Android is far too unpredictable for my business critical use

The latest version of Android is still driving me round the bend.

You’d have thought they’d have fixed all this nonsense after many iterations. As it stands today I’m still getting emails from Android apologists telling me that ‘these things should be resolved with the next version,’. Yeah. Not useful to me when I’ve spunked £600 on what I thought would be a phenomenal experience.

Here’s a case in point that is causing me to press exit on Android today.

This morning I sat down at my desk to do some work. I placed my LG G3 top of the range gorgeous Android phone on the desk and got on with my tasks.

About 40 minutes later I got a text message. I picked up my phone. That’s when the trouble began.

It was exceptionally hot. Uncomfortably so.

I looked at the battery indicator. I put it down on about 98%. It was now, after 40 minutes, reporting 67% charge.

In my mind I was screaming BLUE FRUCKING MURDER.

Yes, it’s a #firstworldproblem but this is totally unacceptable.

I tried to respond to the text and found the phone had got itself drunk. It was semi responsive. The FRUCKING HUGELY POWERFUL CPU was behaving as though someone had thrown a bottle of Sambucca down it’s throat.

Now and again it was responding to my commands. I’d tap three times. The screen would register the taps but the rest of the phone was 10 seconds behind. And that created even more trauma because I ended up launching apps and other services that were going on to use up even more resources by mistake because the phone was misinterpreting my wishes. Because it was slow.

It was slow, because McAfee was doing something.

There’s some bollocks generic McAfee nonsense installed on the phone. Family Protection or something like that. I can’t easily find a way to remove it so I just left it.

I had a look and saw that in the past 40 minutes, McAfee had eaten up 32% of the battery power and seemed to be consuming a heck of a lot of other processing resources.

Why?

No idea.

It’s perhaps wrong to blame McAfee. I’ve no idea what kicked that off. I’m at home today so I’m not worried about power. But I tell you, if I’d been on the train into work this morning and arrived at the client’s office with 50% battery … because of some stupid process malfunction. Ouch.

The fundamental problem as far as I’m concerned is that I’m using Android. And it doesn’t matter WHAT you say to counter this text: Android isn’t prime time.

Prime time requires stability. Stability at all flipping times. Not general ‘I’m sometimes drunk’ stability. I mean guaranteed stability.

I get this with an iPhone on iOS. IT. JUST. WORKS. NICELY.

I think once in a blue moon I’ll find my iPhone overheating unexpectedly. This is almost a daily occurrence.

It doesn’t take long before the other list of ‘fcuking annoying traits’ bubbles to the surface.

Want just one? (I’ve got a whole list.) I start the camera and … piff paff poof… I get message saying, “Camera stopped.”

Great. Thanks. Useful. Run the FLIPPING camera won’t you please? What is so difficult about running the camera? How can it POSSIBLY fail? Surely this stuff is tested repeatedly and repeatedly? Yes… but not in real world situations when you’ve got all sorts of buggy nonsense from lazy third party app developers interfering.

The OS itself on both the HTC One M8 and the LG G3 is really, really fast and responsive when you first switch the phone on. Start putting stuff on it and then seems to progressively dissolve into a semi-responsive experience.

I absolutely ABHORE interfaces that have to keep on building. You know, swipe right and then you have to WAIT while the phone renders the animation, then displays the icons and then properly formats the background. You have to wait or you’ll confuse the hell out of it.

You don’t need to do this with iPhone. Or BlackBerry. Or, to an extent, Windows Phone.

So that’s it for me and Android.

I tried, dear reader.

I’ll try again later on.

I need continuous stability first. Bring on the new iPhone.

Next, I think I owe it to Rafe Blandford to try out Windows Phone properly.