Mobile Today has a fascinating article about the rise in software faults as the trends of Smartphone and Touchscreen increase…interestingly, it is claimed that some customers ask the staff of retail outlets whether they think it’s better to wait for a while [for the device software to stabilise] before taking the plunge!
There is a view that the consumer has in fact become the “beta-tester” – a rather insidious trend (if it were true) that seems to have come over from PC software – where end-users have to install a growing amount of updates and fixes post-launch. Of course, you could look at it from the other side, and say that if software, operating system, or firmware code has 000,000’s of lines in it, then debugging to the point of readiness before launch is pretty unlikely.
From my time working at (and with) handset manufacturers, the development cycle (often 9 months to 2 years) is fraught with time spent debugging where (internal) software modules interlink and don’t work, or even worse, the (external) networking interaction with the handset isn’t working
Of course, one thing that does cause bugs to slip through the net is pressure – and pressure comes from launch dates – which are often tight, and occasionally impossible! If a competitor steals a march on your sales by getting the device out first, heads can and do roll. The result of all of this is handsets on the market that are not really finalised software. It’s not the case now that devices launch without showstopper bugs, just how many….
The dual trends of ‘smarter’ handsets, and certain key technologies within them (e.g. touchscreen), mean that the number of areas of interaction in new handsets is ridiculously complex; to the point where you have got to wonder if there is a hope of even the majority of faults being solved. Sometimes it doesn’t happen – there are certain famous handsets that are now past v30 of software, and you can ponder how much of that is tweaking or feature addition, and how much is bug-fixing.
A good final point that the Mobile Today article also makes is the fact that some new tech like touchscreens are slapped on top of old platforms – I can think of several great examples – and that just doesn’t really work. In fact using the same logic, the best touch implementation (Apple’s) was on a new platform built from the ground up.
Anyhow, I’m sure we’ll continue to see more and more and more devices coming out with not-quite-there software – and we are just going to have to suck it up that if you are an early adopter, you may well be doing some of the ‘testing’ for the network and the device vendors…..
[Original story via: Mobile Today]