Android News
Android Entelligence: A Rebuttal
March 13, 2010 | by Ed Clark
Android OS, Dell, Featured post, HTC, Motorola, Samsung
An iPhone-owner friend of mine recently sent me an article by Michael Gartenberg, author of the Entelligence column on Engadget. Mr. Gartenberg’s article, “Entelligence: Will Android fragmentation destroy the platform?”, presents some interesting things to consider, but is surprisingly inaccurate on a number of critical details. I thought it would be useful to summarize his points here and dissect the major arguments presented, many of which have been parroted by iPhone fans for quite some time now. While Mr. Gartenberg’s statements may help Apple fans feel a bit better about the phones in their pockets, there are some good reasons for the rest of us to question his conclusions.
1. Fragmentation and Linux
Gartenberg compares the current Android milieu to that of the Linux OS, where far too many different flavors of Linux have left it a minor player in the global PC desktop market. In essence, manufacturers and customers have too many choices when it comes to Linux, and so cannot choose. While this may seem to be a reasonable comparison at first glance, there is at least one key difference that Gartenberg neglects to consider: Major PC manufacturers have never committed themselves to the Linux operating system.
Here is what I mean: You can buy a Dell with Linux, but the vast majority of buyers will order theirs with some version of Windows. HP also offers some Linux pre-installations, but the bulk of its sales also come from Windows machines. Can you think of a major manufacturer that has decided to base significant portions of its desktop sales on Linux installations? I can’t.
The same is not true of Android. Everyone knows HTC as the “Android phone maker.” Motorola–a fairly huge company in the mobile phone market–has also committed to Android. Samsung has decided to launch a number of Android-based devices as well, and even Dell has decided that its first forays into the mobile phone market will be based on Android.
As you can see, these are all Android devices, and the manufacturers offering them are not going to allow you to order them with some other operating system. These companies are betting that their devices will sell better with the Android OS than with some other OS. That doesn’t sound much like the Linux situation to me.
2. (Not so) Ancient history, Sense UI, Blur, and Android’s version problem
What this does sound like is history repeating itself. Way back in the early 80′s, Apple was on top of the world, and you could only run the Apple OS on a few select machines. PC clones became Apple’s major competitor, and most of them chose to run Microsoft’s DOS system. Different vendors offered customizations that ran on top of DOS to offer different graphical interfaces. These include Digital Research’s Graphical Environment Manager (GEM) and Tandy’s DeskMate, both of which offered users some new graphical ways to interact with the core OS.
Hmm. Does this sound a bit like the Sense UI and Motorola Blur overlays to anyone else?
Then, like now, there were many different versions of Microsoft operating systems on the market. (In fact, I can still buy machines with Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 at the store today.) In the end, we all know what happened. Because Apple would only allow Apple hardware (and yes, one or two unfortunate clones with pre-installed daggers in their backs) to run its OS, while new PC makers were able to come to market with any version of Microsoft’s OS, Apple lost its market share and nearly went out of business. And a certain famous executive lost his job along the way.
3. An unEntelligent attack?
Gartenberg loses credibility towards the end of his piece. He attacks “an Android enthusiast site” for reporting that Google has promised Android 2.1 for every Android device. He says: “Well, that’s all well and good and smiles and rainbows, but an unverified blog post from some Android enthusiasts isn’t exactly canon to me.” Ouch. Androidandme, you have been served.
(And excuse me, Mr. Gartenberg, but don’t you write for a technology enthusiast site that posts rumors all the time?)
For what it’s worth, I have also heard through my own connections that this particular rumor is true. I also find it telling that versions of 2.1 have already been hacked to run on even the oldest Android model, the G1. But I guess we will see.
Gartenberg also says that older Android releases “such as 1.5 or 1.6…lack newer core features like Google Maps Navigation.” That’s not true, and a quick fact check would show that every G1 owner in the US has navigation now if they bothered to update their Google Maps app.
He wraps up his piece with another quick jab: “I recently tried to install one of the few good Android games and found it won’t work on Nexus One as it has a nonstandard screen resolution.”
Aw, man! He didn’t even tell us poor Android users what that “one of the few good games” was! Just so he knows, I have installed over 40 games on my G1 and my Nexus One, and have yet to see a game fail because of screen resolution issues. Maybe I’m just lucky, or perhaps I don’t enjoy good games.
As a middle-aged guy, I do remember one last thing about those times way back in the early 80′s. Apple owners like me liked to tease our poor PC-clone friends with statements like this:
“Man, the games suck on those things.”
We all know how that turned out, too.
Excellent rebuttal. You covered the points really well, and were able to successfully fight the FUD with intelligent, thoughtful, and logical responses.
Kudos!
When searching the Name "Michael Gartenberg" you can find at Wiki Michael is an "Enthusiast Evangelist" at Micrology chuch. He is part of the M$ PR machinery and badmouthing competing products seems to be his job. There is only very limited credibility on any of his publications.
I own both an iPhone and a Droid (and am dumping the iPhone because of AT&T's lack of coverage in the SF Bay Area, I enjoy my Droid, but many of these arguments ring true, while I've purchased Android software, I would dump my Droid in a minute of the iPhone came to Verizon.
