Google makes Android non-Scalable
Google is the one of the largest software IT companies in the world right now and is the leader in email and search. There are a thousand new Gmail IDs being registered each day and about a million websites being indexed each day. This being the case Google’s working code has to be extremely scalable to handle this daily increase in capacity.
One would definitely assume that Google would have a lot of knowledge in building scalable applications and when they come out with a new product, they would use all their learning and put it into the new product so that it too is scalable and resilient like Google Search and GMail.
Seems Google’s engineer weren’t thinking straight when they created Android.
Android with all its hype about being built on a Linux kernel, and openness, and other things, has a very silly architectural constraint. It seems the engineers were not thinking when they introduced this architectural constraint into the Android system.
The problem is that the Android system stores all the applications on the phone’s internal memory. Forget about the SD Card, even if the phone has an internal memory for storage that is not designated as a ROM, then too this is not used to store the applications. We know that RAM or ROM is quite expensive as compared to flash storage, and hence manufacturer do not provide much of it.
However is a serious limitation in terms of installing apps from the market onto the phone. The moment you install 10+ apps, the phones becomes very slow and starts complaining of shortage of memory. On a device with around 512mb memory, only about 150mb is available for installing apps. Some of the apps such as Google Maps, Google Browser, Shapewriter(a soft-keyboard app), Facebook etc., take about 5-10MB of space each. This being the case, one can only install about 15-20 apps on the phone. At least 10MB is required by the phone for swap, else it starts complaining.
It is very hard to understand why Google did such a thing. V2.2 of their OS seems to address this limitation by allowing the users to push the apps on to the SD card. Until this, the usage of the Android market is severely limited as the market has over 50000 apps, but only 0.04% of this can really run on an Android phone at a given point of time.
The other insane option of course is to keep on installing apps that you currently want to use and uninstall them afterward. Warning: Data charges incurred in doing such a thing is not payable by Google.