android roadmap?

i'm not sure which way google are going, but they seem to want to turn the android into a desktop os, rather than a handheld os. google are doing to android, what microsoft did to windows.. make it bloatware & proprietary locking everyone out, till people give up and move to alternatives.

i can still install and use windows 95 on that old hardware. i might not be able to install the latest software versions, but i can install those versions which came along at that time, and use them just fine. just like newer versions of windows demanding ever increasing hardware requirements, every android release seems to demand bigger and more expensive hardware. older hardware would just not function in this new world covert strategy.

google's sustainability strategy is not translating into actual practice!

google market has been replaced with google play store, mimicking apple store. the older market app which came on your phone will not work. market started out as a small and sleek app, which progressively kept growing bigger, and the newer google toys will not even install on older android phones. and if it does fit, you would need to delete all your other apps to make space for this google garbage. why would anyone even think of watching movies on an old android phone? if only google allowed the older market app versions which came on the older phones to connect, people could continue using those older android phones. but google, in it's infinite wisdom will not allow even their own older apps to function, rendering all older android devices useless.

don't get me wrong, i am not saying that all the older phones should work with the latest apps. but the phones, which we bought a few years ago, should work as they did at that time. but google won't allow them to connect to market, maps, contact, calender, and anything else on the network. so you could use them, but not as a smartphone. which begs the question, why would you not rather use a non-smartphone, if you only need to make calls/sms, as they would have much better battery life.

the only silver lining here is the google strategy remaining officially open source. the bad news is none of their apps are. google apps have become proprietary closed-source bloatware. from initial app size of a few kb to the current many mb, google apps are growing without restriction. and this is hitting a crunch point.

my mobile phone does not have unlimited disk space, memory or battery. although i have unlimited net, at some point it will not be, and i need to prep for it. so i need lean focussed apps, than all-in-one behemoths running in the background all the time without my explicit permission.

google maps started out so well, that i was using it to the point of excluding everything else. now google maps is more focussed on bells n whistles than making its core functionality more efficient. bells n whistles that i have no need of. so, out goes google maps from my phone. likewise with gmail, google play store, etc. market was a lean app, which has now become play store with books, movies and billboard advertisements. do i really need that on my phone?

android permissions are out of control. seemingly any app can request and is allowed any permissions it asks for, not necessarily what the app actually needs, or the user would actually want to allow. and the user has no idea. there are apps which start at boot (read almost all), and want to keep running all the time. user be damned! in a mobile phone, the most important resource is the battery. anything that can potentially drain it, is malware!

i look forward to more choice on my mobile phone, like on my computer. the primary requirement is open source, using minimal diskpace & memory. idle battery use should be ~nil, which would preclude covert background tasks/activities. i still wait for emdebian to mature.

mobile linux is gaining momentum, but i don't think they are on the right road. if their starting point is firefox, gnome and/or ubuntu, they are a long way ahead from being lean. firefox bloatware used so much space, that i promptly removed it from my phone. i have no idea what kind of hardware the developers work with! perhaps they use their pc for development/testing and expect their apps to behave the same of phones with much lesser hardware specs...