I guess I don’t understand why Google releases so much stuff in beta, or what they call beta. As an at-times frustrated Android user, I’m already waiting for stuff to fail—the last thing I want to see is ‘beta’ next to a Google software product.
I mean, releasing stuff in beta to developers the way Apple released iOS 5.01 to developers in November is one thing. That was a quick-fix scenario after complaints about battery life for iPhones using iOS 5.
But releasing stuff to the public in beta all the time confuses me. Don’t get me wrong, Google is an amazing company. But although I like Google Chrome, I’m not about to download the new beta version of it. (And Chrome is supposedly crash-proof.)
My dad is a computer engineer who has been developing software since the 1960s. You could say he’s old school, but he’s also pretty new school too. He still develops new software all the time.
When I was visiting over the holidays, my dad asked me about smartphones—he knows I write about smartphones all the time in the blog and have a decent grasp of what the big phones offer.
I spent a good twenty minutes going through what I perceive to be the pros and cons of the major phone manufacturers and carriers. (I’ve shared a lot of those opinions already in this blog, so I won’t go into them.)
One of the things I addressed is Android’s problems (buggy, performance not uniform across phone brands, doesn’t integrate with apps well, has fragmented ecosystem, et cetera).
As an illustration of Google’s practices in general, I showed my dad the Google Instant (beta) option on my phone. The old school in my dad shook his head—he couldn’t believe Google would release anything to the public in beta.
Was he right? I don’t know. What do you think?