None of the arguments ring true… did you actually read the article?!
crapple lovers are brainwashed, mindless specters
Gartenberg? Is that you? LOL.
parry and thrust old chap. GOOD SHOW
From another middle aged former Apple // enthusiast, I couldn't agree more !
Gartenberg may have gotten many details wrong, and his analogies may leave a lot to be desired, but to this reader, the article does ring true.
Fragmentation: if Android is to succeed, the latest versions must become available in timely fashion on all phones with hardware capable of running it. It's bad enough for users that Droid still can't get 2.1 (sorry, rooting doesn't count). and inexcusable that G1 still doesn't have it. And it's a nightmare for developers, exacerbated by the fact that Android clearly does not provide proper backward compatibility. Developers don't help their cause by failing to make clear what version of Android their apps support. And exacerbated by the horribly-designed and managed Market, which does not provide a structure to specify this info in a uniform way, thus failing to make it obvious and easy developers to do so.
Game compatibility is indeed a problem on my Droid (and presumably on Nexus One). Some apps are truly unstable on 2.0, including layar and spectrek. But the main issues seem to be games with a user interface that depends on a trackball, and yes, screen resolution, but in a way that isn't immediately obvious. How? Games designed for a smaller screen run on my Droid, sure, but because the pixel dimensions are fixed, the physical size of the play area on Droid is so much smaller that the distance between touch positions is so small that my finger touch registers on several adjacent screen areas. (Same problem occurs with closely spaced links on a web page, but in that case I can zoom out to solve the problem.) Between these two issues, even though many games nominally run on my Droid, they are very difficult to play or downright unplayable. Want examples? Here you go: pente, parallel kingdom, mystique, buka, pocoro, crystallight, colorix.
There quite a bit of factual trouble in your post. To set the record somewhat straight:
- Android certainly does provide "proper" backwards compatibility, and that is always a consideration during the development of new versions. It is hard to know exactly what you mean by this without details, but the vast majority of application issue across versions are due to applications using private APIs, and a lot of effort goes into helping developers know when they are doing this and discouraging them from it. Even so, the vast vast bulk of applications have continued to work across platform updates.
- The statement about games designed for smaller screens being unplayable on Droid is… just strange. The ones you have listed make no sense — I have played both Buka and Colorix on both the Droid and Nexus one and they are scaled up to the screen as expected (hint: there is no black space to the left or right). In the transition to 1.6 (where high density screen support was added) a significant amount of effort was put into making sure that older applications were scaled up just so they wouldn't be unusable (yes, there is some of that backwards compatibility work). Applications targeting 1.6 or later are expected to deal with different screen densities correctly without the compatibility crutches, but the APIs are designed to make this relatively easy to do and application can always turn the compatibility mode back on if it needs to. So an application with this behavior is an indication of a broken app, not a problem in the platform.
- Also the spacing between lines on the web browser is the pretty much the same physical amount on the Droid/Nexus One as it is on lower density screens like the G1. The size of the text is scaled up to make it the same space with the higher density. Maybe the screen is just too small for you? It is true that Android devices tend to have slightly smaller screens than the iPhone (compare the G1 screen to the iPhone screen which have the same number of pixels), giving them a more traditional phone form factor (easier to hold in the hand etc). Someone could certainly make an Android device with a larger screen more the size of the iPhone; there may already be some out there. Maybe that would be a better screen for you. Fortunately Android should give you the choice there.
- Applications can report both the minimum version they support as well as the highest version they have been tested against (the former to help the platform know when it needs to enable or disable compatibility features). Applications that require a later version of the platform than what you are running simply won't be shown in Market. There is no reason to show them to the user, telling them what minimum platform they need (and thus requiring that the user compare that against their current platform to decide whether they might work). That would suck. There is no need to show a "maximum" platform version because a developer can't know to report this unless they are doing something they explicitly know breaks on newer versions of the platform, and encouraging that kind of behavior would also suck.
- Likewise, applications can specify things like requiring a trackball. If the application does require a trackball (does not work with a DPAD), it should say this, and it will be filtered out of market on such devices so you don't need to be bothered with it.
- Finally, as far as devices running old versions… there really needs to be some perspective here. The Droid came out about 4 months ago. The 2.1 version of Android was available as source about 1 1/2 months ago. Expecting the new version to appear on all manufacturers' older devices a month after it is available to them is just not reasonable. Nor is it necessary — extremely few applications rely on any 2.1 APIs. Over time manufacturers will get it on to their devices, but that just isn't going to happen over night. And it really isn't a problem for developers to be dealing with a spread of versions of the platform; in fact that has pretty much been the expected situation for most every platform there is (Windows, MacOS, etc).
" Games designed for a smaller screen run on my Droid, sure, but because the pixel dimensions are fixed, the physical size of the play area on Droid is so much smaller that the distance between touch positions is so small that my finger touch registers on several adjacent screen areas."
Some day someone will discover the secret of allowing computer games being able to run at different resolutions. Now excuse me while I go play some doom on my 640×480 passive matrix laptop.