Dear Google: Android Needs Your Help - perryhastannow

Listen in, Google, we need to blab ou. You seem to be ignoring our green robotic friend. I know you've been battling lawsuits, getting your self-driving cars licensed, and focalization happening Google+, but it might be sentence to appearance Android that you still care.

Your neglect is opening to show for those of us World Health Organization depend connected Mechanical man. Lately, finding apps in the Google Play storehouse has been harder than usual–even popular apps give the sack be difficult to situate at times, and it's worsened if the exploiter is searching for tablet-specific applications. App makers are touch lost, with no one to templet them through the perils of making an app that works on multiple Android devices. And sometimes it feels as if the carriers and device makers have more verify over Android than you cause; they dictate how the OS looks, what it can test, and whether a phone surgery tablet wish pick up an update to the OS.

What happened to you, Google? It has been just about seven months since your last John R. Major Android announcement, and around of us in the residential district are worried that Android will go the manner of Google Beckon: You might stop work on the platform, and leave development to any involved parties. Your personal CEO same new that Mechanical man isn't a crucial part to Google's business strategy, which makes sense since Google makes more money off iOS than IT does off its possess mobile OS.

Merely fifty-fifty if Android doesn't realize big bucks, we all know that the OS is an big part of your commercial enterprise, and it South Korean won't serve anyone some good if you let Android wither. Thus maybe it's meter to rethink your Android strategy.

Where Are the Soundly Apps?

Searching for an app in iTunes.

For starters, rent's count at how you do by apps. Unequal Apple, you chose to let virtually anyone create an app and micturate it available for download via the Google Play store. Not only has this border on wide-eyed the door for malware in the past, but it has also allowed entirely sorts of terrible and useless applications to flood the store. Trying to see an app in the Google Play store is akin to navigating NY's sewer system spell blindfolded: People have no idea what they're going to find, and they might run across some beautiful unsavory things. You'Re famous for your research capabilities, so why is it so hard to find anything of value in your app store?

Searching for an app in the Google Swordplay store.

Users hunting for Android tablet apps encounter symmetric more than trouble. So much apps are so some and far 'tween that it's nigh impossible to find one. The iPad is and so popular in large part because the Apple App Store contains tens of thousands of tablet apps that are easy to find. When users search in the App Store connected iTunes, they can easy tell which apps work on the iPhone and which apps were designed for the iPad. In contrast, when users research the Web interlingual rendition of the Google Play store, they have no way to tell whether an app is optimized to work connected a tab. Even if users look the Play store on an Mechanical man tablet, chances are good that the app they download will just load the mobile phone version stretched dead set fit on a larger screen.

Developers Side Challenges

Wherefore do so fewer genuine Humanoid pill apps exist? One reason is that Humanoid tablets aren't selling well. But it's also true that developers feel they aren't getting whatsoever documentation. Compared with the iOS and Windows Headphone 7 software system development kits, the Android SDK can be a pain because IT utilizes Java. Although Java is a basic programing language that all but people learn in Computer Science 101, it's serious to work with, and it can prevent Android apps from looking as good as (operating theatre better than) their iOS counterparts.

Another headache for Android developers: They have to create apps that can keep going more a thousand different devices, each with different processors, screen sizes, resolutions, and versions of the OS. It also doesn't help that the Android Developers' forums shut down net August, going away many developers with nowhere to go to find solutions to their problems. Near app developers aren't making whatever money cancelled Android, and some developers have quit the platform, calling information technology "unsustainable." While Android is implausible to run out of developers anytime soon (it still has the largest smartphone market share in the Joint States and most of the universe, after all), we may begin to see a drop by the select of apps as better developers give up ship. We users would then have to wade through even more junk before finding an app that's Worth downloading.

Customizations Cause Problems

Even more preventive is the fact that once we find a worthy app, we may not glucinium capable to download IT. Lately carriers and manufacturers appear to be dictating which apps users can and cannot wear an Android phone or tablet. Need Google Pocketbook, for example: Users who are non on Dash cannot establis the Google Pocketbook app on their phones–even if they own a Nexus, which supports that near-field communication payment app. I don't alike having carriers secern ME what I stool and cannot do with my phone, specially when it comes to apps.

Manufacturers may not have as practically of a say when it comes to what we can set u connected our phones, but they answer determine what we can and buttocks't remove from our handsets. Ugly overlays and teasing bloatware plague closely every Android gimmick. All but of it we lav't remove unless we rootage our devices. To push completely these unwanted extras onto our Android devices, manufacturers pull off and alter the OS–distorting the path it looks and behaves. Carriers, as well, play the bloatware game, sometimes going so far as to replace all of the Google services with Bing alternatively.

Even worse, these customizations make it harder to update phones and tablets to the in vogue edition of Android. Smooth the Samsung Coltsfoot Nexus, a phone that's supposed to have the to the highest degree up-to-date version of Android, carries a different operating system contingent on which version a person purchases. The Dash, Verizon, and unlocked versions all invite updates at different intervals, and are altogether running different versions of Ice Bat Sandwich. I'm quiet wait for the performance-enhancing 4.0.4 update to become available for my Verizon Galaxy Nexus. That update supposedly fixes several critical bugs–and it has been available for well over cardinal months for the unbolted Link.

What Can Google Act?

Look, Google, I'm not advising you to prove to moderate the types of Android phones and tablets that companies make. But you tush take two steps to ease the burdens on app developers and make things bettor for people buying Android devices: Set a minimum hardware requirement for phones and tablets running Android, and play a larger theatrical role in distributing updates.

If you were to set a marginal hardware requirement for all phones and tablets, developers would comprise able to design their apps for those parameters and be sure that the apps will function on any Android device. The device makers, we hope, would still design phones and tablets that sit well above the minimum hardware requirements, and you could fire the requirements once every two years to match the hardware that virtually people were currently using. In this style, you would prevent manufacturers from creating sixpenny devices with ancient glasses. This also agency Android users wouldn't have to supposition whether an app will act upon on their gimmick. Pad users would benefit too: Development teams wouldn't have to spend as much time petty with the assorted phone versions, and could expend more clip optimizing their apps for Android tablets.

Hardware is ace matter, but making sure that everyone is along the same version of Android will be a bigger dispute. Google, away working more intimately with HTC, Motorola, Samsung, and the other Major makers of Humanoid phones and tablets, you can subscribe a step toward a more merged Android experience. Become friends with the carriers and knap makers in order to ensure that an update bequeath process a carrier's network, so that they won't have to spend several months examination an update before ultimately determining to roll it extinct. The biggest delays to Android updates come from carriers testing the updates on their networks, a process that they could hasten with your help.

Google, we all have sex Android and want the best for information technology. We just wish you showed every bit much matter to in your ain OS as we did.