comments (not for humans)

I have been an Android-owner for about two years now, and I'm no longer fan.

I purchased a Motorola Milestone (Droid) late 2009. I wanted a phone with a full keyboard, and I didn't want to be as locked in as you are with an iPhone. I thought Android was a good choice. And yes, I really was happy with it at first. Great apps like Listen and Spotify, surfing in a proper browser, reading mail in a proper email reader etc.

But then six months later, Froyo came along, and that's when things started to go wrong. I was really excited about Froyo, and expected the update cycle to be as fast as for iPhones. But no, I had to wait. Ok, I thought to myself. Motorola probably just needs to make a few adjustments. Then some weeks later, Motorola said Droid/Milestone would not get Froyo at all. My phone was outdated after just 6 months. I was really disappointed. Some more weeks passed, and Motorola seemed to have changed their minds. But it was taking forever. And Motorola was going back and forth whether they would actually release an upgrade.

9 months after the initial release of Froyo, it came to Motorola Droid. Only to be horribly broken. Half of the time my phone is completely unresponsive or really slow. It reboots at random. I often cannot make phone calls or receive/send SMS without rebooting first. Motorola suggested a factory reset. And I hesitated but eventually did. Didn't help.

I was expecting the Android architecture to look something like this:

Vendor bloat
Android OS core
Vendor drivers

There vendors would provide drivers for their hardware, and they would able to put some extra features on top. Yes, this is oversimplified, but that would be the gist of it.

Right now I'm afraid the Android architecture is more like this:

Why am I saying this? Well because the Motorola Droid Froyo upgrade reintroduced a 6 month old bug in the Exchange sync, and it still - over a year later - has not been fixed. It's fixed in vanilla Froyo, but not in the Droid version. So obviously there are some really tight dependencies between the different parts in the Froyo version I'm running, which makes it impossible to upgrade the core, but leave the vendor drivers and bloat as is.

Spotify died a few weeks after I installed Froyo. Every time I tried to play a song it would just stop. I reported it as a bug, and they replied that they would look into it. A few weeks down the road, I got a reply: "When troubleshooting this issue, we discovered that the cause of it lies much deeper than we anticipated.

Regretfully, we will no longer be able to provide any official support for the Motorola Milestone/Droid. Using the phone with another firmware than Motorola's 2.2 will hopefully still work, but due to the nature of this problem it is not realistic that the 2.2 incompatibility is fixed within the foreseeable future."

This just goes hand in hand with the architecture views up above. The fact that they have a list of "Let's check we're compatible" tells me that Android is not Android. In fact, Froyo isn't even Froyo.

For a while there I was thinking Motorola was to blame. But a few days ago I saw the posting Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support and everything fell into place. No, it's not just me. Most Android phone are not upgradeable after a short period of time. Nexus seems to be the only real alternative if you want upgrades.

And the lack of upgrades makes me really worried from a security perspective. Are the bugs in the OS fixed in my version? Will they ever be? What about fixes in apps for older versions of Android, because I certainly cannot use the newer ones. With Android malware on the rise, this seems unsustainable.

My next phone will probably not be an Android...
Henrik Hartz
Nokia N9 ftw! ;-)
Mark Woan
Can you not install cyanogenmod on the device?

http://www.cyanogenmod.com/devices/motorola-droid
Erlend
It wasn't supported earlier, but I see it is know. So I'll definitely give it a try. Thanks.

Still, the support should be native, not through someone elses good will.
Comments closed for this post