I recently switched from iPad/iPhone to Nexus 7/Nexus 5. I have been using/trying out Androids and iDevices for the past few years. I tolerate using Nexus 7/5, but I still find the iPad/iPhone 5s more enjoyable to use. I've had, played with, and tested Androids from the very first G1 (beta) up to 4.4.2 and although each version is an improvement to the previous version, I am still surprised to see how much rough edges the Androids still have. Below are my biggest gripes, and reasons why I prefer the iDevices, if price was not an issue:
1) Battery life
My Nexus 5 has tons of features, but the biggest "unfeature" is that drains in a day even with light usage (browser & G Maps) so I end up having to charge every day. You can have 100 features but they're irrelevant when you need to use them at the end of the day, when you're lost/stranded in Tenderloin District and can't make a call or look at maps.
I know some Android fanboi is going to knee-jerk respond by saying "You should try the Qi charger, it is great!" or "Try out this other slower Android! It has longer life!" Yeah... thanks... major inconvenience.
2) Placement of Android buttons
Placement of Android's back/menu buttons is, for a lack of a better word, piss poor. Sorry that I need to be so harsh on this, but I have normal sized thumbs and I keep pressing back/menu by accident, especially when I press space. This happens over and over and over again.
See the problem here? Spacebar is too close to the 3 menu buttons below. Maybe I'm a cluts with fat fingers who can't help it but pressing wrong buttons constantly, but I'm sure I'm not the only cluts with fat fingers in this world who does this. This is possible THE most annoying problem and poor product decision I have encountered to date.
By now an Android fanboi is going to knee-jerk scream with "Why don't you just tilt it" or "Just root the phone and change the placement." Yeah...
3) Nexus 5/7 auto screen brightness burns the retina
iOS's screen is comfortable to look in total darkness. You can also set auto brightness and fine-tune the auto brightness. Another plus with iOS is that it has a "night-mode" that reverses black-white for all the apps that can be switched on/off very easily.Sadly, on my brand new Nexus 5 and 7, it is either fully auto (no fine tuning that iOS has), or full manual (retro alert!). Furthermore, on the lowest brightness, Nexus 5/7 is simply too bright to read in total darkness. In order to turn brightness even lower on Android, you can either do manual mode (pain) or there are apps you buy to compensate for this lack of feature. I bought Lux for $3.80 to imitate iOS' auto-brightness, and downloaded Screen Dimmer for quasi-night-mode -- not as good as iOS' night-mode, but better than nothing.
4) Built-in Chinese/En keyboard input
I know I'm going to get dissed for this because most Android users reading this post in English don't have this issue. Let me just be blunt here: the built-in Android Chinese/En keyboard input is inferior to iOS 7. I understand these are issues that I (and other Chinese people, and I know there are many of them out there) run into every single day, and they're repetitive and very annoying and make everyone unproductive. On the iDevices, my Chinese keyboard and English keyboard are integrated -- same dictionary, and I can switch one input to another with one touch. But on the Android, they are separate "apps" each with very different configuration and dictionaries thus switching between them is a pain, requiring few extra steps.
So now you're probably going to say "why don't you just keep the Chinese input app which has its very own separate version of English input options than the default Android keyboard, after all, there are hundreds of settings and options to choose from!!!" Yes, below are the problems I run into by doing exactly that:
4a) Default Chinese/En input: the dictionary size is pathetically puny. For a company that has tons of data on search query, I'm shocked that a Google device can't even recognize some of the most popular terms, like "apps". Are you kidding me? (This is not an issue on Android English-only keyboard.):
WTF, "Alps"? No!!!
4b) Default Chinese/En input doesn't auto learn from humans: Let's say I manually delete "Alps" and type Apps again, it still gives me the same incorrect replacement! On my iDevice, pressing back and correcting it again (as what most laymen would do) means "a person really intends that word, keep that word." But Android doesn't get it. This problem comes up OVER AND OVER AGAIN and is extremely irritating.
Also on Android, the default English-only input requires extra steps to save input/learn. For example, when I type "da" (I use this for text messaging) it corrects to "DA". On the Android, one needs to manually add it with extra overhead -- unnecessary and annoying:
4c) Chinese/En context correction: Let's go back to the "Apps" to "Alps" example. Let's say now I manually delete "lps" in "Alps" so that I can continue to correct it to "Apps". It now auto corrects lps to post, making a "Apost":
Come on, are you kidding?
