Dieter Bohn and Walt Mossberg at the Verge weren't impressed either. Consensus seems to be that the hardware is solid, but tablet Android is still a mess. Worse, even if Google fixes the problems in the OS, there are (still!) virtually no 3rd-party apps that support tablet Android natively; they're all just blown-up phone apps. Not only does that ruin the experience but-- like Microsoft and their stalled phone ambitions-- it's not a problem Google can fix no matter how good their developers are. All the software patches in the world can't fix the issue of apathetic 3rd-party devs.
Thing is that Android apps, when properly made, should be able to go from phone to tablet without existing in different versions.
That at least was the idea back when they introduced the Fragments framework. there they took the existing activities concept and turned them into panes in a larger UI. Sadly the world quickly turned that into that "hamburger" bar.
Nor did it help that Apple, via the iPad launch, had gotten app devs to think about phones and tablets are separate spheres. Thus for a while there was "HD" apps popping up in the Play store that had the whole Fragments thing going, right alongside existing phone apps.
And then Google kinda abandoned the tablet world for a while, instead trying to pitch ChromeOS and Chromebooks as a corporate platform.
That didn't catch on so now they seem to be returning to Android tablets after doing some work on various things like multiple user accounts, and Android for Work that allows someone to have one app state for work and one for personal use on the same device.
Well, it doesn’t help that Google’s support libraries for developers are at best... bad looking. At worst, they are crashing with no way to find out what caused it.
1. AppCompat used to crash on device rotation with no clear error message on KitKat.
2. There are many third-party libraries that expand on what Google provides to allow devs to actually provide good-looking Material apps, from MaterialDialogs to MaterialDrawer to MaterialTabs.
Many things, like a multi-pane preferences activity with AppBar, are not possible without hacks, reflection or access to internal com.android APIs either.
> Worse, even if Google fixes the problems in the OS, there are (still!) virtually no 3rd-party apps that support tablet Android natively; they're all just blown-up phone apps. Not only does that ruin the experience but-- like Microsoft and their stalled phone ambitions-- it's not a problem Google can fix no matter how good their developers are.
Actually, with sufficient number of sufficient-quality developers, its a problem Google can solve fairly directly, by developing their own, compelling, Android tablet apps.
OTOH, I think that this is a problem that is overstated; Sure, there's lost of Android apps that are just "blown up" phone apps, but there's a lot of apps where there's no compelling need for something more, and "blown up" to tablet size improves interaction when you have a tablet available.
Its also not really like like Microsoft's problem.
> Not only does that ruin the experience but-- like Microsoft and their stalled phone ambitions-- it's not a problem Google can fix no matter how good their developers are. All the software patches in the world can't fix the issue of apathetic 3rd-party devs.
Hell, Google isn't even doing that much. Half of their apps don't have proper tablet UIs. How can third parties bother to do decent tablet apps if even the company who develops the platform doesn't care enough to do so? Google is in a leadership position, which means they have a responsibility to lead, and not only did they drop the ball, they threw an interception straight to Microsoft.
Since they started flogging Material the tablet-friendliness of Google apps has gone to crap.
Take the latest iterations of the Play store for instance. A while back they introduced a semi-floating search bar on the front view, that has the "hamburger" button integrated. Except that if you put a tablet into landscape, that bare stays fixed width, so now the burger button is suddenly not in the top right corner.
And i think Hangouts produce a single column down the middle with massive whitespaces on either side.
Edit: Thinking about it i wonder if this device is Google's attempt at dogfooding tablet development. Right now it seems that most of their apps are developed firstly for Apple devices.
It gets worse: Google's newest, most Material apps, like Inbox, have no tablet layouts. They are "blown up phone apps." Especially ironic (in an Alanis way, maybe?) because GMail is an exemplary app that shifts layout decisions based on screen size and orientation.
That said, Drive Docs, Slides, and Sheets are very nice on larger tablets. Still, Google needs to raise awareness that Android's APIs have very nice support for larger screens.
