The bottom line is that we will never have the same uniformity in experience and satisfaction as the Apple iPhone users because the wide masses of users (and developers) lack the sophistication to deal with the problems of the sheer openness of Android.
Much the same can be said in the Win vs. OS X world.
Apple is first and foremost a hardware company - all Apple software exists solely to promote and move the iron.
Compared to the large number of headsets and options, the few iPhones in existence are therefore almost the degenerate case in support.
Couple that with the fact that iOS, while sophisticated in its own right, is less complex than Android while being simultaneously more mature.
In systems theory, the risk factor is defined as (complexity / maturity). Therefore, an iPhone presents a lower risk factor.
Further, Apple controls the update process, it's not an aggregate of OS_maker+handset_maker+carrier doing that. So risk occurrence should be expected to be lower.
HOWEVER - as there's no such thing as a free lunch, there's always a price to pay and in this case, it's in risk mitigation. Ask the many unhappy iPhone 3gs users how happy they are with the latest chicken dance with whatever's gone wrong for them updating to the latest iOS. If you've read or studied anything by Dr. Demming, you'd agree that was a matter of when, not if, for something like that to go south.
I personally see a number of Android problems as related to the fact that until the system matures quite a bit more, it really does come down to managing it as one would any unix system - and the number one rule there is to define the configuration.
A lot of people are criticizing my advice as being too heavy handed when most people just have "simple" problems - but it's really quite a brain-dead simple approach:
1. Preserve what you think you have.
2. Define the configuration.
3. Restore what you thought you had.
As for the other points in my post, it still Android, Walt Mosspuppet was right, and where apps are concerned, it's still the Wild West.
While I pass no value judgement on social networking, the app problems they present is quite obvious if one steps back and looks at the forest vs. the trees:
A. There exists a collection of apps that will track you, where you is defined as personal photos, shared tweets, facebook friends you name it. Under the principle of making this easy - they are gaining in automation.
B. If history has shown us anything on this, going back centuries before computers, it is simply this: whenever tracking is made efficiently proceduralized, the tracking itself will become the focal point for all actions, rather than that to be tracked.
It's all just that simple.
You are 100% correct.
When people start to question the very nature of what they're taking for granted with their apps - that is the day they'll begin to question the apps and what they're doing rather than the OS.
And that does take a certain sophistication.
Android is unix. It can and will cause all of the trouble and woes that it's allowed to - that's in its genetic heritage.
The clean-up steps I propose - they could easily be wrappered into any update installer and the user would be no wiser - but - it would lead to a significant reduction in user troubles.
I often wonder if the Gingerbread initiatives, where Google would be given control of the entire using experience - is not really the first step in that plan - or simply the first required step when it becomes obvious that that's really, truly and absolutely the only plan that is ever going to work.
Configuration control.
Don't leave home without it.
