10 largest Android flops of the decade
Android has not always been such a great example of a mobile platform – it has had quite a few flops. Let’s look at the worst Android errors from 2010-2019.
Image: Sarah Tew / CNET
Android is the most used platform in the world, and with good reason: it is solid, reliable, flexible and user-friendly. But Android and the devices running the operating system have not always been first class.
My list of the 10 largest Android flops of the past decade is a combination of devices and platform changes that I think should never have seen the light of day. These are not in a certain order – deciding what was the worst was too big a challenge.
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1. HTC Evo 3D (2011)
The HTC Evo 3D dates from before the Amazon Fire Phone, but never corresponded to the existential failure of the Amazon phone. The Evo 3D was the first glasses-free 3D display and contains dual cameras for taking 3D photos. The problem with the Evo 3D is that the three-dimensional aspect of the screen was not impressive, and when you passed the gimmick, you discovered that you had a device with a bad camera, a terrible battery life and an insufficiently powerful CPU. A follow-up device – the LTE – would originally be suitable for 3D, but in view of the terrible sale of the Evo 3D, that plan was canceled.
2. Amazon Fire Phone (2014)
Amazon should never have decided to dive into the smartphone market – the Fire Phone was terrible. The promise of the 3D interface was intriguing, but failed at every conceivable level. The device was nothing more than an attempt by Amazon to make it even easier for consumers to purchase products on the world’s largest e-commerce site, and even that aspect of the device was a flop. To make matters worse, the call quality of the device was more than insufficient. In fact, there was no good function to be found in the Fire Phone – except that it came and went so quickly. Nobody should have suffered with that terrible phone.
3. BlackBerry PRIV (2015)
Do you remember the PRIV? PRIV stood for Privilege and Privacy. The problem was that the PRIV concentrated its privacy on a built-in app called DTEC. This app has measured the health of your PRIV smartphone based on the strength of your lock code – if your device is encrypted and you have disabled certain options. This app has done nothing to prevent your data from being stolen – it has only checked how secure it felt that your device was. To make matters worse, the DTEC app did nothing to prevent apps such as Facebook from accessing data on the device, nor did it do anything to encrypt data; DTEK only detected if the device itself was encrypted, which did nothing with transmitted data. No matter how powerful device encryption is, if you work on an unsecured wireless network and send data in plain text, there is no privacy.
4. Nextbit Robin (2016)
The Nextbit Robin actually contained a very cool idea: apps that you didn’t use often would be removed from your device and stored in your Nextbit cloud account. Those apps leave a link to the app, so when you tap the link, the device downloads the app again so that you can use it. This was an attempt to save space on the device; Apps aren’t the biggest cause of storage usage, so the feature was more of a gimmick than something really useful. But that wasn’t the biggest problem with these devices. The Robin chassis (in that striking robin’s egg blue with the sharp square edges) was made of a composite plastic that – no matter how careful you were – would break near the volume switches. Eventually you realized that you had bought a gimmicky, underpowered device that would certainly break. Pass.
5. Samsung Galaxy Note 7 (2016)
The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 was banned by the Federal Aviation Administration – that alone should be all that needs to be said about what should be Samsung’s next big flagship. Why was it forbidden? Defective batteries that were susceptible to fire or worse. Samsung has recalled the devices, but their solution failed. After the repair, another device caught fire during a flight, causing Samsung to stop the Galaxy Note 7.
6. Essential PH-1 (2017)
I hate that this device is on the list; in fact, I had to fight the urge to rule it out. Ultimately, however, the Essential PH-1 had to be mentioned. Why? Although the device was about as elegant as a smartphone design I have ever held, it suffered greatly from an insufficiently powerful CPU and a very bad camera, and that’s nice. To make matters worse, you knew all the time that you were in possession of a PH-1, that the company would perish and you would end up with a paperweight. In that respect, the Essential PH-1 would have made an excellent paperweight because it was heavy. Finally the glass of the PH-1 was delicate; for example, if you were talking and sneezing, it was not out of reach for the possibility that the discharge from your nose and mouth could scratch the screen. Okay, maybe that last bit was an exaggeration. Could be.
7. Loss of microSD support (continuous)
Let’s migrate away from devices and tackle some of the errors in the Android platform. The first of these flops is the widespread removal of microSD support. It was not only device OEMs that removed hardware support for external storage, it was Google’s decision to make the use of external storage a challenge, effectively reducing device storage capacity. This came at a time when devices were sold with 16/32 GB of internal storage, which is not much. Without support for external storage, devices fill up very quickly. This was the worst decision ever made for the Android platform.
8. Upgrade process (continuous)
This problem continues to haunt Android. Unless you bought a Google Pixel phone, you understood that you would be months behind the update cycle. This applies not only to the operating system, but also to the security pattern level. Why is this happening? