Android Is a Dead End

Most of the comments here miss the point of the article. The article author is saying that Google will replace the Linux component of Android with something proprietary. Then Google will have total control, and will be able to prevent Android clones.

Already, Android apps make such heavy use of Google proprietary code that open source Android systems such as Cyanogen and FDroid have mostly given up.

I understand what the author of the article is saying. Android seems to be flawed, on a business and an architectural level. I'm just not sure changing a programming language will fix that. The resource problems, in fact, arise from the lack of tight integration between hardware and software. Basically, iOS is more than just an OS. It's very tightly integrated with the hardware of the various iPhones. Those integration points are all revisited in every update to ensure no regressions, and often, to implement improvements.

Speaking of updates, that's another problem with Android. (If we're being fair, I think that problem too is a problem of the more loose hardware integration). But the fact remains that as long as the OS is yoked with the business requirement of being able to be deployed by any OEM, on any hardware they slap together... Android will have update problems. OEMs are sometimes trying to throw a 2.5 cent network chip onto a 40 cent phone and expect Android to handle it with all the speed and grace that iOS handles the rigorously vetted hardware and professionally customized, hand coded firmware that Apple puts in their phones. This is very difficult to do. In fact, I think it's unreasonable to expect that this can be accomplished at all in the market that Android OEM's have to operate in.

Google needs to decide what they want... do they want Android in the hands of the majority of device users? Because if they do... they are going about it absolutely correctly. (Afterall, Microsoft beat Apple SOUNDLY in the pc market... but the reality is that it required many Windows installations to run on some very unstable hardware builds.)

Alternatively, Does Google want to make better DEVICES than Apple? If this is what they want to do... yeah... Android is just NOT going to get them there. It probably is a dead end.

But either way... it's not because of Java, or Rust, or whatever programming language we're blaming it on today.

It really is a problem of ... let's be honest ... a lot of substandard hardware that OEM's are pawning off as being the same as the good stuff. As well as firmware that many of them just don't want to invest much time and money into perfecting. (Because the return on that investment is so low.)

You could change your VM and programming language tomorrow... you'd still have the problem of OEM's slapping cheap hardware and barely functional firmware into something that looks just like all the other Android phones and saying, "Buy MINE!!! It's cheaper!!!"

These days, the Java code in an android app is compiled to native anyway.