October 24, 2013

Why Android was and remains an unusable piece of software shit?

Be aware: Android related rant following

<rant>

This is kind of a rant followup to a year-old posting of mine about using Samsung Android on a Galaxy Tab.

Some months ago I bought a Cloudnet CR 9/S Android stick - one of the fastest Android stick you could find at the time with a fast quad-core CPU running the lasted Android 4.2 version.

I bought it because I was looking for a small hardware solution for running some presentation videos at the our booth during the DMS Expo fair some weeks ago in Stuttgart.

This buy was a major disaster.

To make it short:

  • Android market app crashed continuously - hard to update installed software.
  • I could enter the password of our home wifi network using an attached USB keyboard but the RETURN key could not be used for blicking  the CONNECT button and confirming the dialog. I had to attach an USB mouse for clicking on CONNECT - how stupid is that?
  • The stick/Android did not recognize a brand new 1080p-capable display connected through HDMI (working with all other computers - even with my Raspberry PI).
  • I had to download five or six different Android video player to get a 30 fps video running at the full frame rate. Even apps like VLC did not work properly - even with hardware acceleration enabled.
  • Android software remains a pile of unpolished alien software shit. In various applications you could see buttons where the english text fits into the predefined button size but longer german texts like "ZULASSEN" became wrapped into two lines "ZULASSE-N" - sorry, but this an absolutely non acceptable behavior of a user interface in 2013.

</rant> :-)

That's why I still love my iOS hardware - working and shiny - independent of the "closed" Apple eco-system.

User experience is what counts and Android feels as user-unfriendly in version 4.2 as it was years ago.