Android crashing a lot

[EarlyMon]

Sorry, heard wrong.

Nothing is perfect.

 

[nickdalzell]

Yea the '[app name] isn't responding, do you want to close it' in ICS is the most annoying thing since the little paperclip dude in MS Office 'hey, it looks like you're writing a letter....'

 

[mydian]

My Samsung doesn't lag when I type and it doesn't freeze up. ZTE's are known for having all kind of freezing and lag issues. Must be the Chinese spyware installed hidden on it. :tongue:

I have used my friends iPad 2 quite a bit and it doesn't seem any smoother than my out-dated phone running Gingerbread. It also can't do half the stuff my phone can do but I'll stay out of that.

 

[mikedt]

My Samsung doesn't lag when I type and it doesn't freeze up. ZTE's are known for having all kind of freezing and lag issues. Must be the Chinese spyware installed hidden on it. :tongue:

"We do not put spyware in our phones." :smokingsomb:

 

[mikedt]

Yea the '[app name] isn't responding, do you want to close it' in ICS is the most annoying thing since the little paperclip dude in MS Office 'hey, it looks like you're writing a letter....'

I've only ever really noticed that with the cheapo ICS devices. My $60 Ampe tablet does it almost every time I use it, yeh... '[app name] isn't responding, do you want to close it'. Which I would expect, given what it is. This is the general crappiness and instability you tend get from off-brand budget Android devices. On the other hand if I had a much more expensive Google Nexus tablet behaving like this, I'd be wanting my money back.

 

[mikedt]

Definitely agree with nickdalzell.... I've been using android too from the first version up till now and it definitely keeps getting hung up and lots of lag issues and a dozen other "speed" problems its got. The "force close" is like THE most frustrating thing in an android. Never used an iOS but heard that it never ever crashes.

I've used iPhones and iPads. iOS is always smooth and stable I've found, and extremely polished. But then I would expect nothing less of Apple TBH. Apple products can be very expensive luxuries here in China. iPad 3 is equivalent of $800-900 USD here.

But on the other hand if one has some Android device bought from the local market or Alibaba or Ebay whatever, for about $60-$80 or so, I kind of expect it to be crap, and to crash frequently

 

[EarlyMon]

When iOS apps crash, they do so without telling the user.

To say "Android does XYZ" without pinning the remark to a specific device is not accurate.

I respect opinions, but I don't believe that all opinions represent universal truths.

Androids run slow. Androids crash. Android is XYZ. Substitute the name of a car maker for Android, and that exposes my argument against those statements.

 

[nickdalzell]

Is there any way to disable that 'not responding' alert? Never shows in GB but its so annoying in ICS. It's just like that paper clip in Office 97. Usually it shows up when loading a resource hungry game, but the game runs fine...

I've used more than th ZTE, including many. But the fragmented nature of Android and how its used on various hardware is partly why I find it always playing catch-up with Apple. To get the same performance, stability, and smooth scrolling, you end up paying the exact same price for a Android Smartphone as an Apple iPhone. So really what is 'overpriced' to you?

I am trying to save the money for a Nexus 10 but if it so much as jitters or acts up, its going back to the store. Those who never used or owned an Apple device may not notice or care, but the retina screen and OS smoothness is something that always brings me back to Apple. Be it tablet or phone. I just can't stand performance that is like running Windows 98 on a 486.

 

[Crashdamage]

Apple is playing catchup to Android. I've used both and the Nexus 4 with Jelly Bean is at least as fast, smooth and stable as the iPhone 5 and has a better screen. All for $300-350, about 1/2 the iPhone.

Heck, my old HTC Amaze with ICS is as good as the iPhone 5.

 

[mikedt]

]Is there any way to disable that 'not responding' alert?[/B] Never shows in GB but its so annoying in ICS. It's just like that paper clip in Office 97. Usually it shows up when loading a resource hungry game, but the game runs fine...

You finding that happening when you run resource hungry software on budget low-specced Chinese devices, that don't have much system RAM and weak CPUs, like the ZTE Merit and the D2?

