Recently I have been hearing much criticism of Android. Some people are suggesting that Android will survive on smart phones but not on tablets. The problem is that the user interface on Android is not satisfactory for many apps.
A very interesting article, "Nothing in Android makes sense except in the light of its original vision" explains the Android strategy. Android was designed to solve the hard problems in operating system development, as the author explains:
"The hardest part of building advanced mobile phones...was writing the lower-level software that the operating system uses to communicate with the hardware, including the radio baseband and audio/video controllers"
This strategy left the higher level issues in the software stack to manufacturers, app developers and carriers. They would be responsible for the user experience and interface. However, the Android toolkit to assist developers was not very sophisticated and resulted in slow run times. The developers were consequently very challenged and the user experience suffered. Some of these issues still continue and may undermine the long term viability of Android on the more sophisticated tablets.
While Android provided a great service in addressing the "hard problems" they left the all important user interface to others and consequently the user experience.