4d) Default Android Pinyin really sucks. This has different levels. One is that the dictionary/auto recognition is horrible. When I type ZZJNT (extremely common n-gram), I expect 中正紀念堂 (zhongzhengjiniantang) to be filled predictably like all my iOS and MacOS devices:
But on the Android this is what I get. BTW I don't think this has anything to do with the cross-straight relationships as I can find plenty of other common and non-political words that default Android dictionary fails to include. And please don't tell me that there are hundreds and hundreds of dictionaries on the web I can choose from and download from and install manually on the Android:
4e) iOS 7 handwriting recognition is superior, hands down. I can easily do n-gram hand-writing recognition (excuse my handwriting). Steve Jobs would be extremely proud even if he doesn't write Chinese, because this is the dream input method for hundreds of millions of Chinese people who don't do Pinyin and Zhuyin:
But on the Android, I'm forced to hand write one letter at a time. This is a very retro 1990s method:
I've already written 新年, why is Android not guessing 快樂 by context? It's got to be the most common n-gram in Chinese. Come on.
Furthermore, I'm not done writing 快 and it auto fills in 小 incorrectly because Android forces you to finish within milliseconds. So for young people and old people who write slower (even with the slowest setting), they will keep inputting in the incorrect letters. Bad usability:
4f) By now a Android fanboi is itching to knee-jerk at me and say: "there are hundreds of other Chinese inputs to choose from, why don't you try them out?" Look, I already spent hours and hours on 3 other top Chinese Input apps on Google Play Store, and they all suffer albeit different problems that I will have to get into in a much much longer post than this one. In short, I don't have a lot of patience for this anymore and I'm done QAing beta programs. More choices doesn't necessarily mean any of them is better than iOS 7 input that just works.
There are over a billion Chinese people out there, surely Google can make an out-of-box input experience more tolerable for them?
5) Durability (or lack of)
My previous iPhones have taken a lot of abuse. My toddler tosses everything and anything he can get his hands on. My bare iPhones have taken a lot of beating on hard floor and survived. On Jan 1 2014, my one month Nexus 5 (LG brand) with a protective case took one little 3 foot fall on a hardwood -- it looks perfectly fine, but the display stopped responding to touch completely! Boo!6) Support (or lack of)
Due to my broken Android, I went through Google Tech Support (not LG), doing hard factory reset and a bunch of things and still have the problem. The worst part of it all? 2 hours wasted on the phone and the Google customer support is completely clueless and gave me an experience that beats Fry's Electronics' experience. "No. I want you to read the IMEA numbers one by one, don't tell me 'five-hundred ninety-one, just say FIVE NINE ONE so I can understand you better'". I tried very hard to not explode as she was pretty condescending.After painful hours I finally got an RMA and will be getting a replacement Nexus 5, which will arrive after a week. I am a VERY UNHAPPY CAMPER as of this minute. I will not have a phone for a whole week.
If this were an Apple device, I'd go to the store and one of the Apple Genius would have the issue resolved in less than a day, or at least be a little bit nicer to a customer.
7) Android Fanbois
By writing this blog, I was surprised to see the amount of hate messages I got from Android Fanbois (fanbois = internet meme for "fanatical boys"). Yes, I am too uneducated and too stupid to use an Android, I should have tried X Y Z apps to fix KitKat 4.4.2 deficiencies, I should have rooted my phone, anything made by Apple is evil and therefore I am, Steve Jobs was an asshole and I support his kind by vouching for Apple stuff, yadda yadda yadda.Summary:
Google is an amazing software company because its software gets the job done. I use Google Apps 90% of the time: Google Maps, YouTube, GMail, Google Authenticator, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Voice, Google Hangout, Google+, Google Contacts, Google Translate, and obviously, Google Search.
Unfortunately, I find Google affiliated Android hardware piss poor, and the customer support to be on-par with Fry's Electronics. The top of the line hardware (Nexus 5/7 by LG/Asus) sucks, and the Android UX is just as bad even after all these years of improvements. The low-end cheap Androids are awfully slow (e.g. Google Maps take 2-3 seconds to update when I scroll), and the expensive Androids still suffer battery-hog problems and other UX issues that obviously can't be fixed with better hardware.
In an ideal world where money is not an issue, I would switch back to all [unlocked] iDevices and install Google Apps on them. But I'm cheap, so I'll just have to put up with Android.
