Motorola CEO: Open Android Store Leads to [Sales,] Quality Issues

Motoblur collects information about customer use of applications and how that use relates to functions like power consumption. With that data, Motorola learns which applications drain power. “We are getting to the place that we should be able to warn you,” Jha said. He envisions presenting a notice to users when they launch an application alerting them that using the application will drain 35 percent of the phone’s power, for example, he said. The user can then decide to continue or conserve power.

Motorola is doing exactly the right thing, surprisingly. Just like Coderspiel said a year and a half ago:

The design problem is that users (and casual programmers) aren’t exposed to this new dimension of bad. Normally you can judge software just by using it. The user interface is good, bad, or ugly. The app is fast or slow, it crashes or it doesn’t. But for battery waste the feedback loop is broken.

For mysterious reasons, PC World’s headline puts a negative spin on this positive development. The article’s leading sentence wanders even further from the truth: “Motorola’s CEO blamed the open Android app store for performance issues on some phones.” Sure, if by “blame” you mean figure out how to improve on the trade-off of your platform’s primary competitive advantage.

If it weren’t for Android’s wretched openness (hated by delicate tech-industry commentators, gobbled up by the rowdy public) the original battery-dropping Droid would have been an irredeemable flop. There would be no three-quarters baked Android tablets for industry idiots to use as propaganda for bureaucratic control of software distribution. What exactly is their issue, anyway?