You’re Too Damn Open, Google

Hey man! You know what pisses me off about about Samsung’s “runaway” success with Android? Samsung’s compulsion to crap up these hundreds of millions of phones with their front end interface, their skin, TouchWiz. HTC, I am looking at you too, also you Motorola and whoever else. Stop it.

I’ve never heard anybody say they prefer the likes of TouchWiz over, say, the vanilla Google interface. What I have heard countless times is that it’s a new thing to learn, pain in the balls if not impossible to remove, kills the battery, slows down the phone, weird menus, the F word, doesn’t sync contacts and groups right, stalls update distribution and so forth. The rationale for locked bootloaders on certain phones I can see, fine, but not TouchPiss or Dense or Scrotoblur.

I don’t know why these companies have invested so much into shoving these things down everyone’s throat. Maybe an attempt to differentiate themselves, make their own brand sort of? Vanity? Habit? Too many nepotism hires you need to keep busy? Why did you bother hiring the CyanogenMod guy?

I’d largely attribute the exponentially rising success of the Nexus line to increasing droves consumers wising up and wishing to escape anything that distances their phone from the latest version of Android plus Google’s apps, also this. Yet Samsung and the others insist on thinking its in their interests to keep rolling with the damn skins, last I heard, all of which cannot be (easily) fully uninstalled. And with Samsung selling most Android phones, the TouchWiz experience is lining itself up to be the de facto Google phone experience.

Maybe it already is. Yeah, I suppose it is. I didn’t bother googling it but I suppose that good ol’ “pure Google experience” is actually rare on the Android device shelves, something you might have to actually switch carriers to find. That’s bullshit Google. That ain’t right. FFS.

This is not a problem with the iPhone of course, I believe not with those Windows Phones either. Google, you’re being too damn open here. I’m under the strong impression that most Android phones have perverted out-of-the-box UIs, I suspect it’s not doing you any favors, so tell these damn companies, please, to knock it off if they want the Google software and branding and market included in their future phones. How? I suppose tell them if they think consumers want their crap that they can get it on Google Play. Let OEMs differentiate themselves with the quality and creativity they throw into the original equipment they manufacture, not this cancer. Clamp down, Google, just clamp down now. Damn.

The other day I think I actually saw something about Samsung making their own app market. I Ctrl+W’ed real quick, but it’s still lingering in my head. Someone please tell me I got that wrong, a third party Android app markets being assembled by Samsung. Lie to me if necessary.

Doug Simmons