Saving Android From a Second-Rate Future

As an Android users I agree with the article. The very least Google could do is get Motorola to use the "stock" Android. They really shouldn't care what the other manufacturers think about it. First off, they aren't using stock Android anyway, so why would they be upset about it? And second, they seem to be very willing to adopt a very "stock" WP8 OS on their phones, so again I see no reason for them to get mad over Google using stock Android on Motorola devices. Now, the hard part seems to be actually convincing Google to do this.

Has anyone seen the Motorola phones they're criticizing? The DROID line is really, really good. The newer DROID releases have a Blur that is even more minimal than the already very-minimal recent Blur. When I watched the demo of the RAZR I (with Intel), I was floored at how clean Blur was and how close to stock it was.

Turns out, the RAZR M that's available like, everywhere, is also the same way. Huge screen, smallest bezel I've ever seen, same form as the iPhone 5.

I was a lot, lot, lot more worried about Android a year or two ago. A year or two ago Blur was god damn awful. And irremovable. And there were NO phones on the market that offered an updated experience or an unlocked bootloader. Today, we have the Nexus line. We have Motorola and Samsung offering "Developer" edition phones that we can load our own OS onto.

tl;dr Android customization has been reigned in, though likely because of consumers buying in patterns and HTC/Moto/Samsung realizing that fewer and cleaner modifications in Android allow them to perform updates faster.

(also, I think Google would do themselves a favor in more than one way by accepting T-Mobile Theme Chooser into Android proper so that Motorola/HTC/Samsung could use that to provide visual differentiation instead of brewing their own theming jars.

it's also not just about the skin being bad, it's about quickly getting updates. That's the bigger problem IMO. Both the phone manufacturer and the carriers seem to hold up updates, sometimes indefinitely. More important than getting TouchWiz/Blur/Whatever off the phone is getting the latest Android bits on the phone. If the manufacturers pushed their skin updates as quickly as Google can push release-ready Android updates I wouldn't care as much (although the recent Samsung security issue still gives us plenty of reasons to hate these customizations anyway)

It wasn't a Droid, but I took back the Motorola Atrix HD I got from AT&T the day I got it because of the Motorola crap on it--thin as it is. Because, honestly, it's still terrible. Some people might not care that things are changed just for the sake of changing them (the back/home/task-switch buttons are changed very slightly, for no good reason). I do. Because they don't know how to make it better in the process of doing it. Blur makes it worse, and it might be only slightly worse, but it is worse.

I realize I'm in a minority compared to all purchasers, but I full-stop refuse to buy an Android phone (or tablet) that isn't stock.

Android is second-rate because it's only in Jellybean that they've conquered the latency issues. People are using Android devices for passive consumption, rarely for any kind of content creation, because virtually all the content creators are and content creation software are already on iPad and have given up on Android, in much the same way that musicians almost exclusively used Macs for 10 years because nobody took audio seriously on the PC. That was OK because PCs had many other uses, but since tablets are more lifestyle than business devices, ceding all the early-adopter and tastemaker types to Apple was a huge mistake on Google's part.

Fragmentation is not that big of an issue among the Android users and developers I know. A craptastic multimedia stack was a much bigger negative.

I say this from a household with 4 Android devices and no Apple ones, incidentally.