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by mtlmtlmtlmtl 1086 days ago
Android really shat on, set fire to and salted one of my favourite things about Linux in this regard. I.e, how few resources I can give it and still be productive. Hell, I'm gonna assert right now that if Android didn't waste such gobs of memory, I could still be doing the... oh, about 4 or 5 things a phone is actually useful for, on hardware equivalent to the SGS1.

I know, because I did all those things on the SGS1 and it worked fine.

Seriously, what the fuck happened?

1 comments

That's the difference between GNU/Linux and Android.

Android uses Java because there's an existing market of Java developers. Java does not have much inherent overhead but like any tool with a lower barrier to entry a lot of lower quality software hits the market. Optimizing for time to market by each company's app team is where the wheels come off the bus. People expect software to be free or $0.99. Companies are pushing the technical limits on how much data can be mined bloating their apps. Android is fragmented across diverse hardware, operating system versions, and cellular carrier permutations making testing and QA a much harder problem.