Disclaimer: I write iPhone/iPad Software, so I may be biased here. I try to be fair, though. I believe that Android is a good thing, the only _real_ competition in the Smartphone area for the iPhone. I’m sure Android will go mass-market, and will be successful. It’s not bad. There are just some things that really need to be fixed (and even google thinks this way)

I spent my two weeks in San Francisco @ WWDC with an HTC Legend. What, you think? It was my only *unlocked* phone, i got it for free – and I really wanted to try Android somewhere more in-depth. So I got a T-Mobile USA Sim and started playing. And no, I won’t go into the horrible cellular networks that are in the US… (God bless Austria for that!)

And I apologize for not having screenshots ready…

There are some domains where Android really shines:

1. The Notification Area. When you get different Push Notifications/Messages on iPhone, they (sometimes) overlap, but mostly you will loose the older one. That’s kinda annoying. On Android those notifications are collected in the status bar and are accessible from every screen, as long as the status bar is visible. I’m sure this will improve in later iOS versions. (Palm also has a superior notification system)
   Disadvantage:  There’s no scroll-to-top (like on iPhone) which in combination of a kinda wanky scrolling system is really missing.
2. Maps. I *love* the Places-Integration. It’s just that cool to have all data from Yelp, Urban Spoon right on the spot you searched for. (It may be useless in Austria but it was cool in the US)
   Otherwise maps felt much clunkier than on iPhone. Scrolling wasn’t smooth at all.
3. Systemwide back. It’s a yeah and sucks both times. Those extra buttons like back, search, menu take you away from your app canvas every time. It is supposed to be just the app. But with those hardware-buttons you (the developer) has to provide actions for every screen. But yeah sometimes they just don’t work.
   Systemwide back however, is pretty nice. Open a URL in Maps, go into the browser, press back, and voila, you’re back in Maps.