Other thing is, ICS is more demanding and requires higher-specced hardware than GB. So it probably will lag and "not responding" if the hardware is weak and low-specced.

I've used more than the ZTE, including many. But the fragmented nature of Android and how its used on various hardware is partly why I find it always playing catch-up with Apple. To get the same performance, stability, and smooth scrolling, you end up paying the exact same price for a Android Smartphone as an Apple iPhone. So really what is 'overpriced' to you?

Think it depends where you are. Here in China, Apple products tend to be 50-60% more expensive than in the States. Basically because Apple is selling their products as desirable luxury items here, rather like LV, Cartier and Gucci....see this thread...
http://androidforums.com/lounge/657786-iphone-loosescandidate-job.html

I am trying to save the money for a Nexus 10 but if it so much as jitters or acts up, its going back to the store.

Those who never used or owned an Apple device may not notice or care, but the retina screen and OS smoothness is something that always brings me back to Apple. Be it tablet or phone. I just can't stand performance that is like running Windows 98 on a 486.

Many budget Android devices can be rather like an old 486 or Pentium, with a crappy el-cheapo PC-Chips motherboard, except they're trying to run Windows 7. Get the Nexus 10, you might be amazed.

I've actually got an iPad 3 here at the moment, it belongs to a friend of mine. I'm setting it up so he can use it for English lessons. TBH my cheapo Ampe tablet looks and works like a cheap plastic toy compared to his beautiful Apple tablet, but then he did pay a lot of money for it...almost 10 times as much.

BTW Nick, did you ever own a first generation iPhone or iPod Touch?

 

[nickdalzell]

Yep a first gen ipod touch. Smooth as silk. Was my first ios device

 

[Xuthus]

I don't own an iPhone but my fiancee has one. Of all the generalisations in this thread saying that the UI experience is smoother on iOS is probably the only one that is true. It is also one aspect of the overall experience and other things can easily be more important and I will give a couple of examples:

1. An HTC Desire-Z. This is an Android phone with a slide out keyboard. Mine suffered from a bug whereby the phone would sometimes lock up. When it did this it would not wake up when you pushed the power button and, most importantly, would not respond to incoming calls. As I did use the phone as a phone and not just a personal organiser/media/internet device this was a serious failing because sometimes people would try to phone me and get voice mail even though I was available to talk. By comparison there have been several cases of Samsung devices randomly rebooting themselves and, while being completely stable without reboots would be preferable, auto rebooting is infinitely preferable to the hard lock up of the HTC because it gets the phone back on the network so it can be called.

2. An iPhone 5 which sometimes loses WiFi connectivity and will happy report that no WiFi networks are available even when other devices can see at least three. The significance of this is that the owner has chosen her data plan based on the phone using WIFi at home and mobile data when out and about so if the phone uses the mobile network at home because it won't connect to the WIFi this either runs up a large data bill or exhausts the bundled data allowance. The bug seems to be in iOS 6 as people are reporting the same with iPhone 4Ss and iPads that have upgraded.

You can say my opinion here is subjective but to me these are both much more serious than occasional lag and the odd crashing app and neither platform has come out smelling of roses.

Regarding the comment about Linux running servers that are very stable and don't tend to crash or need rebooting, yes Linux can be very reliable. On the other hand when you run it on recently developed hardware bugs in either the hardware or the drivers developed for that hardware can be a source of unreliability. As the hardware has been around for a while the bugs in the drivers get fixed and the driver writers even manage to work around some bugs in the hardware itself but this all takes time and mobile hardware changes so fast this process is less effective on phones than on server or desktop PCs.

 

[Joelgp83]

............I'm still curious about the 100wpm typing lag complaint. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think I've heard of ANYONE else achieving 100wpm on a touch screen interface, with the exception of Data from Star Trek.

I don't have reason to doubt nickdalzell's typing speed, but still it's been my experience that (as far as touch screen typing is concerned) it is not only nigh unheard of, but also RIDICULOUSLY fast, and such speeds are NOT what hardware designers are expecting, at all. It's kinda like complaining that your average car engine starts getting unstable after going 110+mph.

