Blog

I like TweetCaster Pro for Android ($1.99 in the Amazon App Store and $4.99 in Google Play) a lot. In fact, it has been the default Twitter client on Android phones and tablets that I use. Unfortunately, however, it has been crashing nearly everytime I open in on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (Honeycomb 3.2) in the past few days. It crashes so often that I deleted my account settings in the app and switched back to the recently updated Twitter app. The Twitter for Android 3.2.0 update provides the following enhancements.

1. Updated design and improved relevance of Discover stories
2. Activity in Discover tab shows who your connections follow, updates to their lists, and which Tweets they retweet and favorite
3. Spelling suggestions and related searches in search results
4. Username autocomplete in search
5. New push notifications for when your Tweets have been retweeted, favorited, or when you have new followers
6. New languages: Traditional Chinese, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Polish, Hungarian, Thai

I realize that most people don’t care when or if their Android phone or tablet gets a major OS upgrade. But, I do and have been annoyed by how long it takes vendors to get upgrades out the door. Android 4.x (Ice Cream Sandwich), for example, was released on October 19, 2011 – 6 months ago. The first ICS device, the Galaxy Nexus, was released a month later (Nov. 14, 2011). However, Samsung is only now announcing the list of their devices that will eventually get ICS upgrades. These upgrades aren’t actually available. But, there is the hope that upgrades will be available soon.

While carriers are sometimes the cause of these delays, why is it that Samsung’s WiFi-only tablets have not been upgraded yet? My guess is it is because of the no-value TouchWiz graphical layer Samsung lays over Android’s native interface. If vendors would stop fussing with their ugly and generally useless GUI overlays (with the exception of the screen capture utility Samsung adds with TouchWiz), I bet these upgrades would be available a lot faster.

So vendors, dump TouchWiz, TouchSense, Blur and all those other GUI overlays. They add little or nothing and keep desired new features and bug fixes out of your customers’ grasp.

Six months after its release, Google’s Android 4.x (Ice Cream Sandwich) only accounts for 2.9% of the devices that access the Google Play store. Toss in the popular Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook Color, which do not touch Play at all, and ICS probably accounts for only 1% of all Android devices. And, yet, Time Warner’s anxiously awaited TWC TV update that adds live TV streaming to the Android app only provides that streaming on ICS devices – the 1%. What’s up with that?