The Goal for Android P Should be to Make Android Suck Less (Premium)

Android has some major problems. And they are familiar to anyone who has used Windows PCs over the years.

There are frivolous things we could discuss about Android P. Which sugary dessert it will be named after, for example. Or that it will allegedly support devices that mimic the iPhone X by allowing a notch to occlude the middle top of the display.

But I'd like to have a more substantive conversation about the meaningful improvements that Google is expected to make in the next major Android version. And, perhaps more important, those it desperately needs to make.

Here's what we know. And what we think we know.

Sometime this month, Google will unveil the first Android P developer preview, in keeping with its release schedule from years past. (Last year, Google announced the first Android O developer preview on March 22.) A public beta usually appears in May, tied to Google I/O, appears about two months later. And then Google finalizes the product in the summer, in time for it to ship on new devices in the Fall.

Over that time span, we learn more, incrementally, about what Google expects to ship in the new release, with Google I/O obviously being the big information dump.

According to the reliable Mark Gurman, one of Google's goals with Android P is to convince more iPhone users to switch to Android. (This explains the notch support, he claims.) But I'm confused by Google's approach since the search giant is allegedly "improving the look of the software."

This is unnecessary. Google's Material Design---which is correctly viewed as a more modern and consistent version of the Metro look and feel that Microsoft pioneered with Windows phone and Apple began copying in iOS 7---is already better looking, and more consistent, than what Apple offers in iOS. In fact, as this UX has matured and rolled out naturally across Google and third-party apps, including those on iOS, Material Design has sort of established itself as a de facto standard of sorts.

(On a side note, one negative side-effect of Apple's decision to slow down iOS development and focus on quality this year is that a major UX overhaul, which would have added the ability to better customize the iOS home screen, has been pushed back to 2019. This is just one area in which Android is already vastly superior to iOS.)

A bigger issue for the Android user experience, I think, is inconsistency. And this is a byproduct of Android's openness: Phone makers like Samsung can tailor the interface to their own needs almost without exception, and while today's phones aren't as kooky looking as they used to be, there are still weird differences when one moves from phone to phone, especially between different phone makers.

Whether Google even can prevent this and make Android more like Windows in this regard is open to debate. But even Google is guilty of changing the Android UX on its own phones. Though it (incorrectly) touts the presence of "pure Android" on its Pixel han...