Much of this is dopey nonsense but he's correctly describing a few Real Problems.
-- iOS devices blowing their asset layout and 'Othering' out is a Real Problem that used to happen far too often. The only fix beyond a backup+restore is to remove and re-add photos and music. If that doesn't work? Time to restore up to 60GB over USB2! Whee. Good luck explaining this to mom.
-- The built in Mac applications and frameworks are frightfully poor - it's unacceptable from a company that prides itself on quality. SyncServices is still a flaming travesty, Mail.app spontaneously corrupts messages and passwords, Spotlight can die in twenty different ways, iCal is a UI disaster, Address Book has completely broken sync options... the list goes on and on and on. Of all of these, I think Mail is the absolute worst. Three total rewrites and it's still neurotic on a good day.
-- iPhoto is goddamn slow. No matter what, no matter where, no matter when.
iOS is an order of magnitude more usable for two orders of magnitude more people with an order of magnitude fewer issues and two orders of magnitude fewer things to go wrong that makes an order of magnitude more money for them. So I think that's where he Lion's share (haha) of Apple's QA is spent. Sadly, I fear OS X will never receive that same level of care.
I am not an iPhone user, but if what you have described above are problems that a significant number of iPhone users face, then I am pretty surprised/disappointed.
All of these would be hampering user experience ( something Apple excels at ) irrespective of whether the user is a casual one or a heavy one.
Also, if these problems are easily reproducible and quite prevalent, isn't Apple solving these in upcoming upgrades?
In other words, they must be getting some kind of feedback/bug-reports and these problems should surely have to be part of that.
Given its financial performance, I can only imagine that iOS's quality is priority #0, #1, and #2 through 10 at Apple. From an anecdotal perspective, it has all gotten a great deal better over the years.
>I am not an iPhone user, but if what you have described above are problems that a significant number of iPhone users face, then I am pretty surprised/disappointed.
As noted by other posts, most of the issues are with OSX applications rather than with iOS.
To be honest, I think that the storage/backup issue is a legacy design issue with iOS. Unlike Android, iOS was never originally designed to be a standalone OS. Apple designed iOS to sync heavily with iTunes, which led to a lot of this "if you just restore from a backup, it'll magically be fixed" nonsense. Apple's started to move away from that, and more towards iOS being it's own thing with the OTA updates and by giving users a lot more control over storage usage through the device itself instead of iTunes, but they still haven't really broken away from it's necessity.
No we don't ... if you take a theoretically open Android system but buy it from Verizon, you'll find low-quality bloatware and unresolvable data issues just like those described in the article.
And that, kids, is why you want to look for a rootable, reflashable phone.
Don't look at me like that. My sister's phone is rooted. Same for the guy at Radio Shack who sold me my last phone. Neither of them know shit about how to do it, but they got someone else to. Rooted and re-ROM'd smartphones are a pretty hot commodity these days.
To be clear, you need to find a guy who will undo what the phone company did to it. This is Google/Android's fault the same way that it is Microsoft/Window's fault that the Acer you bought from Best Buy is nigh-unusable due to everything it's trying to run when you first boot up, and "some guy" needs to come in and clock some serious time in the Uninstall dialog before it'll be really usable. (If indeed everything will uninstall correctly.) It's actually the fault of the last person to own the box.
> This is Google/Android's fault the same way that it is Microsoft/Window's fault that the Acer you bought from Best Buy is nigh-unusable due to everything it's trying to run when you first boot up...
That isn't Microsoft's fault because they've already been slapped with an anti-trust lawsuit over exercising that kind of control over Windows. They theoretically have the power to enforce such a restriction but choose not to in order to cover their ass. Considering the various payouts they've made to governments for telling OEMs what to do, it's hard to blame them.
However it is Google's fault because they have no such restriction with Android. As the scuttled Acer Alibaba launch demonstrated, Google has no qualms about exercising its power in a potentially destructive way to bully their partners into toeing the line.
They get final approval of what ships on the phone, the design, and the changes to Android. If they don't like what they see, they can revoke access to the core Google apps like Gmail and Market, making it essentially an AOSP device. The Skyhook investigation taught us all that.
So in other words, Google has the power. They use the power frequently. They also are not in legal hot water over exercising the power. However, they won't exercise the power to benefit you because they value their close relationship with carriers way more than they value you as a customer. Mainly because you're not really a customer, as an Android user you're the product being sold to advertisers.
There is no reason to give Google a pass on this one. They are the only ones with the power to stop carrier and manufacture bloatware from ruining the phone, and they deliberately choose to ignore it because maintaining relationships with hardware partners and carriers is more important to them than your experience with the phone. That's the bottom line.
That and (to a lesser degree) the Bionic were absolute disasters of phones last year. And because they were the first LTE phones, they were incredibly hyped and moved a ton of units.
It's a real shame, because it turned a lot of people off of Android -- and deservedly so.
Honestly I love the design of Nokia's phones (at least the symbian phones from years past), and my phone when traveling internationally is a pay as you go simple nokia candy bar that I love. I really wasn't sure I wanted to get a windows phone, but I'm sorrta turned off by Android now. I'm gonna try rooting and putting a good rom on my phone, and give android another shot, but if that is a botch, I'm gone from that system.
android to me is really a poorly designed inconsistent mess. Windows phone has a fresh design with intuitive design and the Lumia 920 hardware is frankly better than anything available out there.
>- The built in Mac applications and frameworks are frightfully poor - it's unacceptable from a company that prides itself on quality. SyncServices is still a flaming travesty, Mail.app spontaneously corrupts messages and passwords, Spotlight can die in twenty different ways, iCal is a UI disaster, Address Book has completely broken sync options... the list goes on and on and on. Of all of these, I think Mail is the absolute worst. Three total rewrites and it's still neurotic on a good day.
Most of it is anecdotal YMMV kind of problems.
I, for one, never had any problems with Mail.app, and I have 2 Gmail accounts synced to it, and a third party IMAP one -- around 40,000 messages in total.
I also use iCal and AddressBook with no problems. Some UI issues that could be better? Sure. Then again, everything else has similar problems in any platform.
-- iOS devices blowing their asset layout and 'Othering' out is a Real Problem that used to happen far too often. The only fix beyond a backup+restore is to remove and re-add photos and music. If that doesn't work? Time to restore up to 60GB over USB2! Whee. Good luck explaining this to mom.
-- The built in Mac applications and frameworks are frightfully poor - it's unacceptable from a company that prides itself on quality. SyncServices is still a flaming travesty, Mail.app spontaneously corrupts messages and passwords, Spotlight can die in twenty different ways, iCal is a UI disaster, Address Book has completely broken sync options... the list goes on and on and on. Of all of these, I think Mail is the absolute worst. Three total rewrites and it's still neurotic on a good day.
-- iPhoto is goddamn slow. No matter what, no matter where, no matter when.
iOS is an order of magnitude more usable for two orders of magnitude more people with an order of magnitude fewer issues and two orders of magnitude fewer things to go wrong that makes an order of magnitude more money for them. So I think that's where he Lion's share (haha) of Apple's QA is spent. Sadly, I fear OS X will never receive that same level of care.