Let’s go to the bad things i noticed

1. Messaging. First, the system is not able to order my messages the right way when they were sent in the same minute. This leads to very strange message histories with garbled sequences. It’s very frustrating cause thats clearly a bug. I don’t know if it’s a HTC Sense issue or Android itself.
2. Message send failures. When message sending fails, you get a notification (good), then you get to the “Message sending failure”-Screen (good) and then you don’t see a button or anything to retry sending. It’s hidden under the Menu-Hardware-Button-Popover. I had a hard time discovering that.
   To be fair, it’s a 1:1 cause the iPhone doesn’t even has option to retry sending of all unsent messages.
3. The Keyboard. Much too much keys, two labels per key, and much junkier to use. To be fair, that’s an HTC Sense issue and was improved on Android 2.2. There’s an paid App on the Android Market that replaces the keyboard with an iPhone-nearish model, and i was pretty good.
4. Autocompletion. Sucks on iPhone too, but subjectively less. If you type and you look at the text, iPhone displays the proposals right where your text is. Android adds a text proposal bar right above the keyboard (like early prototypes of iPhone did) This takes up more spaces (as it’s added when you *start* typing, and not with animation but in a junky way.
5. Twitter. The official Twitter app is nowhere near as good as the Twitter app for iPhone. Nowhere. I tried Twitdroid too, but that was a total sucker. Added a notification as soon as I got new tweets, my phone was making noise every 5 minutes. But that’s supposed not to be an Android issue, right? Because it’s all the apps. But as a developer, the frameworks you get really make the difference in building a ok or a great app.
   I tried to upload an Image with Twitter for Android, and it crashed every time. Yeah, after I found my picture, because the picture browser is crazy slow (there isn’t even a delay on iPhone – on Android you can see each picture thumb loading after the other). And the order is wrong, you have to scroll right down to the bottom to get the latest pic (which is usually what u want – take pic and tweet it). Twitter for Android also often just lost my scrolling position, changing it a few tweets up or down. That’s absolutely unacceptable.
6. Facebook. The iPhone version is also much superior. As soon as you drill down on something, you are redirected to the Web-Interface of Facebook, where the iPhone-Version just does fine. I also didn’t manage to upload a picture to fb that was already on the phone, because pressing the picture-icon just opens the camera (instead of giving you a chance to selected saved pics)
   @westbaer on twitter told me that it’s only possible from the Android picture browser. So you go to a picture, press the action button and get this menu with all app hooks (which is kinda cool and not possible on iPhone right now). But then _another_ screen is opened, where you have to select the picture you wanna upload (same junky stuff as on Twitter, scrolling, waiting, scrolling, waiting). Why it doesn’t just upload the picture I was on? And why I can’t do that within the application?
7. This damn selection-ball. I don’t get it, I don’t need it and I don’t wanna use it. Hello, it’s all touch, remember? But I accidentally touched it and it changed my screen focus. It’s also ridiculous that this is the make-a-picture-button. I gave it to some people and most just messed up. As they removed their finger they made a touch-gesture on it, resulting in the active button cursor to be on delete, deleting the picture right after making it. Great. (And isn’t that supposed to glow on notifications? It never did)
8. Selecting text. Where’s my magnifier? It’s there _sometimes_ but it wasn’t there in messages or the browser. At least not when I tried to copy that damn phone number. (On iPhone you have data detectors that make the number click-able. It worked here, on Android most of the times not) After five minutes trying to get the cursor right before starting the selection mode with long-touching in input, then copying… and then every time THE WHOLE MESSAGE was copied. Which I didn’t knew, pasting it into the message number box unknowingly, resulted in a bunch of alert boxes that this was (obviously) no number. The only way out was to press the Home-Button as Message-App was pretty much killed with that action.
9. The Address Book. I don’t care where you save the Contact, can’t you just save it and keep my Google-Contacts in sync with my Local-Contacts? It’s a Google-Phone, isn’t it? And SIM, hahaha, I really don’t care.
   But it asked me every time, with no option to “make this default”. Sucks, totally. Also that you have to enter many sub-views to enter your data (like name – all happens on one screen on iPhone). And then try to scroll aaaaaallll the way down to the end of the form to find the save/clear button. Why it just can’t be on the top?
10. The Browser. Tabs? What is it, a joke? Switching tabs on iPhone already sucks, but on Android sucking got a whole new level. Press Menu, Press Windows, try to select your tab from the junky CoverFlow, activate it. But don’t worry, more than 4 or 5 tabs are not allowed anyway.
    The Browser is also way more imprecise when pressing small urls. I was used that most of the times i got it right – no chance on Android (this may be because of a worse touch screen, or was it just not calibrated correct? I don’t know, and honestly I don’t care – this is supposed to just work!)
    The Browser also doesn’t auto-zoom in when pressing on small form elements. It’s a small feature but you gonna miss it really hard – especially in combination of bad-working multitouch zoom. Try it and you go back to the on-screen-buttons (they are much more reliable)
11. Apps in general. The quality is much lower than I am used to. Some are _ports_ of iPhone apps, resulting in clunky copycated ui-elements that just aren’t there on Android. Must Apps look and feel very differently. There are some outstanding good ones, like doubletwist, but most of them are junk.
    On the iPhone AppStore, there’s much more junk. But also MUCH MUCH more apps that really shine out and make your live easier. Here, knowing most of the iPhone-Versions, most had less features, had a junkier ui and were slower.
12. The Market. I really wanted to buy some paid apps (maybe here is the good stuff?) but there were no attractive apps in the store. I finally bought a replacement keyboard (after downloading the free task killer app
    The payment process is a mess, I was forced to enter my credit card details on the phone, in a multi-step process. Even later on buying needs about 4 touches, compared to just one on the iPhone.
    Another suck-age is the return policy, which you just can’t do. Maybe a 79 cent app is fun for 20 minutes. People buy, download and then, after 20 minutes, just return it and get their money back. ERROR IN THE SYSTEM!
    Another error is that the LOCAL PRICES are displayed. So I see Euro, Pounds, Dollars, pretty much mixed up. Why? I only have one currency, and Google knows my country so it should be able to just recalculate that.

I keep that as a draft, pretty sure there are more things than that.

Related posts:

1. Version Adoption Rate: iPhone vs Android
2. “On Android, it’s fucking hell”