No kidding. This page[1] of Ars' Froyo review made me cringe, and I'm a geek who understands all of this stuff! No way I could recommend this to friends & family who aren't into tech for the sake of tech. If that's the cost of removable and upgradeable storage count me out.
By default Froyo manages moving apps between internal storage and the SD card automatically. Normal users never have to see those (admittedly ugly) detail screens. Your complaint is like looking at the man page for vi in Terminal.app and concluding that Mac OS X is only usable by geeks.
But they'll be bitten by this. The Android team are clearly not smart enough to understand why people like the iPhone.
"One obvious downside of external application storage is that the software installed on the SD card will only be available when the card is mounted on the device. If you plug your phone into your computer and enable USB mass storage mode, for example, the software installed on the SD card will not be accessible. Due to this limitation, Google's developer documentation warns that long-running software like background services, live wallpapers, and widgets should not allow SD installation."
Can you imagine explaining this to end users? "Well, if you install to the SD card to get more storage, you can't use this app when your phone is plugged into your computer." This is just... stupid.
"Well, if you install to the SD card to get more storage, you can't use this app when your phone is plugged into your computer."
Plugged in is fine, it's only when the SD card is explicitly mounted as a USB drive that the apps are unavailable. Still mildly annoying, but not as annoying as the iPhone refusing to let you access its filesystem at all.
First the default limited storage for apps. WebOS had the same problem up until about 6 months ago. That's just poor design and planning.
Then the choice of where to install apps being left to developers.
Last, the choice to expose a method for shuffling apps around. Sure it's nice to have because of the default limited space for apps. However the correct solution isn't to burden users with this low-level crap, but to fix the design so this kind of thing is unnecessary.
If they insist on supporting a removable SD card then they should install apps wherever there is room, perhaps notifying the user that if they remove the SD card then they will no longer be able to run apps installed to it.
It seems like a small thing, but these kinds of hacks pile up on each other and soon your left with a Windows-esque system where users are burdened with system maintenance crap instead of the device being more like an appliance that they can just use.
If a user goes to install an app and the device says there's no room when they have a 16GB SD card, most would just throw up their hands and think that it's broken, not that they should contact the developer of the app to request that they enable installation to SD cards, or that they should change the install location or whatever.
Then the choice of where to install apps being left to developers.
Yeah, I'm not thrilled about that. They have a point that some apps types fundamentally won't work well when run from the SD card, but I'd prefer it to be an opt-out rather than opt-in process.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2010/07/android-2...
This particular problem is with the handset, not the OS, but it's basically the flagship device. Ugh.