[Windows Phone 8 General] link68759:
Don't get me wrong, I know what the unix philosophy is and I love it when it works. Also I was a WM6 enthusiast before WP7- I consciously chose to use WM6 on my HD2 and rarely booted into android, though I kept it updated and played with every new release up until (and including) ICS. I had a tablet with gingerbread on it (if not ICS). I am more than familiar with android and how it works.

But android completely fails to uphold the unix philosophy, which is why I'm bitter about it. This is the fault of the devs of course. But the core of android is sloppy too- which contributes to the problem. At the end of the day, apps that are solitary are fine, but if you try to feed any app's output to any app's input, things tend to crumble.

For example, on an old WM6 with only 800MHz CPU I used to connect to my computer via samba shares and play videos/music/pictures over the wifi (G, not N) network (or even cellular via vpn). This worked and worked well because CE6 has a solid framework of good code that my media player program utilized- the program in question didn't even support network play, but CE6 explorer file-open dialog allows you to type in local or network addresses and it serves the file to the program all the same.

On an android tablet with dual core 1.5 GHz wireless N 5.0GHz, the base framework that apps use, in this case the open file "explorer", does not support typing in an address manually and does not support network at all. But that's ok, right? Because this is *nix and you can just mount network shares! Or so I thought. There were only a few apps in the market, and each one had poor unusable performance for video playback (if the video played at all). If the video did work at all, not just the app, but ALL of android crashed shortly after and I was forced to cut the power.

It was so infuriating. This is but one of the many cases where android just fails because the quality of code all around (devs, android itself) just isn't up to par with say, a *nix desktop OS. Sure, WM6 crashed a lot but the quality of programs was very high, the core was efficient and fast, and the framework was solid and more powerful than what android offers today. That's what you get out of WP7/WP8 too: good quality apps and a solid system core/framework. I am aware that most of android's normal apps are perfectly stable and fine, but my thought is, why would I bother to use android if every time I stray beyond the basic "app" I'm going to be limited by the weak system, and the devs' complete disregard for the unix philosophy? I might as well just use WP if I have to stick to "apps" as opposed to having a power user phone. That's why I just couldn't justify spending money on a good android device; especially when all the power of the tablet I used couldn't match an old 800MHz phone. And it's not like I don't have my WM6 phones which can dual boot android if I feel the need.

And yes, android is more customizable than WP, and yes, I do like WP's homescreen. But android apps don't quite match the quality of WP apps (or at least the ones I use), and no android app/metro imitation launcher can make up for a lot of the solid core functionality that WP has, and there is no satisfactory live tile copycat system on android (and even the widgets are bad IMO, another area where android devs tend to fail or just ignore. I like WP devs' emphasis on each app having a 'widget').

It is worth mentioning that android cannot even set a wallpaper properly without a third party app (forces panorama and damn you if you don't want to you that). I mean, come on! I understand it's supposed to be bare bones, but at the end of the day it isn't actually a bare boned system, because there is a UI and lots of settings. Making me search the market just to set a wallpaper is a little silly.

So no, I didn't miss the point of android, I just find android insufferable and prefer WP despite WP's (sometimes incredibly arbitrary) restrictions.

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