[Terretta]

I don't need to qualify it at all. A wife rejecting the iPhone 5 over AppleID frustration is going to have to use something else. There are things that spec higher, are more hackable, or more "open", etc., but nothing with the iPhone's level of wholistic user experience polish.

So if the corner case of swapping user IDs for purchased items is enough to dump a phone, she's going to be desperately unhappy with the other alternatives out there which currently have countless more normal user UX annoyances.

[joenathan]

You seem to have bought into the marketing, as an owner of a Nexus 4 I am unfamiliar with the "UX annoyances" that you are referring to. Could you be specific?

[Terretta]

As an owner of a Galaxy Nexus (TMobile) running the latest Jellybean, I suspect you've forgotten what it's like to pick the device up for the first time, if you claim the user experience is as polished for "normal" (non-tech) people. You also would be alone among the crowd of Android journalists who love the OS and talk about how each release is more polished, closing the UX gap. Skim any honest pro Android site for a catalog of annoyances remaining.

Here's one for a new user: Let's say I'm looking at apps on my home screen, swipe left or right to see more apps. Great. I install something new. Not on the home screen. Swipe left or right. Not there either. This is an actual problem for normal users.

I also don't like having to pull out the battery every few weeks because the phone is frozen when I picked it up off the dock. This can happen from any background app. In the most recent case, turns out it was the foreground app, a clock called "Alarm" that I had coming up when docked in the landscape dock. Switched to Daydream, that problem went away, at least. But having to unplug the battery before I can make a call, definitely an annoyance. Glad it has a removable battery though, disassembling and reassembling the battery saves me having to press Home + Power for 10 seconds.

Ha, here's another one, as I'm writing this.

I just took a picture to talk about the UX of finding and sending that picture, but when I went into Apps and swiped left to look for Gallery (seriously, we can't just call it Photos?), the phone froze. Now I'm looking at the first page of icons half off the left of the screen, above a dimmed set of the second page icons. It's still stuck there as I type this. But the phone isn't frozen, I was able to take a screenshot of the built-in Apps browser being stuck halfway between two pages:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/z04qqbn4a93sxlb/Screenshot_2013-03...

As I'm finishing this paragraph, it's still stuck. By contrast, I haven't seen an iOS device crash swiping between the app icon pages.

While finishing describing the above, the phone dimmed, and then locked, as it should. I unlocked using face recognition, and was looking at home screen. Tapped to browse apps, and ... still frozen halfway between two apps pages.

This is native core functionality, simply not working. And like now, these things happen when trying to do something useful. That's a user experience annoyance.

[joenathan]

From what you describe you have a defective phone, you should get it replaced, your experience with your phone freezing isn't typical at all. My Nexus 4 has never once froze on me.

Also the Play Store has a default option called "auto add widget"[1] that adds a shortcut to your home screen of any newly installed app, I personally hate that default behavior and always uncheck that option.

Is that all you could come up with for UX annoyances?

I personally think the experience on Android and Jellybean in particular is first class, if you just take things like the notification shade, the intents system and widgets, the UX on Android is unmatched.

[1]http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57471256-285/how-to-stop...

[Terretta]

> Is that all you could come up with for UX annoyances?

Nope, but I refuse to be trolled by someone suggesting there aren't any. Just because YOU may not be annoyed, does not mean there isn't consensus that it still has a ways to go.

My phone didn't freeze when swiping the apps pages. Only the UI for swiping the apps pages froze. The rest of the phone, and all other running apps, are fine. That's not a defective phone. That's defective software.

Note that I never said Android Jellybean wasn't first class. I said if the woman is ready to dump a phone over trying to use an old account ID, she's going to have bigger problems with other operating systems which are not yet as polished.

“... A related issue is that the iOS interface is simply cleaner and more user-friendly than any Android interface I'd yet to see. One of Apple's slogans is "It just works." Well, actually sometimes it doesn't work. iTunes, for example, has been annoying me for years now. But, when it comes to device interfaces, iOS does just work. Android implementations, far too often, doesn't.“

“So, yes, Android does more today than Apple's iOS promises to do tomorrow, but that's only part of the story. The full story includes that iOS is very polished and very closed, while Android is somewhat messy and very open.”

— http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/android-already-offers...

If you cannot imagine any UX annoyances, then most likely you fall into the “Android fans can be blind to its faults just as much as the most besotted Apple fan” camp.