experience. Here's a few.
Come on. I know the screen can rotate to landscape. It works on alternative home screens, after market ROM's, and even my Asus Transformer Prime. The screen won't rotate on handsets running stock Android.
The menu placement isn't consistent even among Google's own apps. On Play Store and Google Docs, the menu is at the top while on Contacts and Voice, the menu is at the bottom in portrait and the top in landscape, like Gmail. On other apps, the menu moves around as well. I am constantly looking for the menu! Gmail takes menu's ridiculousness to new levels with a menu for the app and a menu for each email. Ugh.
There's a lot of them. The image above shows 16206 of issues marked as defects. The theory is that you can star an issue to cast your vote and supposedly the most starred issues get addressed first. Only 432 are marked "Assigned"--meaning someone is working on it leaving 15774 in limbo.
Two emails later and no response. I will be old(er) and grey(er) before I hear back.
Now I can only find them in the list of All apps (right), which includes apps installed onto any Android device I own, which is three. I have a Droid, Galaxy Nexus, and Asus Transformer Prime. The list of all apps is also not sorted or sortable, so I have to scroll through hoping I see the one I want. That is not helpful.
I thought it might have been a bug since I was only seeing it on one device, but now I am seeing it on others. If you are so inclined, go star this issue.
Just take a look at the software and hardware buttons on these home screens. Some of 3 buttons. Some have 4 buttons. I think the symbols were inspired by the Mayan calendar. Worse, the hardware button functions can be re-assigned functions by developers. Isn't that just fun when some well-meaning but woefully misguided developer decides to change how the back button acts for just their app.
Google does have developer guidelines, which they revamped in the last few months, but Google doesn't enforce them. There is some hope. OEM's and Carriers that want to have the Android Market, I mean Play Store, on their devices must support the stock UI. That should save developers from have to write custom layouts for each UI, but it's still a long way from consistent.
What Google did between versions, however, was pretty bad. Going from 2.x to 3.x and then 4.x, they made some significant changes to Android and notably the UI components. Many apps from earlier versions would run on later versions, but wouldn't look right. Apps written today for ICS require special handling to support previous versions. I haven't dove into multiple version support yet, but it's a pretty nasty mess. Google did create a compatibility API/SDK components which abstracts some of the messiness of supporting many different versions, but it isn't without its quirks, and few developers have re-written their code to support it.
In general, developing for Android is harder than it should be and supporting all of those versions it difficult. If you are developing an app, do you write to the 2.x train which is old or the 3.x or 4.x? Wait, 5.x is coming.
The problem comes in when you are in a task, leave and do a few things, and then return. For example, I could be reading a web page, switch to email, launch a link to read a new page, switch back to email to write a note about the page I was reading, then switch back to the browser and I end up not at the last page I was reading, but the one I started on because the second task in which I was using the browser was taken off the stack. The life cycle is working as designed, but it's a bad design.
Perhaps rather than giving away Android for free, Google should start licensing the OS to OEM's, create an P&L for Android and treat it like a business. Or maybe Google can take some of its $9,983,000,000 in cash to create an Android support team and start to resolve some of the 16,000+ defects.
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