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 handsets, those devices, in fact, have unique, non-pure UX features that only appear on Pixel. It’s kind of a disgrace, frankly.

Gurman also claims that Android P will “emphasize” or “more tightly integrate” Google Assistant more than current Android versions, though he offers up exactly zero examples of how that might happen. But this seems obvious to me. And it is interesting on a number of levels.

With rival assistants making inroads on Android, I’m curious if Google will work to shut down the competition. This could take a number of forms, including blocking the ability for third-party assistants to take over for Google Assistant as is now possible. But this could also have ramifications for phone makers like Samsung, which not only has its own assistant, Bixby, but also features a dedicated hardware button for this feature on its flagship phones.

Again, it’s not even clear if Google can do this. And, if they can’t, what they can really do to slow the progress of third-party assistants on Android.

There are other important changes coming to Android P. Mashable noted recently that Google developers are working on privacy-related features for this release, including a new system-level change that would prevent idle apps from accessing the camera. It should natively support iris scanning, which will spread the use of this technology past just the biggest handset makers. And it should support a feature called Enhanced Call Blocking that may finally bring pervasive anti-spam call functionality to the platform.

This is all good stuff. And I’m sure there’s a lot more. But let’s move on to what needs to happen here.

When I use and think about Android, there are some major issues that always comes up, that I consider endemic to the platform. And Google needs to work to address these issues now.

The first and most egregious is performance degradation. This problem is so common and widespread that the Huawei Mate Pro 10 that I’m currently reviewing literally includes AI-based technologies that are designed solely to prevent this issue from happening.

“Most of today’s Android devices lose their speed and responsiveness over time,” Huawei explained to me. So the firm developed what it calls a Machine Learning Algorithm that “ensures the HUAWEI Mate 10 Pro stays fast even after long periods of use.” I may not have this particular device long enough to know whether it works. But I think we can all agree that this type of thing needs to be a platform feature. That it needs to solved by Google.

And if there’s any company that can solve this problem, and do so using AI, it’s Google. For all the problems Google has had making its own hardware, one of its core strengths is its ability to weave AI into that hardware.

This issue cannot be overstated, though I know from years of experience that just writing this will trigger comments from people who claim to have never had such a problem. But as a fan of the ideas behind Google’s Nexus and then Pixel lines, which should offer the best-available experience, I’ve been suffering from performance degradation all along. Most recently, the Nexus 6P, Pixel XL (2016), and even the recently-released Pixel 2 XL have all exhibited major performance slowdowns. It’s disheartening.

Many will cite fragmentation as a core Android problem, and they’ll use Google’s own platform statistics as proof. As of this writing, only .3 percent of Android phones in use are using the very latest version of the system, Android 8.1. And only .8 percent are using Android 8.0, the most recent major release. Add them up, and roughly 1 percent of devices are running an Android version that is less than a year old. Terrible, right?

Nope.

As I’ve argued in the past, the very notion of Android fragmentation is a lie because the timeliness of new platform features matters much less to users than apps, which are broadly compatible across versions and updated regularly. Plus, users upgrade at faster than ever rates these days, usually every year or two. They will get new platform features when they buy a new phone. The system works fine.

But there is one related issue that I think is more relevant and needs to be addressed: Security updates. Some phones do get regular security updates—Google’s own phones are particularly good, and get at least one every single month—but most do not. And there is no excuse for this, whether you look at the needs of a carrier, a hardware maker, or any other interested party. Security updates on Android need to be as timely as they are on Pixel—or on Windows, for that matter—and they need to be universal.

Worse, I suspect the real reason we don’t see this happening is … Google. The difficulty of delivering the same security updates across such a disparate group of devices is probably mindboggling. But it’s also a problem of Google’s making. And as the platform maker, Google is the one that needs to fix this. In fact, I feel that this issue is so important that it should take precedence over anything else. That Google, like Microsoft, should copy what Apple is doing this year with iOS and focus on quality.

The third and final issue speaks to the differences between the Android and iOS user bases. Which, of course, mimic the differences between the PC and Mac user bases. That is, the Apple guys always spend more money. More money on hardware. More money on apps. And more money on services. And that means that Apple’s smaller platforms—iOS and Mac—are, in many ways, healthier than the much larger platforms with which they compete.

According to Gurman, this discrepancy is one of the things that Google is trying to address in Android P.

“While Android dominates the middle and low-end of the global smartphone market, Apple controls much of the high-end with users who spend more on apps and other services,” he writes. “Embracing the notch may help change that. The design will mean more new Android phones with cutouts at the top of their screens to fit cameras and other sensors. That will likely support new features, helping Android device makers keep up with similar Apple technology.”

We saw this strategy work in the PC market, by the way.

Microsoft’s Surface was created solely to address the need for premium Windows PCs that could compete with the Mac. And to provide a way forward for PC makers, which had been scraping the bottom of the barrel with netbooks when left to their own devices. What the PC market proved was that choosing volume over quality was a short-term solution to a long-term problem. And that the industry was killing itself from within.

Clearly, this could be happening to Android too.

Samsung, for example, makes incredibly high-quality premium handsets like the Note8 and Galaxy S9. But the only reason it outsells Apple is that it operates like a PC maker by providing a vast array of devices at different price points. The majority of the phones that Samsung sells are not devices that can compete in any way with an iPhone. Samsung is “winning” with volume, not quality.

And even then, the competition is pretty close from a unit sales perspective. As with the Mac, the iPhone would be considered a niche product if it weren’t for the fact that it is incredibly profitable. Indeed, by some measures, Apple is the only profitable smartphone marker.

But again, it’s not just the hardware. Apple is also killing Android in app and services sales over time. As with hardware sales, it all comes down to demographics. So Google is trying to entice well-heeled customers to come to Android, not just for the device sale, but for the duration.

For a great example of how these two markets differ, I strongly recommend that you read the Ars Technica interview with the creators of the hit mobile game Alto’s Adventure. In it, the game makers, which come from an Apple background and release their wares on iOS first, explain how Android is different.

Put simply, iOS customers are more likely to spend real money on a game. So Alto’s Adventure costs $4.99 on iOS, a premium price. On Android, however, the same game is free to play because Android users will not typically pay that much for any game. Instead, this audience gets in-app purchases instead, something the game makers would never do on iOS.

“The reason behind us trying free-to-play on Android was primarily because we had heard from so many indie game developers who had made premium content for iOS that, on Android, they were seeing anywhere from as low as two percent to at the very, very, very best, 30 percent [of the sales],” the developer told Ars. “I think I heard one person say 50%. But for the most part, it seems to be between five and 15% revenue on Android compared to iOS, yet, for all intents and purposes, let’s say they have just as many pieces of hardware out in the market.”

(That’s some good iOS blinders right there: There are many more Android devices in the market. And yet revenues on Android are just a tiny fraction of what’s seen on iOS. Also, the game maker previously cited piracy as an issue on Android, too: If something is too expensive, users will just steal it.)

How Google overcomes this issue is unclear. I suppose one might argue that it is following the Microsoft model by releasing its own premium hardware, in this case, Pixel, to show the industry the way. But that lineup has done poorly, both in unit sales and from a quality perspective. Today, Google has more to learn from its partners than they do from Google, frankly.

So, yes, I’m looking forward to Android P. But I don’t feel that this release will solve all of Android’s problems, and most especially not the core problems that are threatening to topple the platform. These are issues that Google needs to address quickly. The only question is whether they will do so.