- Mar 15, 2003
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I noticed a weird thing after switching from ios to Android: on iOs I played a ton of games, on android I spend much more time customizing/fucking with my phone to entertain myself than actually using the phone. To me, that's like buying a car because you enjoy changing the oil vs going places. From figuring out what's killing battery life to finding the right launcher, mixed with the lack of top tier games it's a bit maddening. In other words, instead of playing games ON my phone, I'm spending a lot of time playing WITH my phone. Last night, for example, my s6 edge slowed to a crawl (and HUGE data usage the past week, with the most basic of apps installed). I spent over an hour on mother's day resetting to factory mode and installing my apps all over again (i didn't want to restore because I've had that replicate the initial problem again). Annoying! I don't want to restore my phone every x months, I don't enjoy this process, and I don't view user intervention for basic system functionality as a platform advantage - why do so many of you guys do? Just curious! This isn't pro-apple, windows phone gave me little problem and just worked (though the app store blew). Can't android have style guidelines? Coding requirements/ a testing protocol? I think there's a solution but android fans don't complain because they view it as a compromise for choice.
It's kinda a maddening pursuit because a lot of this "customization" is coming from amateurs not professionals who beta test or even seem to do much UI optimizations. For example, I like the ability to customize themes and icons, but the vast majority of theme designs contain enough bad design choices (mixed in with the good) that I find it frustrating, from asymmetrical layouts to icon sets that are woefully incomplete. For example, I could find an awesome black and white theme but, use an app that's not part of their limited icon set and you've got odd color icons that break the design rules of the set. I would hope a good programmer would just grayscale icons not part of the set but, nope - color icons clashing with a a duo-tone icon set. Didn't they test their damn product? Or icons that aren't sized properly (so they looked staggered on a grid), or just bad programming. Or horrible fonts on otherwise nice widgets. It's like amateur hour, and the reviews on the appstore seem phony to the point of reviews being useless. Oh and android 5.0 is worse than 4.4 based on what I'm reading, so now I have to wait until samsung does the point upgrade for improved battery life - it feels like one step forward two steps back, because you're waiting months for point releases that fix bugs instead of relatively shortly after the masses notice a bug (like ios).
My point is, that tech saavy people seem to love android with an erection worthy amount of lust, but isn't this much user intervention for daily operation kinda less about "user choice" and more about bad coding guidelines or lack of hardware optimization? Customizations aside, I had to spend a good week figuring out the battery drain on my phone, spend time figuring out why google play wouldn't download apps, find out how to disable useless apps I didn't want but couldn't uninstall - why is all of this considered a feature by some when the end result for all the trouble is a platform with less top tier apps/games anyways. I guess it means I'm an iOS fanboy now, but that's a weird end result from buying an expensive s6 edge.
It's kinda a maddening pursuit because a lot of this "customization" is coming from amateurs not professionals who beta test or even seem to do much UI optimizations. For example, I like the ability to customize themes and icons, but the vast majority of theme designs contain enough bad design choices (mixed in with the good) that I find it frustrating, from asymmetrical layouts to icon sets that are woefully incomplete. For example, I could find an awesome black and white theme but, use an app that's not part of their limited icon set and you've got odd color icons that break the design rules of the set. I would hope a good programmer would just grayscale icons not part of the set but, nope - color icons clashing with a a duo-tone icon set. Didn't they test their damn product? Or icons that aren't sized properly (so they looked staggered on a grid), or just bad programming. Or horrible fonts on otherwise nice widgets. It's like amateur hour, and the reviews on the appstore seem phony to the point of reviews being useless. Oh and android 5.0 is worse than 4.4 based on what I'm reading, so now I have to wait until samsung does the point upgrade for improved battery life - it feels like one step forward two steps back, because you're waiting months for point releases that fix bugs instead of relatively shortly after the masses notice a bug (like ios).
My point is, that tech saavy people seem to love android with an erection worthy amount of lust, but isn't this much user intervention for daily operation kinda less about "user choice" and more about bad coding guidelines or lack of hardware optimization? Customizations aside, I had to spend a good week figuring out the battery drain on my phone, spend time figuring out why google play wouldn't download apps, find out how to disable useless apps I didn't want but couldn't uninstall - why is all of this considered a feature by some when the end result for all the trouble is a platform with less top tier apps/games anyways. I guess it means I'm an iOS fanboy now, but that's a weird end result from buying an expensive s6 edge.
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