|
|
|
|
|
|
by angryasian
5364 days ago
|
|
|
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. |
|
|
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.