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Unqualified Reservations: Five problems with Google Android

Five problems with Google Android
While I’m certainly unqualified to discuss the usual UR material, we can’t all stay on topic all the time. I thought it would be fun to actually exercise my actual qualifications for a bit. If you’re uninterested, I apologize. (Next up: actual responses to readers’ comments!)

Android reminds me a lot of the first cellphone OS I ever worked on, way back in the Mobile Paleolithic - 1997. “Liberty” was written in C++, not Java, and it used its own kernel rather than Linux. But these are details. The basic idea of an object-oriented application framework is more or less the same. I suspect Android is also not unlike the Danger Research (Sidekick) OS, as some of the same people are involved.

In other words, Android is a conservative design. It does nothing to disabuse anyone of the general view held by most programmers today, which is that the era of interesting software is over. Done, finito, stick a fork in it. Certainly this is the safe position. And when you have a trillion-peso market cap, why not play it safe? I suspect that if I worked for Google and you asked me to build a handset OS, I might well come up with something much like Android.

So I can’t really blame Google for the fact that Android strikes me as kind of lame. I blame society. (I always blame society.) And I’m also pleased to note that Android’s Java VM was designed by an old classmate of mine, a good guy who I hope is now very wealthy. (I never knew “Bornstein” was an Icelandic name. Maybe that’s just what you get when you show up at Ellis Island with a handle like “Björnssøn.”)

But that said:

…

(Via del.icio.us/toxi.)

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Since 2004, R-Echos is an experimental online magazine dedicated to republication; topics vary from biology to graphic design, from ecology to business. It agglomerates anything which is about art, computing, science. His form is made out of collages of texts, links, images, references, videos and sounds - choosen with care to take part to this very personnal publication.

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