Today is a day for Google to let me down. Generally, a lot of technology companies end up in the same dustbin. They always promise some glittering awesomeness, but when you start to engage with them, you discover that the awesome is rather half-baked. In this particular case, the first two Google technologies were their Music Play property and Android.

Google Music, or Google Play, whatever it’s called, has a lot of the music that I uploaded from my iTunes when I still had music files that I used to play on my iPod. My musical use has migrated to streaming technology, specifically Spotify for which I am very pleased with. I often times miss my old iPod with my music loaded on it. There was something about the shuffle feature on my old iPod Nano that fascinated me. The old shuffler felt almost psychic or at least sensitive to my environment and conditions. I think it is because the device had its RNG on-device and it was a wearable device. There is something still there I think, and I think back on it fondly. A lot of my music is on Google Music, and today I thought I might uncork some of it. I opened my Safari browser and discovered that Google Music doesn’t work without Adobe Flash. As a general rule of thumb, I don’t use Adobe products at all if I can help it, and that is especially true of Adobe Flash. There was a point in the past where you could have installed HTML 5 on the Google Music site, but Google has since eliminated that option as far as I can tell. So, strike one for Google.

The next strike came when I tried to use my Samsung Galaxy Nook device. This device is loaded with Google’s Android operating system, and I’ve railed against this before. In this particular case, it is related somewhat to the dead horse I keep on beating in regards to Google Android. I had my Nook open, and I was trying to use it. The interface is sluggish as hell, but I have grown to accept that. There is an app I have on my Nook, it’s called “Clean Master” and it’s designed to be a system maintainer for Android. From my experience, paired up with what I’ve seen claimed by “Clean Master” application is that Android is a wet hot mess. Every time I use the app, it finds 350MB or more of “Junk files”, and does scans for “Obsolete APKs.” This scan takes an exceptionally long time. So I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole with the device, trying to get it “cleaned up” because it’s “dirty”. This application is dutifully chugging away, apparently just circling around the same batch of directories for about ten minutes accomplishing nothing. I tap the big button at the bottom. “STOP”. Nothing happens. I then tap it a few more times. “STOP”. “STOP”. “STOP”. In the end it was a comedy, and I started to mumble “STAHP” to the device. At the top of the application is another control that says “Advanced Settings” thinking maybe I could turn the scan for “Obsolete APKs” off. Nope. Tap, nothing, tap, nothing. Tap tap tap tap tap tap. The device stops working altogether and then boop, new screen and it’s back to working! But the options there are useless. So then I try to use the “Home” button, and the Nook just dwells there, thinking. about. it. Then the Home switcher screen appears, and I make the throwaway gesture to get rid of “Clean Master” app. There is “nothing” running on the device, but it’s mostly just sluggish as hell.

So that is what informs my opinions about these companies. Google, Samsung, and Apple. I include Apple because I have a lot of Apple devices, and they don’t behave like this. Even with two giant corporations working together, Google and Samsung, they can’t even touch on what Apple does. My iPhone 6 behaves for me, mostly, and in comparison, it is far better than what Samsung and Google bring to the table. My chief issue is the disconnect between the hardware stats, the Samsung is supposed to have more resources than the Apple products, so it comes down to the OS? It may simply be a fight between iOS and Android in the end. To really focus on my issue, it is all about user interrupt. On my iPhone, the user interrupt, which is to say the events that the user wishes take top priority. The interface is “snappy” and “gets my wishes” and “performs”. Whereas in Android, the user input seems to be treated like a queued wishlist that the user inputs and waits for the device to act on if it wants to, or not. I know it’s not designed to behave this way, or at least it shouldn’t. But the behavior is what informs my opinions. I’ve got an Apple device that is snappy and responsive to me versus a Samsung/Android Nook that seems to want to do its own thing. There is another company represented, and that’s B&N. Mostly at this point I think of B&N as a bystander. They aren’t really involved anymore with Samsung or Android, they’re just marketing books through a channel, and they happened to choose this channel. For what the Samsung Galaxy tablet is, it’s core function that I use it for, which is an eBook reader, it is satisfactory. For a general use tablet or a mobile device capable of more than just eBooks, though? No. And I can’t understand why people who use Android accept this behavior so blindly. Perhaps that’s what being a fan is all about. If you are fond of the underdog, the scrappy alley fighter, then I suppose Android has some romance to it. You want the sad, somewhat over-concussed street-fighter who sometimes pisses himself and forgets his name to come out on top in the end and win the day.

So with these two starting experiences today, the answer is to lower your expectations. I expected too much of Google and of Samsung. The device is just a simple eBook reader, it really can’t be anything else. I will never willfully purchase another Android device, so there isn’t any reason to declare that Android is dead to me, it was dead on arrival after all. The only thing that I can say is that other people seem to enjoy it, and in the end that’s all that matters. After seeing what this Samsung Galaxy can do, I don’t understand the why behind Android’s success, but they are successful and in that, well, that’s good. It’s just not for me.

As for the music, I again lower my expectations. Instead of searching for some way to access my Google Music without Adobe Flash, I’m instead going to try an application that can help me migrate my music collection off to a Spotify playlist, maybe. In that, I have very little faith, and I’ll probably just give up and stop thinking about it altogether. I find myself not really fighting about technology anymore. I find that I’m more apt just to turn it off, put it in a drawer and forget about it for a few decades. If I were a technology company, I would really love to find out what kind of technologies people have put in their drawers and forgotten about, and find out why. That would create a great laundry list of things “not to do” when devising new technologies.