Why I will never* buy an Android phone

[mas90]

Because this seemingly-inocuous patch (which postdates Android 1.5, and thus fixes a bug affecting several of the earlier Android phones) reveals an alarming mess.

Before that patch, making an emergency call on some networks (e.g. Rogers in Canada, and T-Mobile in the USA) would cause a system service to throw a NullPointerException, and the phone

Comments

[anonymous]

See, I'm of the complete opposite opinion: Bugs happen. And yes it was a dreadful bug, but from my experience, when you encounter bugs, especially major/serious ones, you tend to become much more wary of them - I'm sure that since this event, there has been much more thorough testing and awareness of 911 bugs, actually making Android safer than other phones in this context. -dwh

[mad_tigger]

but hasn't google at some point paid your salary? Potential conflict of interest there.

[anonymous]

Yes, but on the other hand I have even the vaguest sense of independent critical thought with relation to a company for whom I have worked for three months and won't be doing so again in the near future, with nothing possibly to gain... I'm simply talking about *my* experience of bugs.

[gerald_duck]

That is, indeed, an inexcusable bug.

About the only thing I can think of to say in mitigation is that emergency calls are just about the only code path you can't reasonably test on a real network: what do you say to the emergency operator, "sorry, just testing a new mobile phone"?

But surely someone in Google has a dummy base station and some magic SIM cards that use it?

[sillytrippy]

I'm reasonably sure I've heard of it being considered ok to make a test call through, say, a new office PBX to emergency services (non-standard dialplans being at particular risk of causing issues). If that is indeed the case, testing during mobile phone development would seem reasonable too.

[king_of_wrong]

Unreferenced footnote: '*'

But, yes, that is a bug so critical that it should never have made it through testing - a real show-stopper. It's not the first one, either - remember the hidden root terminal permanently bound to the keypad?

I'm inclined to say that this is because Android is open source (amplified by the culture inside Google). Testing, particularly certification testing, is incredibly dull. It's not what 'real programmers' do. And, like usable documentation and user interface design, it most certainly doesn't get done if you leave it up to people to choose their own tasks.

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