[Galaxy Note II Original Android Development] Cloudane:
I had noticed. I remember the same thing with the new camera software, until they eventually threw the towel in and stopped trying to include it. I remember the same kind of stuff when I had a HTC as well. In fact I've never had an Original Android ROM working properly in my life.

Thank you for trying and I'm not attacking you but I've never had much success in any hacking community with "here's a random list of things to try so you'll go away for a few months" (because that's how long it'll take to go through them all). It's like when you have an ISP problem and know it's an ISP problem and they tell you to go and try some different filters, routers, software resets, reinstall your OS etc to get you off the phone. It's also like with OSX86 where several years later they still haven't figured out why NVidia cards freeze randomly and are still trotting out "try repairing permissions, try graphicsenabler=no, try pcirootuid=1, try holding ctrl-alt-shift-p-q while singing 'I'm a little teapot'".

The problem is, out of the workarounds many of them are impractical (don't want to turn wifi on and off all the time, having a minimum on the CPU will kill the battery, having something media based connected at the same time as something else is a daily occurence etc). It's almost "Here's how to fix bluetooth, simply disable bluetooth". It's also something that only happens randomly once or twice a day, though it does seem consistent overnight (Pebble app currently thinks my Pebble is connected - it's not). So it'd take weeks to go through all the suggestions.

I've even seen a suggestion of killing some app that's used for polling GPS. What's that got to do with Bluetooth :S

I'm not trying to attack custom ROM developers who I'm sure try their best and I'm grateful that they try, but I'm very frustrated at the supposedly "hackable" Android in general. What it boils down to is the reality that no one knows how to fix these problems - custom ROMs simply do not work properly, because the manufacturers use closed source binary blobs for their custom hardware and are not willing to share the details. Frankly they'd rather custom ROMs do not work, so they can steer you towards a Note 3 if you want a newer version faster. It would seem that manufacturers and Google alike started off embracing the open source nature of Android and then had a change of heart later, and now we have this horrible mish mash of open and proprietary, with the open part being suffocated more and more year after year.

All over the place including Android magazines that should know better, we have the media using it as a selling point, "go Android! It's fully hackable and you can use whatever ROM you like!" - yes, if you don't mind it being broken, or are lucky enough not to use the thing that's broken in the first place. A lot of people never use the camera or the bluetooth and so to them everything is sugar and rainbows - good for them.

And then comes the argument:

"If you're going to use custom ROMs you should be willing to accept that things might break once in a while!"

Yes, but to me it's reasonable to think they might work once in a while, too, given that it's so frequently used as a selling point for Android.

The whole Android thing is a mess - I'm almost tempted back to the dark side (Apple) as at least they're frank and honest about being closed source and locked down and not giving a crap about the users' freedom, and don't do this thing of "look, some basic part of the OS buried deep down is open source!" to pretend they do, despite them having the ability to make the same claims with Darwin. Heck, they even update their phones (up to about 2-3 years old) the same day as the new software comes out. Name an Android handset brand other than Google's own that does that.

Perhaps next time I'll learn and just get a Nexus. I don't think I could seriously stomach going back to "sorry our app doesn't do soandso, Apple won't let us". I'm sure Nexus devices probably have the same problem with custom ROMs, but fewer reasons to bother with them to begin with. Can't see myself buying HTC or Samsung again - as per usual, they're only interested in the masses who don't have a clue what "android version" even means, and not the technical users.

</rant>