OEM Android

Android, the mobile platform that has taken the market by storm. Many manufacturers have taken on this platform to use on their high end devices and smartphones, and each device from each manufacture looks different but at the core they are all the same.

So why do manufacturers develope different UIs for the same platform?

The answer is that each manufacturer wants to provide a user friendly exprience.

Well thats a nice sentiment isnt it, the major mfg's of these phones want to provide the end user a easy experience, but at what cost?

Most users on average who want to go out and buy a new phone or mobile device are initially wowed by the way the OS looks and want the  best phones on the market with the ability to use their apps and media on that device. The underlying issue here is that over time that user begins to have issues which include the phone rebooting on its own, applications force closing, loss of stability of the handset, and overtime the phone can begin to feel more sluggish in performance. Not all of these issues happen to everyone, but at some point they are experienced by someone.

The reason people is this, when a manufacture develops a phone and build the android platform to work on that phone and its hardware they also skin the OS with their own theme and apps. Motorola, Samsung, HTC are amongst the better selling phone manufactures out there who are guilty of this. The every day user doesnt think about this when they get a phone, they just think its looks cool. But the bottom line is that a phone is essentially a small computer, and with that said it carries the same hardware as a computer. So think of it this way in terms of buying a new computer from your favorite merchant.

You buy this computer from a merchant, get it home, and boot it. We all at some point in our lives we are shocked at how well this computer performs out of the box, but over time we install new games, create documents, save pictures and music, and what happens over time is that computer will slow down.

How this works is that a computer will cache all of this information in the RAM of the computer, when it does that it takes away from the available amount of ram that can be allocated to other things such as games or other programs you may want to use. Well if you have 2 gigabytes of ram and your computer is caching a gig of that, and you want to play a game that requires A gigabyte of ram on its own what do you think happens with that computer. Chances are it will perform very slowly and run like crap, this is where we see an issue with our android devices.

If you arent aware of this, most smart phones come stock with 512MB of ram installed on it. What does the mean exactly? It means that on a stock device you will only get to see about 384MB of that free to use, which if you are able to manage your application use and monitor the apps that are always running you should be ok, but for a lot of people they dont do this and then they begin to suffer all of the issues I mentioned above earlier in this article. Well the biggest thing here is that the actual oem GUI takes up a big chunk of that ram, the most notorious of this is Motoblur.

Major manufactures over time have figured this out, but they still continue to theme their phones with TouchWiz, HTC Sense, and Motoblur. While it may look nice it really hinders the phone and how well it can really operate, and this is where the problem lies.

So why not go stock android on all these devices instead of using their own separate skins like they do now? The answer is like I mentioned before, and its to provide a good user experience with a cost.

I believe that manufactures wouldnt suffer if they went the direction of placing the vanilla android OS on their phones, as a matter of fact all of their phones would perform better, the updates to each phone would take less time since it wouldnt have to go through as much development processes, the issues that are present now would show up less frequently, and all of this would create a better user experience.

All of these factors will do wonders for both the user and manufacturer of the phones.

Before you decide to crucify me over the internet please remember these are my views and opinions.