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How can Google Play be so inept?

38 points by curiouslyme ↗ HN
The Google Play store lacks any ability to sort search results on mobile. It can't download in parallel, and waits to start downloading the next app until the former is done installing.

I could go on. How can such a widely used service be designed like some sort of joke? Where is Google's legendary obsession with speed?

22 comments

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j4n4
I could not agree more, but Google has no incentive to make it better. Why would they waste the time when you have practically no choice but to use what is provided?
markfer
To, you know, provide a better customer experience.
csallen
That's not an incentive, unfortunately. It's a means to an end. The end is the incentive.
philtar
More profits through more apps sales. Come on..
csallen
Those are ends (incentives), not means. And better customer service is a means, not an end.

Presumably, Google doesn't care much about customer service in this instance, because they have a monopoly on app distribution, and therefore customer service won't meaningfully increase sales. Presumably.

taprun
The incentive is that Android users might buy more apps. That means more profit for Google.
owebmaster
Allo & Duo are waste of time but Google still has the workforce to develop it so I don't think this is the reason.
nkkollaw
Well, it's not that hard—at least compared to iOS—to just go to the developer's website and install an APK (which I often do).

There is some choice, maybe not enough?

flukus
Then you lose the update mechanism because that's tied to the play store and not the OS. One of the more subtle ways that google maintains hegemony over android.
curiouslyme
Apple does have roughly twice the revenue as Google, when it comes to all sales. But Google is a huge driver of ads in free apps. So Google has a pretty meaningful reason for making the store solid.

When you search, you can't sort by rating, by price, etc. This is stuff Amazon was doing in the 90s.

Honestly, it feels like Google has some hidden agenda on how they weight search results...

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owebmaster
Your android phone already comes with most if not all apps Google want you to install.

But the UI is nice. I'm using it as "inspiration" for my new material design-app.

nvr219
Wow that sounds horrible. And I thought iOS App Store is bad (which to be fair it is)
puzzle
Why would parallel downloads be a good thing? I can think of so many drawbacks.
lastofus
Not having small apps be stuck in a queue behind large ones for starters. Not be effectively throttled by a single over-saturated server for another, assuming the parallel downloads hit different servers.

Even allowing only 6 concurrent downloads like most HTTP client/servers would be a big improvement.

curiouslyme
Many times, total throughput roses with the number of connections.

I can see the argument why one might not want it - total time to getting an app to play with can be increased.

What I really can't understand is why they pause all download activiry while installing an app. That's truly maddening.

puzzle
The real reasons for both have probably more to do with flash writes being slow and increasing the chances of running low on space. Probably more chances for the CPU to go into thermal throttling, too. Not everyone has the latest hardware.

Parallel downloads increase contention at all levels: CPU, Flash, FS, local network, ISP, server. Serial downloads make the store a better citizen.

quickthrower2
Never been a problem for my workflow. Maybe it's not a problem for most users?
maxwin
Search is so bad on google play. For example , if you search wechat, you will see list and list of unofficial wechat related apps,but not the official wechat app.
superasn
My biggest pet peeve is to not to be able to filter the search results by "in app purchases", "ad supported", etc. Being able to check or uncheck those boxes will make it 100 times more useful.
ggm
As a s/w maintenance experience, I completely agree. However, all of the package managers on UNIX I use tend to have global lock issues: apt-get update in parallel with apt-get install on Debian, or pkg install in parallel windows on FreeBSD exposes this. (that said, the fetch phase could be parallel and should be)

There is a bit of a consistent story about google products: things a computer scientist takes from granted like BOOLEAN LOGIC are just .. not there.

So you can't say in the google play store search (omnibox)

"SSH AND NOT origin:.cn" to try and get apps which do SSH but don't come from china.

or "SFTP or SCP but not FTP" somehow. (ok. that one might fail for a number of reasons)

I also think the marketplace of 'designed for phones' in a tablet world is a bit odd: where is the button to show me apps designed for tablets?