Android Hall of Shame
April 11th, 2009
A few minutes ago I tried to take a picture with my G1 phone. My phone failed:
So I grabbed my Canon PowerShot SD1100 camera and snapped the picture shown above. My Canon camera never shows a “Force Close” error. It just works. I expect the same user experience from my phone. Is that an unreasonable expectation?
Here is the Weather Channel Android application, one of the most popular apps in the Android Market. It Force Closes becomes unresponsive from time to time. To get this picture, I simply tapped the tabs quickly:
Next I opened the Snake game. I opened and closed the phone a few times and…well, you know what’s coming next:
This is not good enough.
Welcome to The Daily WTF.
The second one is a Application Not Responding (ANR) dialog which is not a crash, just means the app is taking a while to catch up. If you clicked ‘Wait’, it probably would have worked.
@dooks – I realize this, but it is still a common application bug on Android. This bug is entirely unacceptable. It is a bug because the programmer who created The Weather Channel performs long running operations on the main application thread, making the application unresponsive. A correct, bug-free application always performs long operations on background threads.
Snake with open/close is a memory leak . As a weather has nothing to do with Android just bad app.
@Alex On a purely technical level, Weather and Snake are just bad apps. But this has *everything* to do with Android. Android is littered with bad apps, leaving users with a bad impression of Android itself. Normal consumers do not, and should not, care about the core cause of bugs. If their phones are constantly showing “Force Close” and “This App is Not Responding” dialogs, they will not be happy with their phones. I view this — the crash-prone user experience — as Android’s number one problem.
Well, i somewhat agree. It does give a bad impression, but let’s be honest my palm treo has such ugly UI that it gave much worse impression than couple of force closes. My beloved nokia e61i was slow as worm and it also was crashing. And we’re talking about very old platforms that suppose to be mature. Android is really young and it’ll take little bit of the time to get it right. I myself have one memory leak that manifests itself like once a week and i’m not able to pin pointed. So I think everybody just need to relax for a year or so and get over the learning curve. Based on what Google have put together in matter couple years – i’m impressed and think that all the goodness will come. And despite that Weather forcloses, shows null in the last update field and occasionally jumps to last location entry in the list while changing views – i use it every day
The weather app is a bit touchy, but the wait condition is due to the app pulling the first set of data for each of the tabs.
Every time a tab is clicked for the first time, the available data fields need to be updated over the network. This initial load will take about a minute for each tab, but once loaded, you can flip through them rather fast. It’s a network response issue, not a hardware or coding issue due to large functions.
Apps that make expensive network calls must be properly coded to handle the case when the data takes a long time to return. The Weather Channel does not, instead it becomes unresponsive and the user gets the error shown above.
Becoming unresponsive is clearly a coding flaw in the Weather Channel app.
Snake is not a memory leak.
That app was originally written as sample code for a previous device, which didn’t support the re-orientation (or opening/closing of a device). Basically, the shape of the screen is changing, and the app wasn’t written to take care of that.
The bug has been fixed in the latest releases by having the Snake app stick with the same screen in both portrait and landscape mode. This should be available in the new SDK: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/
If you can’t cope with it not working as well as your Nth generation camera, why did you buy a v1 device ?
What’s an Nth generation?