 

[nickdalzell]

I can only type that fast on the ipad but never Android. The ipad has large and big button on screen keyboard plus excellent touch response and accuracy. I have to type at a lousy 30wpm on any Android device.

In a phone Android is great but I use my phone as a phone and mp3 player. Hardly ever much else. As a tablet platform Android has a lot of catching up to do. I can play flash games on my ipad with Photon Web Browser but so far games crash the Android flash player in all browsers

 

[alicemenezes]

Sorry, heard wrong.

Nothing is perfect.

So, you mean the iOS crashes too..?? As frequent as android..?? Like twice a day to say the least. One thing I don't understand is why this problem isn't being rectified. Android 1.6 had these issues and now so does the ICS

 

[EarlyMon]

I have 2 apps out of 124 that I have installed on ics that crash in the same way, predictably. I can crash them on demand. I have 7 browsers, only one crashes, it does it oddly and the dev knows about it. All the rest, don't crash.

Sorry you aren't getting that out of your set up, but to say that your experience indicates the behavior of the revision isn't technically reasonable.

An independent study, that I linked here often, found no real advantage to either operating system as of last year. Apps for both crash quite often.

If ics crashes twice a day (meaning, it reboots) then I suggest that you have a bad configuration, a bad device, or a crappy implementation of ics, such as nick suffered.

 

[rui-no-onna]

My ipad 3 was only $499 at Best Buy. 16GB. I expect the Nexus 10, which has something better than the retina display( my only reason to consider it) will likely cost that much if not more.

I believe the Nexus 10 16GB is $399 and 32GB is $499. So nope, not more expensive than the iPad 3 (unless you count Apple Outlet refurbs).

Definitely agree with nickdalzell.... I've been using android too from the first version up till now and it definitely keeps getting hung up and lots of lag issues and a dozen other "speed" problems its got. The "force close" is like THE most frustrating thing in an android. Never used an iOS but heard that it never ever crashes.

You heard wrong. I have a bunch of iOS devices (original iPhone, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod Touch 4G, iPad 2, iPhone 4S, iPad 3 & iPhone 5) and all of them have crashed at one point or another bad enough to require a hard reset (hold Home+Sleep button for 10s). The thing about iOS app crashes is the app usually just closes itself without any notifications.

Not all iOS devices are "silky smooth" either. The iPod Touch 4G is an exercise in frustration. It just doesn't have enough RAM for its retina display. For that matter, same goes for the iPad 3. I've experienced a lot more Safari crashes on the iPad 3 than on the iPad 2 (usually on pages with lots of images). The original iPhone was also extremely laggy but given its age, that can be forgiven.

 

[nickdalzell]

i have never had to reboot my iPad 3 unless it was doing a system upgrade (like from iOS 5 to iOS 6, that was it) it stays on, in standby constantly, never has problems. never slows down, never crashes. apps run and close as i choose. never once do i get 'sorry, this app has stopped unexpectedly' or 'this app isn't responding do you want to close it?' (that last one is so annoying, it's as if Android is just that impatient, and reminds me of the dreaded Clippy from Office 97)

the lag is not really anything other than an annoyance. it makes the device feel like it's 10 years old. even though Jelly Bean seems to have fixed that, there are so few transitions in Android, and it just feels secondhand. it does not have the level of professional transitions in/out of apps as iOS does. it feels cheap.

there are many things missing in Android i wish were standard or at least doable without third party apps. the most important being badge notifications on the app icon. currently my notification bar is so cluttered with individual icons for the same thing on Android and it looks messy, and if not, i have to open each app one by one to check if anything is new. i really liked having the badge notifications. say the number '3' on Yahoo! Mail indicating three new emails, or '45' on my Facebook icon, or '5' on Play Store alerting me to five new upgrades available. it was convenient, nice and saved me time. now, i have to use three different apps, one plugin, one widget and even then it's not perfect. i have to refresh the launcher for the badges to either update or show, thus defeating their purpose, or i get them for one app but not the rest. this kind of thing should be standard. there is just no true implementation that works for Android and this always makes me go back to my iPad....a shame really.

worse is the need to reboot Android almost daily. today my phone literally froze in my hand after unlocking the screen. nothing was running! then it crashed and rebooted itself while downloading from Google Play. iOS NEVER does this! you never have to reboot iOS at least not from my experience. Android is a great system but seems like a toy. playing with it, messing around with widgets, etc. but it feels unpolished, thrown together, and is largely unstable. there is no need to tell me this app crashed or that this app is too slow--it doesn't help me fix anything and offers no real solution other than annoying me.

