The problem with Android is choice

It's not a bad thing that Verizon offers a slew of different Android phones and tablets with different features and price points. Choice is good. Choice is driving competition to create the best hardware to run android. Crappy hardware will fail, and good hardware will thrive.

This is a poor application of the principle. You don't have to make this choice repeatedly so the effects are negligible. Sure, it might apply to constant tinkerers but they are a tiny fraction of the actual users.

The rest of us might feel less happy setting it up than if we hadn't been allowed to set it up, because of the mental effort of making a large number of small choices.

But then you get to use a phone for a long long time that is suited to your needs and will be more happy because that small bit of one time unhappiness has increased your happiness during day to day use.

It's why, I assume, I keep hearing about a solution to the paradox of choice in the canonical example, food shopping, that consists of picking your favourites and then just buying those all the time instead of scanning the shelves making a new decision every time.

You don't avoid the paradox of choice problem by allowing other people to arbitrarily pick things for you, that's a pretty ridiculous overreaction to an issue that is concerned with long term repeated making of choices.

Does the paradox of choice really apply?

The vast majority of users run most of their stuff stock, and are fine with that, thus they are not affected by the Paradox of choice (remember that the crux of the problem is having to chose, stock is not typically a choice but a non-choice).

I think the important distinction for choice vs tinker is how you find the option to choose. Going in order of preference: optional choice > no choice >>> forced choice. Having no choice is a lot better than being forced to choose, but being able to choose has its advantages.

I personally frame the android thing as "If I don't like it I can change it". I have found that helps even with problems I can't solve, by being able to look at alternatives I actually consider the value of what I am annoyed about, and sometimes decide the downsides are a logical compromise.

You fandroids are just ridiculous. The author is an Android developer who blogs an awful lot about how much better Android is than just about anything else. He criticises one aspect and you lot (usual suspects) come out and ardently defend the fail with the typical snarks and passive-agressiveness. They irony of this is that you project this behaviour onto 'Apple nuts', derogatorily describing the author as such. Seriously. It really needs to stop. There are a lot of things wrong with Android, and the sooner the community talks about them, the greater the chance Android has of becoming what you all want it to be.

There is obviously a market for a phone with minimal choice, and it's filled nicely by Apple. I tend to agree that Android can be overwhelming, especially to new users, given the overwhelming number of choices, both critical and trivial.

In my opinion though, the solution is not less choice, but better and stronger defaults. There's no reason why android phones couldn't be as simple as iphones out of the box, but have more options for configuration for users who wish to dig deeper. Instead, at the moment we generally have phones full of bloatware, where many of the defaults seem designed to sell products and services of questionable value, rather than to aid the user.

The example of default application bindings in the article is a good one. That system is indeed terrible currently, but there's no reason it needs to be. At a minimum it should be possible to edit the bindings of any installed application, rather than simply clearing them all. (Right now it almost seems like the designers were trying to follow this philosophy of minimizing choice, but ended up with a hybrid that is both more overwhelming and less customizable than it could be.) There is also no reason why users necessarily have to be interrupted by the choice of app to perform a given action. Instead, an app could be chosen based on some predefined hierarchy, such as first installed. Then let the user override that choice if desired. (For example, by pressing the menu button within X seconds of one app launching another, then choosing the appropriate option.) You get the same benefit without overwhelming less knowledgeable users with choice. (And yes, some users might never realize that there was a choice at all, but that's a fair sight better than there indeed not being one.)