Motorola Mobility chief executive officer Sanjay Jha lashed out at Android saying its applications have a quality issue. Speaking at the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch Global Technology conference, he said that 70 per cent of smartphones are returned due to untested third party applications.
Jha believes certain applications aren’t tested to match the device’s hardware and hence end up draining its CPU. He added that Motoblur does a better job at not only providing users with real-time widget updates; it also possesses the ability to manage device power.
Android’s battery life issue isn’t unknown. Jha sheds some light on this very crucial issue that is perhaps the true reason for unstable power management on Android devices.
“For power consumption and CPU use, those apps are not tested. We’re beginning to understand the impact that has on the CPU,” Jha said.
Android Market being open for developers and with its crucial “fragmentation” issue, it’s difficult for users to judge whether an Android App would be suitable for their phone or not. Here ‘suitable’ means that it won’t eat much of the CPU or GPU’s resources; that it won’t secretly send or receive data; and that it will be stable.
Developers can test the app on the emulator or a finite number of devices. However, a stable application requires rigorous testing on a variety of hardware.
Sanjay Jha believes that the company’s Motoblur user interface could be one solution for the power management issues pertaining to Android devices. Motoblur acts like a widget layer that pulls almost real-time notifications from social networks like Facebook or Twitter. However, there are a number of users who claim to believe otherwise and blame Motoblur itself for being a memory hog.
Notably, Motoblur user interface isn’t available in India and the company has also no evident plans of bringing it here.
Recently, a leaked video threw some light on how this user interface works. In the video, we can see the redesigned Motoblur user interface on a new Motorola handset, Droid 3.
There’s no clarity as to whether the new Motoblur interface would be rolled out to all devices or only to recently launched handsets. Let’s hope the new Motoblur is tweaked and improved.