Since the original discussion is in a fairly inflammatorily-named thread (and has been missed by several people with vested interest) I thought I'd start a new one. Sorry if you already read my thoughts in the other thread. :)
I think the "community should fix it" is not just a cop-out (which you may or may not agree) but a complete fallacy. Lets look at some of the bigger failures^Wmis-features in the G1 that the "community" should fix and whats happened with them: - Email application: The one psuedo-success in our list. K-9 is out there, and it works. But it takes up 3m (or more) of precious user space while leaving the absolutely broken stock client in place. As far as the stock client, the lack of a changelog (and outdated upstream repositories) make it hard to see if its worth retesting. - Camera application: I'm told the app could be improved a little (quality, not features) but that the core problem is in the platform. So ...the emulator doesn't do camera. How do I help improve the mess here? - Wifi LOS, timeouts, powersaving, WPA2-enterprise: Entirely platform, and again not available from the emulator. Another target I'd love to work on. - App storage on SD: entirely platform, but can potentially be hacked on with the emulator. I'm sure I missed some, but you probably get my point. That is the glaring problem with 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. If you are lucky, your particular itch can be tested on the emulator. At that point 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 :) ..) And consider how similar it is to other mobile platforms - for most developers, it is IDENTICAL to iPhone or Symbian. You can write new apps, you can hang out in the API all day and (for the most part) you can distribute those apps however you please. (iPhone is only moderately different, as you can still sign with dev keys on an IMEI-by-IMEI basis.) You cannot change or fix the core system if something is broken or buggy. The android platform 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. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
