[potatolicious]

What extra cost?

Android is free to license, and the OEMs are benefactors of an incredibly wealthy company that seems to have no qualms about throwing gajillions of dollars into R&D to make a best-in-class mobile OS.

Android not being "good software" cannot be in any way spun as a win for the proletariat - because there is no opportunity cost. The cost to engineer the OS is in no way passed on to the consumer, and so far only the hardware is (with some marginal amount of software integration).

In other words, Google is pouring hundreds of millions to develop Android. The average phone consumer (in any part of the world) is not paying for its development (customers of other Google products are), so the argument that somehow these "cut corners" has resulted in a more affordable product is a complete non-sequitor.

[angryasian]

how ever you want to justify your opinion is good for you, but the fact is look at the cheapest phones offered to countries like africa and china, and they are Android phones. This allows people with probably no other way to access the internet to be able to have the same luxuries through there phone. However you want to try demonize it is fine, regardless Android/Google offers high quality services at the same cost to everyone.

[potatolicious]

Demonize it? Wow man, you really do live up to your username.

> "This allows people with probably no other way to access the internet to be able to have the same luxuries through there phone."

And that is an excuse for poor engineering... how? Your point is that, if Google didn't "cut these corners", this free product may very well not exist, and thus unable to provide these benefits to the developing world at low cost.

Which is, again, a non-sequitor, since there is no evidence whatsoever that Google treats Android like an exercise in budget engineering for the developing world. They are banking practically the whole company on it, and throwing top talent at Android, with a seemingly bottomless budget.

Suffice it to say, if Google spent some more time optimizing and improving UI responsiveness, the developing world will not suffer, and in fact will get a better product for the same price they're currently paying: $0.

This is the same stupid argument that people used with Nokia years ago, before (surprise!) Android came in and ate their lunch. Those budget candy bar phones sure did bring mobile telephony to the masses, and any attempt at critiquing the phones' hardware or software was rebuked with claims of "well if it was better it wouldn't be affordable you elitist".

And of course, then Google came in with Android and now we have touchscreen smartphones in the developing world. And people continue to jump on criticism of Android with the same lame-duck excuse.

[angryasian]

what corners are cut, software development is about prioritization and scheduling, a balance of features vs support. This release tries does a very good job of both. You're not going to make everyone happy, at the same time not all problems are easily solved. What you call cutting corners could just be, they haven't figured out a great way to solve the problem. Android supports just about all possible hardware configurations from low end to high end. iOS supports pretty much 1 hardware configuration that they define (realistically Apple cuts out features out of older phones). Like Nokia if google doesn't address big things, then some one will pick up the slack, so be it. As the parent comment was pointing out, people are willing to pay for the luxury of animations, or polish. For most people just getting calls, text, email and mobile web, at affordable prices is all we really want. Without actually knowing what Google's budget or legal/development/marketing etc costs are, I think theres really no way to assume how they prioritize things. One less animation, or a smoother scroll no one is suffering and for google to offer all that they do at basically free of cost is amazing.

[potatolicious]

The responsiveness of Android has been a thorn in its side since day one - personally I'm going to withhold judgment until I can play with one in person. ICS is supposed to bring to bear a large amount of hardware acceleration for the UI that will make 99% of these UI lag issues disappear entirely.

If it doesn't, that'd be supremely disappointing, since it's truly one of the things that has been plaguing Android since it first launched.

> "Android supports just about all possible hardware configurations from low end to high end."

All the more reason the UI stack needs to be optimized from end to end. Apple can pretty much just assume you have a 800MHz dual-core under the hood, Google cannot. It's taken some serious firepower to get Android's UI to be suitably responsive (we're talking dual-core, 1+ GHz beasts)... what hope does the developing world have trying to run that kind of software on little 400MHz ARM chips?

We know from the development of OSX (or iOS, depending on where you want to look) that even a minimal amount of hardware acceleration from low-end GPUs can do wonders for overall UI performance. A reasonably low-end GPU will lay waste to a large number of problems that even mid-high-end CPUs are poorly equipped to solve.

If anything, if Google wants to make a difference in the developing world this needs to be a top priority - after all, this is the market that is least able to brute force their way past performance problems with raw hardware.

> "As the parent comment was pointing out, people are willing to pay for the luxury of animations, or polish. For most people just getting calls, text, email and mobile web, at affordable prices is all we really want."

I think it's short-sighted to call responsive, rich UI a "luxury". Before Android phones hit the developing world, the status quo was candy bar phones. I'm sure there were enough people back then proclaiming they couldn't imagine needing anything more - it places calls and gets texts, what else could someone reasonably wish for?

But then Android brought smartphones to these parts of the world and the goalpost moved. Now expecting mobile web and email on your phone is entirely reasonable, thanks to what used to be the sole territory of luxury devices. Software is something that has literally no marginal cost - once produced, it can be shipped on ten million phones for negligible cost, and in this sense is pretty much the cheapest way you can improve your products. IMO saying that good UI is exclusively the territory of luxury devices is doing a great disservice to the developing world.

Google ought to be doing better, considering the sheer force they have thrown behind Android, and if these long-awaited hardware acceleration features fail to significantly tame the UI performance beast, it is in every way appropriate to call them to task on it.

[angryasian]

As someone running a 600MHZ phone running cm7 (coming from an iphone 3GS), I never noticed any lag, in fact it runs better than 3GS and iOS. The dreadful UI you continuously bring up, has never been an issue and never got in the way of doing what I need to do. In fact there are things about Android's UI that are superior to iOS IMO. Most of what you call good UI is probably subjective. I'd rather have google focus on bigger issues than, a marginal improvement in scrolling. What android phone did you use and for how long ?