RonV42

With windows mobile I never had issues multitasking apps for my long commute. Waze, podcasts, GasBuddy.

With my Android phone I am seeing strange behavior since moving to it 4 month ago. I usually start off launching pocketcasts to listen to Brad and Paul first ring daily, Then I launch Waze to get my route to work and start driving. Usually about 3 to 4 minutes into the drive the podcast stops playing and I have to re-launch it to continue playing. This may happen once or twice at the beginning of my commute.

When stopped at a light I usually enter some gas prices. I launch GasBuddy and it takes forever to launch with the first station list lookup always failing. I have to do the search a second time.

So after entering the price in GasBuddy and tasking back to Waze it’s usually fine but then tasking back to GasBuddy causes a full reload with the same first lookup fails.   If I leave GasBuddy up say for 30 to 60 seconds while driving and switch back to Waze it then does a full reload and I would say 50% of the time it sometimes forgets to ask if I was to resume the route.

This is very annoying,  I even brought up memory utilization and I am only using 1.8 GB of the 3 GB of the phone so its got to something with Androids tasking system.   I did not play around at all with how Android uses battery saver in the app settings everything is default.

Any thoughts of how to keep task switching more fluid?  I don’t like that background tasks are being killed even though I am activity using them.

We have all heard of the term Windows Rot. Where you eventually have to re-install the OS to clean up the trash left behind from older installs and configuration changes. Well I want to discuss Android Rot. This is where a app in Android which seemed to work fine for the first few weeks starts to behave strangely, stops responding, and in generally becomes unusable.

Before Windows Phone I used to have a Android 1.5 phone which was painfully underpowered but had to use due to work email. Anytime the OS misbehaved you had to go into the diagnostics menu and clear Dalvik and other caches, or worst case factory reset the phone.

I figured by now Google would have had all this app cache, system cache, Dalvik cache, App Data stuff all fixed up but now it's still all happens today. A month ago I started the family on Android and put on common apps we all used. I then capitulated 3 weeks ago and purchased a Moto G4 32GB model at Costco for $150 (Great price).

The first week worked well. Following how I used Windows Phone I used Waze for commute, Pocket Casts for listening to PodCasts, and GasBuddy to report prices as I drove. At work I used the phone, SMS, Outlook.com, and some crappy Citrix Secure apps to allow VPN web access and work email access. I would have said I achieved 95% functionality and usability that I had with Windows Phone.

Well something happened say Friday, GasBuddy would take about 40 seconds just to display the splash screen and when you did your first search it would say no stations found try again. Also tasking back to GasBuddy it would restart the app at the splash screen vs. where I left off. The when I reported this to GasBuddy the usual responses, clear cache, reboot the phone, re-install app. All which didn't resolve the issue. Then Waze started to misbehave, audio alerts stopped playing, couldn't send SMS's of ETA's. Filing reports were hit and miss of getting a timeout message. Same responses from their support also.

This rot then spread to lesser used apps such as DunkinDonuts. It used to cache my id/password just fine but then I and it re-prompted for id/password and it wouldn't accept it. Again tried the same approach cache,un-installed, re-install, reboot. It seemed to fix the issue for their App for one day and started over again Tuesday.

Finally I took the time yesterday to just give up and go into diagnostic mode, clear all system caches and reset to factory, and the key was not to restore any app settings from any backups and re-install everything.

Well that is working now. After 4 hours of re-setting everything up again everything is working fine but for how long? I haven't heard any complaints from my family yet but they don't use their phone like I do. I just wonder how long it will be before the rot comes back into my phone.

Anyone else experiencing Android rot?

Ok.  I will admit my family and I have been using Windows OS on our phones since WP7.  The not much happening in this area for personal phone use I decided to start my investigation of using inexpensive Android device as a replacement.  I found the BLU HD1 at Amazon a really snappy phone with expandable storage and unlocked and works on most LTE/GSM providers such as T-Mobile for me. 

The painful part is getting all the software up and running from MS but using their Microsoft Apps app does get you started.

 I think Paul published this article a while back:  https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/android/65952/android-windows-guy-choose-right-smartphone  but I think its a bit dated and could use a more focused one on being Microsoft app centric.

 As I work thought this phone (it’s for my wife).  She will be the test case to see how seamless the experience transfers over. 

I will try to cronical my experience but if anyone else has done this can you point to any good reference sites?

Thanks