Any day now, the Evo 4G is going to get an over-the-air update to Android 2.2 (aka Froyo), complete with marquee features such as the ability to play Flash video and share contact details over Bluetooth. But after spending every day with a Motorola Droid, now running Android 2.1, we can think of plenty of smaller things we wish Google would work on instead.
High on our list, for instance: Make spellcheck work consistently across the platform and sync with business-grade Google Apps calendars. If Flash support won’t even allow you to watch Hulu videos on your phone (Hulu cruelly blocks mobile access), what else can Google do to make Android a more polished, user-friendly platform?
Push for More Consistency
It’s the small things that add up. For us, one of the most annoying things is the fact that if you make a spelling mistake while searching for an app in Android Market, Android doesn’t correct you.
For Andy Castonguay, Director of Mobile Device Research for the Yankee Group, it’s the fact that on certain devices, the accelerometer only works if you tilt the phone to the left. What makes it worse, he says, is that the Android experience is even inconsistent across manufacturers, as each phone maker layers their own interface on top (think HTC Sense and Motorola’s Motoblur) as a way of making their Android phones stand out. And these extra layers, of course, make it especially hard to update a phone to the latest version of Android, creating an even larger disparity between what Android phones can and can’t do.
“The great thing for the manufacturers is they can create that brand affinity with the consumer on the back of Android, instead of having Android be front and center,” Castonguay said. “That results in idiosyncracies and discrepancies.”
Google can’t wean itself off these skins entirely, lest it alienate the very OEMs that have made Android so ubiquitous. But Google can, and will have to, work harder to develop more and better widgets, so that it’s not up to the likes of HTC and Motorola to decide what information you can see at glance, and what you can’t.
“HTC and Motorola have adapted to reflect consumer needs in a very positive way. Android as a platform will need to adopt some of those characteristics,” said Castonguay.
Re-Organize Android MarketThe lack of spellcheck when searching for apps is just a minor reason why navigating the Android Market can be so frustrating. It’s also difficult to sift through apps. While users can whittle apps down to broad categories, such as games, they can’t sort by rating or recently added.
Jason Harman, CTO of Spring Partners and lead developer for the SpringPad app, laments how difficult it is for consumers to discover new apps in the Market. “The top apps have been in the market for a year and have a million users,” he said. “Then that app grows on itself. I don’t see how they can move up the chain because you need to be able to move up.”
To be fair, Android Market does include a featured section, but Harman says the rules by which an app lands in that prime spot is a “kind of black magic.” Moreover, he adds, developers are limited to a 325-word description, including release notes. His team chooses to include explanations of different releases in this description, which means his chance to explain the benefits of SpringPad becomes even briefer.
Make it Easy to Kill Apps
Steve Jobs himself said, “If you see a task manager, they blew it.” By “they” he means Google’s Android team. The problem is that there’s no visual indicator of which apps are running, nor is there an easy way to exit them or force them to close. (Slacker’s player lets you tap a soft key to quit, but this isn’t a consistent experience — it varies from app to app.)
“I’m not sure that any device has done this beautifully well so far,” admits Castonguay. He does, however, point to Palm’s webOS, with its pile of apps and ability to swipe through them left to right, as an example of multitasking done right.
Harman, meanwhile, says Apple is on the right track, displaying a panel of open apps at the bottom of the screen in iOS 4-enabled iPhones and iPod Touches. Perhaps Google’s recent acquisition of some former Palm engineers will make that kind of improvement a reality.
Don’t Let Apps Run Wild
While we’re on the subject of multitasking, both Castonguay and Harman agree that the freedom that draws developers to Android in the first place has a down side: It also lets apps go overboard, slowing down phones and draining their battery life. Google should step in, they say, and enforce guidelines for how often an app pings the cloud or notifies the user when it’s running in the background.
“It’s a more open platform; it lets you do a lot more,” Harman said. “It doesn’t mean you should do a lot more.”
Castonguay adds that RIM has the right idea in compressing data before it leaves the phone, and then again on its way out of RIM’s data centers. “By compressing that data from the operating center and from the device, it’s a really efficient use of the network,” he said.
Right now, it’s up to the developer to decide how an Android app interacts with the network. In the future, though, says Castonguay, Google “will probably have to introduce a connectivity manager on the device so that its interaction with the mobile network is as efficient as possible. ”
Cater to the Attention-Deficit Crowd
In other words, multitask the right way: Limit what an app can do in the background, and how often.
At the same time, the two warn, the platform needs to be more nimble at switching between open apps. Right now, Android users have to hit the home button to exit an app and return to the home screen (they can also hold down the home button to see key apps, but it’s the same idea).
“It’s more of a Christmas tree approach where you constantly have to go back to the top to work yourself through the maze of the decision tree,” Castonguay said. “I never thought that to be a particularly intuitive approach.”
The same applies to the browser, Harman adds. While the default browser has tabs, in the sense that you can maintain multiple loaded sites at once, it doesn’t follow the visual metaphor that users are accustomed to on the desktop. You can’t actually swipe or tap to view another tab; you have to press a soft key. “In my iPhone, I can easily flip between tabs. What’s missing on Android is you have to go through a list of active tabs.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment