Their Hangouts app sucks. I don't know how people in the U.S. use it, but here people use it only for SMS, and they crammed everything in that so it's hard to do the main function. But not to worry, they made Messenger too. So, if you're a sane person, you disable Hangouts, install Messenger and all is good, right? Of course not. Because since the 5.1 update, every few minutes you get a nice message that says "Hangouts has stopped unexpectedly". You know, the app that you supposedly disabled because you have no use for. So you enable it again, and the message goes away, and the app just stands there, unused, taking up space and memory. And by the way, why do they feel the need to make two or three different apps for doing the same thing? Photos and Gallery? Why not. What about Email, Gmail and Inbox? Sure, my app drawer was a bit too empty anyway...

There's so much more that could be said about Google "products" (I hate this word) and their problems, but my blood pressure is already acting up, so I better leave it for another day.

* Calls don't work. Had to reinstall OS a couple of times. Known Google bug that they refuse to fix on their own Nexus 4 phone. Bug also exists in Android 4.x. Yay!

* Contacts didn't show names. Had to reinstall OS.

* Bluetooth skips, sometimes fails to connect, and after disconnecting, always reconnects with no sound (though the song metadata is transmitted) - no solution that i've found so far

* Calls and texts sometimes do not alert, even when not in the quiet period - no solution / unable to replicate

* For a long time google apps just crashed, but I was able to finally solve that after reinstalling the OS and google apps a few dozen times

* Hangouts will not let you delete more than one conversation at a time

* No silent mode (speaks a lot to the idiocy of Google's product team)

* The new maps interface is incredibly slow and unusable at times (the article gets this one spot on), especially without a very fast connection (not limited to Android of course--the new slow, downgraded experience is available on all platforms from Google)

I'm pretty certain I won't buy any more Google hardware due to their lack of support (which seems to span all of their product divisions) and likely will avoid Android in general if at all possible. It's ironic because the Nexus 4 hardware seems to be quite excellent and well built--I haven't been able to break the phone yet even when intentionally smashing it into the ground as hard as I could multiple times because of the above (the bumper helps a lot, I think). The only reason I haven't made the switch yet is that a $649 starting price (really closer to $800 for a decent model after tax) for an iPhone is simply atrocious for a phone and worse than the horrific problems described above. For now ...

EDIT: Added newlines.

The only thing that makes Android usable in a sane way for me is custom ROMs and Titanium Backup's app freezing.

To continue the parent link's sentiments, it's like someone built an operating system at a company that employed such talented people that no one wanted to work on usability minutia. (Note: design is NOT usability)

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=165558

Mind you this was the case since the L preview that came in July 2014.

Type-Defect Priority-Small

I'm glad Google is all about fixing it.

Hard to say. My best guess is that you put up with a lot more issues than you should. The mobile is so utterly broken that we all have to get used to it to stay sane.

But from my personal experience, and I'm not saying that it applies to you personally, I've noticed that many people just don't give a fuck about the looks. Go and look at how majority of people write letters, or even how they write on the Internet. The amount of typos and overall lack of style is so big that 60 years ago a typical reader would get a heart attack.

Looking at the world as it is today, I start to feel that it's me who has insanely high standards because I want things to look and feel nice, not just barely work.

----

Oh, and about Lollipop - I've seen so many cases where something utterly broken on my device worked fine on everyone elses and reverse, that I learned to appreciate that things just really don't work the same even on the same brand of hardware. It's entirely possible that you and your friends have a good experience while for some reason, GPs device-software combination is broken. Hell, I personally never had any issues with Windows Vista, and almost no one believes me it's possible.

It's so bad I'm recommending a switch to Windows for users that haven't bought into the ecosystem too much - basically U$ 100 Windows/Nokia phones outperform U$ 100 Android phones by a huge margin, so are a better buy for casual users, plus Microsoft is subsidizing phones over here.

My Google Nexus 7 tablet was unusable with the Lollipop update. My LG G3 Mini also performs extremely badly. OTOH my iPad 1st generation is still going strong (though I've seen iPhones go bricky with iOS updates).

Edit: note that I had badmouthed Windows phones previously after an incredibly frustrating experience with older Nokia phones.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8698802

I don't work there, and never have, so I have no idea what the cause is. My guess is just the fact that the company has grown so much that maintaining the quality of people and thus products that they put out is impossible beyond a certain size.

I have actually written to them about my issues and I'm waiting for a response ever since.

They have Google Apps for the Enterprise, but very often you can't reach the Enterprise without the proper support, product documentation and service. From the other hand, I got very positive experience with Microsoft support which proves that "Customer support at scale" is possible.

Thank you for the comment!

Despite that, I quite like Google's apps (and Google Apps). The month view in Calendar is back. The upgrade to Lollipop went smoothly for me and was a significant improvement. Some of them seem effectively abandoned (Blogger) but ones that aren't (Drive) are top notch: fast, attractive, full-featured, and with excellent integration between web and mobile.

[1] http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2015/03/photosindrive.html

Provided you run them using the proprietary {AOL,Prodigy,CompuServe,MSN} client app.

a.k.a. Chrome.

It seems a common feeling that is spreading during the last year... Already discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9074704

If I could, I would downgrade to 4.x ..

I think Google is taking a lot of wrong decisions in terms of strategy. I really liked Material Design and how they tackled the UI discrepancies in their products, but on the Android world this is just a mess. If you want it, you need Lollipop that is just the 5% of the Android world. Can a developer ignore the 95% of the Google Play store? NO.

Then they ported Google Apps, it was nice, but Google Apps wasn't requiring a real re-style, but a better integration with apps and with their services too. Nope, we got a new UI.

It looks like they are prioritizing things that people are not caring now, at least, not so much compared to other things...

Few people are willing to pay for quality web services which leads us on this cyclical path of new more friendly services coming out followed by monetization or shutdown of said services. These changes never benefit the users (i.e. product) of the services.

I think an example of this outside of Google is imgur.com. It started out as an extremely lightweight image sharing site for social networks. It's now morphed into an incredibly featured social network of its own.

In contrast my Apple devices aren't cheap, and there is less collection of data with the intent of selling my attention to third party advertising clients, but they are more expensive and I pay an iCloud subscription fee. For the most part the Mac software doesn't suck and works reasonably well. I don't love everything about it but it's more appealing than Picasa for photos. I do pay for extra storage on Google to back up my pictures (over 100 gigs of family photos). But I am definitely paying more Apple in a direct sense (buying computers and phones + iCloud) than to Google (Google Play and 1 device). Apple's margin on hardware is high, but they make a quality product (for the most part).

What I give Google is information about myself, my work, my family, the music I listen to, the books I read, and anything and everything I ever searched for. They're pretty open and transparent about this, and I pretty much understand what I'm turning over in exchange for their free stuff. See the Google dashboard on you. If there's an application or service hosted by Google, I pretty much understand their intent is to extract data from that service or application.

That works for most people, even though they really don't understand this exchange or think about it. Free is a powerful lure and most consumers have come to expect not to pay anything at all for software and services. That's why they download a free game and keep playing it even when they find out it sends the contents of their address book off to some weird holding company. It's also why they get suckered into free games (because 4.99 is just too expensive on an App store) and then spend multiples of that amount in in-game purchases. It's why they're willing to turn over even extremely intimate details of their life for free e-mail or messaging services.

But the incentive for Google is not to make great software or hardware because that's how they make their money. Their incentive is to roll out services which help them collect information to feed their need for information about your tastes and behaviors. If that photo app you're using doesn't really give them more information, there's no incentive to make it better. Apple has an incentive to make software good enough to support their device/computer sales. Microsoft (arguably) has an incentive to make software good enough for manufacturers to license it. Apple and Microsoft, no matter how much people love to shit on them, actually have more straight forward, simple motives. They have an actual financial incentive to care about the quality of the product they deliver because you are paying them (directly or indirectly).

tl;dr Google only makes software good enough to draw you in to collect data. Other vendors are selling yous something and therefore have an interest in making that thing better.

Don't forget about Play Store revenue. They're making money hand over fist by taking a cut of app sales, which is enough to financially justify Android. Oh, and the media sales too, which don't even require Android.

When I realized all this, I switched to hosted paid email service and moved off using Google services. Last thing now was selling the Android phone and getting the alternative, where at least you get value and support for your money.

I've made the decision to stop "upgrading" anything just for the sake of being newer, and to carefully examine the not-often-prominent disadvantages too. It often turns out, at least for me, that the new stuff they added is worthless and what they removed is what I really need.

Google products' UX is always unpolished (including Android). The last Google service that I'm using is Docs, but I hope Dropbox will make something better soon.