[Nexus 5 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] mciavelli:
Two years on, the debate is still all the rage, not really.

However, let me kick the dead horse and bring a few points back, as someone who is just switching from the old trusted SGS II on Siyah and 2.3 Android to the Nexus 5 after four years on the same old trusted device.

To start with, I immediately rolled back from LP to Slimkat 4.4.4, because as much as I enjoy tinkering, the primary purpose of a smartphone for me is an already stable communication device with compatibility with most of Market apps for improved comfort of use and customizability.

The combo of 2.3 and SGS II has worked so great for me, that I decided to keep to the concept of “don’t fix if it ain’t broken” and even replaced a broken screen at nearly the cost of a new phone, just to save time on migration and tweaking. The phone survived heavy daily use, has been on a round-the-world trip with me, endured multiple falls, trips to extreme destinations, an odd humidity treatment, a frequent temperature change from -25 C North European winters to +62 C African direct sunshine heat. So, thank you, Korean engineering, thank you, the developers of 2.3 Android Gingerbread, and thank you, XDA community for optimising Kernel, ROM, bells and whistles.

Second, I would like to address the points which are frustrating in Kitkat in comparison to 2.3, and my main concern are the features within gapps. Perhaps, for the majority of us who go after incremental updates the change has not been noticeable, but for me it is huge, and in some respects it does not work in favour of the newer versions.

I understand the desire of system developers to tie the consumers with proprietary formats, syncs, links and integration as much as possible, make the process of data collection from the consumers seamless to be able to use target-marketing and/or offer a more seamless experience, however, this comes at a cost of customizeability, increased number of default presets and syncing, and more unwelcome decision making on behalf of the consumer, seemingly based on the assumption that a system developer knows the consumer’s needs better, than the consumer him/herself. Part of it is quite probably unintended and based on a fact that the updated system architecture is forcing the app developers to re-write parts or all of the code, and some features don’t make it to the submission deadline and may stay unimplemented for good, since the resources are then re-directed to concocting another upgrade, complying with the chain of upgrades to Android versions themselves. This is the sad part, when the progress comes at a cost to quality, be it intentional or not.

Now, a few points how the absent or added features in the Kitkat app package put it at a disadvantage in comparison with that of Gingerbread.

Gmail app: when synced with several accounts, the name of the inbox does not show on the top bar, neither there is a handy pop-up list when it is pressed to easily switch between the inboxes. The tabs added seem like an excessive feature: the standard gmail spam filter used to take a good care of unwanted e-mails, and a handy ‘spam’ button would take care of the rest. I do not want to poke several buttons and browse through in-your-face apps. I understand that the marketing people would want me to do that to stumble upon the vital offers tailor-made and targeted exclusively at my needs, however, I cope with my needs fine by myself, and they way they are presented to me bring me back in memories to the good ole’ times of inbox being full of penile extension offers, against which Google did such a good job filtering itself, also back in the days.

People app, Hangouts, Dialer etc: Yes, I want my contacts backed up, but on my terms, on my hard-drive. I am not privacy-crazy, but I am not keen on telling everyone who my friends are, what social circles I belong to, and, hence, indirectly, what my income is and what choices consumer-wise and in life general I am likely to make. This part I can do myself, thank you. However, I am quite keen on simple uncluttered productive interface. I do not mind seeing a picture of a contact as an Accessability feature, in case I go senile one day and forget the names of my friends, however, poking my friends in the face to edit contacts or make calls I do not consider necessary, in fact, it is a distraction. I want to open my contacts and get a cursor blinking ready to make a search by name, not having to find a tiny magnifying glass button in the inconvenent bottom-left corner, or seeing the in-your-face favourites with the giant buttons and pictures (a great feature for dyslexic or senile people, but an excessive space-consuming luxury for a productivity-orientated person). I want to quickly slide left to SMS, or slide right to call, I want a prompt to ask me wether to make a phone call or call by Skype (or other). [the many requests to Google from the users fell on deaf ears, some explaining this unwelcome change by pressure from mobile operators, some by patent wars with Apple. The workaround to enable this can be achieved through Xposed framework install and running of a module “Chengeable calls”.]

I am not sure what has to happen for the concept of development changing direction from trying to sync everything in a proprietory format into proprietory space, thus making a consumer more dependent by “holding him by the data” and shoving well-targeted all-important tailor-made marketing content down his bandwidth, until that consumer, “synced and tied” and unable to resist. Rooting, customisation, containing each individual app appetite for auto-updates, syncs, data cloud backups in proprietory formats, browsing through endless lists of seemingly unnecessary app permissions to get under the hood of your life, and unchecking multiple tickboxes for auto-updates, which may bring new permissions by the back door and for data collection, use and sharing, all of it is becoming more and more tedious.

So, the laughs and giggles are fine, until one finds that a degree of control over a mobile device is decreasing proportionately to the increase of control of the device over one’s data and consumer decisions. These are my thoughts on ‘progress’ vs ‘stagnation’.