The Null Device

Top 10 Android gripes

An Android developer posts his top ten complaints about the mobile platform.

5. The Developer Cooperative

Remember back to college and that Economics 101 class you didn't take. In that mythical class, they might have talked about a term called the tragedy of the commons: the misuse and overuse of a collectively owned resource. In the case of Android, that common resource is the memory, processor, and battery life of the handset. The tragedy is that any application, while in the background, can use any amount of resources. This is why performance and battery life on Android handsets can be so unstable.

Google just expects programmers to use fore and background cycles wisely, which most of us do, right? However, one careless developer can single-handedly demolish a weekend's worth of battery power in a matter of hours.

Needless to say, others include it being based on Java, and market fragmentation making it difficult to test on the ever-increasing range of Android devices out there.

There are 2 comments on "Top 10 Android gripes":

Posted by: datakid Wed Jan 20 23:54:51 2010

"What's worse is Google knows how to protect valued code; Its Maps, Gmail, and Store applications aren't open source."

The far more important one, to my mind (maybe because it's my field), is the google translate and translator's toolkit data. They are taking data from translators, but not making it freely available. By utilising large numbers of Translation Memories - as the two way "dictionaries" are called, essentially a two column spread sheet - they will be making their move into Machine Translation - translation being a $12 billion a year industry. Marry their newly acquired TM's ( with their search data set, people "correcting" translations at translate.google.com Nobody has successfully created a centralised data warehouse for translators - because it's their bread and butter - if you give away your TM, you loose your competitive advantage in the market. Of course FLOSS has po files and lang files and what have you lying around, but nothing centralised, all silo'd away in each individual projects

Posted by: datakid Wed Jan 20 23:58:45 2010

between translate.google.com and Nobody put the segment:

and their massive server set and you have someone that has cornered the translation market just like they did the search market. Let's hope they make it available for free.