There is another huge reason to disbelieve the "community will fix it" line. You can't run your new version/patch in real life. You can't do gradual development, you can't do real-world testing and you can't distribute it to users.
You can run it on the emulator, you can submit it to google and you can beg and plead on the lists and on IRC for someone to put it on their phone, but you cannot run it yourself until its complete and both google and tmobile accept it. (And even then, you need to wait for tmobile to do an expensive and risky OTA update that includes it.) Consider how this differs from the marketplace, where some apps update as frequently as every day. (And others probably should - connectbot, I'm looking at you here.. new features are coming fast and furious :) ..) The android model reminds me of the absolute worst developer shops I've been in, where the most minor changes required weeks of meetings and months of testing, buy-in and arbitrary ass-kissing to get signoff from people who are, for the most part, both unaffected and uninvolved in the actual change or fix. On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 12:36 PM, William Pietri <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote: > mark hensley wrote: > > And who in their right mind would rely on a 3rd party to be > responsible for somwthing as important as an email client. > > Give me a break. You guys are trying way to hard to come up with > excuses and justification for such a dismal piece of programming. > There is no excuse. And they better get it together before Android > fails because of the dismal rollout to date. > > > Hi, Mark. Given that I'm writing this on a Linux box and released my first > bit of open-source code in '92, I am a big fan of open-source software and > the open-source culture. > > However, I agree with you on this completely. If they had wanted to roll > this out as a product suitable only for open-source developers and early > adopters, there were ways to do this. They could have started up a developer > program and sold a few thousand units rather than going for a big public > rollout and selling hundreds of thousands. > > Given its position as a competitor to other smartphones, it really should > have had decent email. And they seem to agree; I note that at > tmobile-g1.com, they say: > > "Your life is in your email, and that makes the T-Mobile G1 your lifeline. > Easily access your GMail and other email accounts with just a touch." > > Saying that while shipping the G1 with real email support only for Google's > proprietary system is ridiculous. And defending this with the standard > open-source "patches welcome" defense is equally ridiculous. Google and T1 > are selling a consumer product, and using consumer marketing methods. That's > a different world than free software, and Google should know the difference. > > William > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
