I'm just wondering what peoples' general opinion is on the Android OS.
I'm happy with the OS in general and the open-ness of it, but I find that theres a TON of features that google could implement very easily, especially if they reuse other peoples' code. They dont, however, and that causes a huge rift in peoples' experience.
For example, I just wiped my phone (running cyanogenmod 6.1.1) and flashed the official google Gingerbread 2.3.3 update onto it. I am quite disappointed with the lack of some of the simplest features.
>FLAC support is nowhere to be seen
>Every single app in the market isnt really free. Sure, you can get tons of free apps, but they gripe you so much about either donating or paying, or shove so many ads down your throat, that the applications are almost not worth using.
>Cyanogenmod had a simple customizeable notification power "widget" that let me customize what buttons showed up and what they did. I had only to click a button to switch the phone between 2G/3G mode, another button for data on/off, one for wifi, gps, and one that cycles between ringer profiles (vibe, silent, sound).
>Every app seems to have free reign over my SD card, and the entire card is riddled with data files with obscure names. It would be so easy to just make a single /appdata/ directory that everything uses, and all application settings go there. It would be even easier to write a music app that only reads files within a specified directory, but this is nowhere to be seen (Example: I listen to audiobooks. I dont want a music app to read those files because if I hit shuffle, i get little 5 minute chunks of book thrown in. Even if I use one app to keep track of where I am in an audiobook and another solely for music, that other app finds all of the audiobook files and counts them as "music'.
I feel like the entire point of linux is defeated with the android OS. I expected an experience similar to running linux on a desktop: if you dont like something you can change it, and everything is completely free as in free beer and free speech. With android its as if I cant even try to use the phone without trying to stare around google's ads or personal ads from the app maker themselves. People arent able to collectively work on a distribution to make it better, releasing program updates every week that dont require complete reflash/loss of data. I'm rather disappointed.
I'm happy with the OS in general and the open-ness of it, but I find that theres a TON of features that google could implement very easily, especially if they reuse other peoples' code. They dont, however, and that causes a huge rift in peoples' experience.
For example, I just wiped my phone (running cyanogenmod 6.1.1) and flashed the official google Gingerbread 2.3.3 update onto it. I am quite disappointed with the lack of some of the simplest features.
>FLAC support is nowhere to be seen
>Every single app in the market isnt really free. Sure, you can get tons of free apps, but they gripe you so much about either donating or paying, or shove so many ads down your throat, that the applications are almost not worth using.
>Cyanogenmod had a simple customizeable notification power "widget" that let me customize what buttons showed up and what they did. I had only to click a button to switch the phone between 2G/3G mode, another button for data on/off, one for wifi, gps, and one that cycles between ringer profiles (vibe, silent, sound).
>Every app seems to have free reign over my SD card, and the entire card is riddled with data files with obscure names. It would be so easy to just make a single /appdata/ directory that everything uses, and all application settings go there. It would be even easier to write a music app that only reads files within a specified directory, but this is nowhere to be seen (Example: I listen to audiobooks. I dont want a music app to read those files because if I hit shuffle, i get little 5 minute chunks of book thrown in. Even if I use one app to keep track of where I am in an audiobook and another solely for music, that other app finds all of the audiobook files and counts them as "music'.
I feel like the entire point of linux is defeated with the android OS. I expected an experience similar to running linux on a desktop: if you dont like something you can change it, and everything is completely free as in free beer and free speech. With android its as if I cant even try to use the phone without trying to stare around google's ads or personal ads from the app maker themselves. People arent able to collectively work on a distribution to make it better, releasing program updates every week that dont require complete reflash/loss of data. I'm rather disappointed.