Android needs triple the hardware to achieve what iOS does with far less. for example, to get the same performance out of an iPad 3 on Android you need something pricey, such as the $499 Nexus 10 (that is the same price as an iPad 3 so who's overpriced? Apple or Android?) and in addition there is no Retina screen, i see pixels! secondly, it takes a quad core, and twice the RAM. on my iPad 3, it only has a dual-core 1GHz CPU and maybe two gigs of RAM. tell me is the A5 chip really that powerful or does iOS just handle things better?

people say you can control Android especially with root, but that is not exactly true either. i cannot install apps if the space dips below 20MB, even a 300KB app, far less than the remaining 20MEGAbytes, will fail saying 'not enough storage' WTH? 300KB is far less than 30MB! why can't i use ALL my space!? what is Android telling me i can't use some of what i have left?

i'm not trolling, but i am noting shortcomings in Android that Apple does not have. it's criticisms i cannot ignore. if there are solutions i am all welcome.

EDIT: i am not a fanboy of any system. do i have criticisms of iOS? of course! do i have cons/pros of my experience with BlackBerry? sure! but while Android offers a seemingly unlimited level of customization, it also has a ton of drawbacks one must live with. and the drawbacks seem to be more often than either of the two systems (FYI, BlackBerry is worse, when you have to reboot, or do a 'battery pull' which is a common term for any RIM device, it can be half an hour or more before you get back up and running, never understood that but my Curve would sit on the BlackBerry loading bar for that long at least on a restart)

 

[EarlyMon]

Android is processor intensive, iOS is storage intensive.

Can't get something for nothing.

 

[nickdalzell]

With Jelly Bean (on at least one of my tablets) i must admit i'm impressed. they finally knocked the UI speed problem (only took them three years, Apple has had it since 2008) but i must admit that it still feels like it plays catchup to Apple. there are also some games that are not ported to Android yet. there's a Star Trek theme, and the Sky Gamblers games seem to not exist yet on Android. for those, i still fall back to my iPad. in my opinion it does have more catching up to do. the same app on Android (let's use Facebook for example) seems like a watered down secondhand copy compared with the app on iOS.

 

[Hadron]

I wouldn't tolerate a phone I had to reboot daily. But the only time in the last 12 months that my phone has crashed was when I was experimenting with a developmental ROM. With my regular setup Android never crashes and I run for weeks at a time without thinking about it.

I can see your point with icon badges for notifications, but it would need to be an option: it only works as a notification if you have the icon on your desktop, and is no use if the icon is only in the app drawer. So it's fine on iOS, but on Android only works for people who like to populate their homescreens with app launcher icons (which you can if you want, but some of us prefer not to).

 

[nickdalzell]

well when they DO work (any implementation seems to be half-working at best) they will also display in the app drawer (they don't work in docks but i don't really care about that) so it does not require populating your entire home screen with icons.

Android's almost unlimited customization is partly to blame for some of my instability i suppose, i see this cool widget and i just have to have it, and while i check the user reviews it does not really mean it will work 100%. widgets increase the demand on whatever hardware and Google Play still cannot sort out what is compatible or not yet. it sometimes deems apps that work fine on my Kindle Fire as 'not compatible' while conversely apps that should not work on my ZTE Merit allow me to download and install. then there are legit concerns, such as not being allowed the last 20MB of my phone's free space to install apps to, even if i have root. even as root, aka superuser, who has access/control over anything in Linux systems, i'm gusssing Android is one of them, i can't even disable those annoying alerts to app crashes and i cannot force apps to either reload (most do, such as launchers, they auto-reload if they crash so what point is there in making me click OK to a dialog first?) or crash silently. some apps do indeed close themselves, but most annoy me with needless pop-ups that offer no solution to the problem. telling me generic messages such as 'an error has occurred' annoys the user and offers no help to fix the actual problem

