[Nexus 7 (2013) General] TheWerewolf:
My experience with KitKat, for what it's worth, has been kind of a mixed bag.

Out of the box, very little has really changed. But then again, for me, very little broke either, so this is more about the future than about right now.

However, what it broke was odd... and why it bothers me will likely lead to a terribly predictable response: that's not what a tablet does.

In my mind, the point of Nexus devices is to be consistent and complete. It's the benchmark. So theoretically everything should be in there and they should be made invisible when they don't make sense. For example, the Nexus 7 WiFi doesn't have any kind of phone chipset, so Phone should disappear. In a perfect world, the app should still be in the ROM, just automatically hidden.

In the LTE version, they have a WRT1605L chipset which provides data over 2G/3G and LTE.. but also provides SMS services. So to me, it should support SMS *exactly* the same way as a Nexus 5 does. And in fact, in 4.3, it did - kind of. If you take the Messenger.apk out of the Nexus 5 and sideload it onto the Nexus 7 LTE, you get back full texting that works exactly the way it does on the Nexus 5. So why leave the app out? That's an intentional decision that makes the Android Nexus experience inconsistent. Worse, when you get to 4.4, they went even further to disable the ability to use SMS with anything but the simple messenger - again shown to be the case because you can install a patch that fixes this and restores full SMS functionality - EXCEPT that because of changes made by Google - Hangouts seems to be the only app you can text with. In this case, they *intentionally* introduced inconsistencies and reduced existing functionality. That's quite different from 'not putting in effort to support something that was previous unsupported' and comes across as vindictive.

The most egregious omission though, is the Google Experience Launcher. As we all know - it works fine. Again, you get it from the Nexus 5 and sideload it and voila - you get the full experience. So why one experience for the N5 and a different (and less advanced) one for the N7 when they're both flagship devices from Google? Wallet with Tap and Pay is another.

In the end, what makes it frustrating is not knowing why these decisions were made. They seem capricious and arbitrary and they seem to serve someone other than we, the customers. They make the Android experience on the Nexus 7 seem second rate compared to the Nexus 5 which only came out a short time after the Nexus 7 and causes more inconsistency. The way the rollout happens just enhances that sense of 'second citizen'.

---------- Post added at 01:44 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:37 AM ----------

Well, two points to that... Facebook is a major app. There's a set of major apps like that. Google can even determine which they are because - you know - they own Play so the can actually get a list of say the top 30 apps.

First off, changing API should be something never done lightly. Google did change several API rather dramatically in 4.4, so they needed to take more care than usual to make sure this wouldn't damage existing apps. There are ways to extend an API without breaking existing calls - it takes more work, but it means less pain for the customers.

Second off, they should have tried the top 100 apps or so on the new OS to make sure they still work. I would have made that part of the QA regression tests.

Finally, there shouldn't BE a way to 'use some non standard things'. If Facebook can do that - it's a huge defect in Android. One reason WinRT and iOS are as stable as they are is because they explicitly block people from doing oddball things.