there are legit criticisms also of ICS/JB. they eliminated the ANR dialogs in GB, as my phone never tells me anything is unresponsive or asks me to click wait or force close, and GB never suddenly dumps me to the boot animation when an app has a fatal crash that takes the launcher with it (leaving me with a 'WTF?' moment). this was actually a big problem with Android Eclair, it did both those things quite often. now they are back in ICS/JB. i never had JB crash or display one, but the option to enable ANRs for background processes still exists in settings-->Dev options. i wish there was an option to just turn them all off, or control what makes it dump me to the boot screen again. like Windows, telling it what to do when an app crashes, whether to reboot the device, or attempt to keep going, or to give me details on the actual error.

I admit i am a control freak. i do not like having the OS decide to do anything on my behalf, i prefer to tell it which apps to keep open, and which to close. in iOS 5 and 6, i can close apps by bringing up the multitasking menu, holding an app, and clicking the minus badge to close it. this is how i keep the thing stable as apps WILL auto-close if there are too many running. in Android, even swiping away an app in a very similar menu does not mean it closes it. some apps i never use, such as Videos, or even Play Store will start up and waste RAM. i do not like that. soon as my phone's memory dips below 50Mb it lags and even locks up, requiring a battery pull. i have tried modifiying the VM heap, built-in task manager, and even attempted Autostarts to control what runs and what does not. but even then apps i am not planning to use start up and show in my list of running apps (go Launcher shows this along with the current RAM demand). is it really a problem to want all control over what runs and what does not run on a device i own?

 

[Hadron]

My point was that a notification hidden in an app drawer is useless as a notification. So while there are things about the notification bar I'd do differently, whether another solution is better depends on how you work.

 

[nickdalzell]

well that is why i have only a few apps i want the badges on. another cool feature of Android is the ability to control what apps do it. most launchers only do it for calls, SMS, and email, but some offer addtional apps such as Facebook or Play Store updates. i usually keep a Facebook, email and Play icon on my home screen for that reason. most apps would not even need them, i don't have them all enabled on iOS either. i mean it should be part of Android, where the user has the ability to enable it or disable it. having third-party apps attempt the same thing causes problems, the apps may be killed by the system (see my last comment) thus ruining the function, or the service supplying the badges gets killed, or the server it operates from loses the connection. if it were a built-in feature able to be turned on or off at the user's decision, it would be more successful.

 

[rui-no-onna]

i have never had to reboot my iPad 3 unless it was doing a system upgrade (like from iOS 5 to iOS 6, that was it) it stays on, in standby constantly, never has problems. never slows down, never crashes. apps run and close as i choose. never once do i get 'sorry, this app has stopped unexpectedly' or 'this app isn't responding do you want to close it?' (that last one is so annoying, it's as if Android is just that impatient, and reminds me of the dreaded Clippy from Office 97)

You're lucky then. I experience a browser crash everyday I use my iPad. Very annoying. Of course I don't get any messages like in Android. Safari just closes on me and the crash log will show up if I go to Diagnostics & Usage

worse is the need to reboot Android almost daily. today my phone literally froze in my hand after unlocking the screen. nothing was running! then it crashed and rebooted itself while downloading from Google Play. iOS NEVER does this! you never have to reboot iOS at least not from my experience.

Funny you should say this. I experienced a crash exactly like the one you've mentioned a couple of months back on my iPod Touch 4th gen. I had to hard reset and when I turned it back on, my app icons where missing. Doing a restore from backup fixed the icons but even now, that iPod is acting mighty wonky. Unfortunately, since I need to keep it on iOS 4.3 for an abandoned app, there's nothing I can do about the wonkiness.

Just because iOS has worked very well for you so far doesn't mean it doesn't have its share of problems and glitches.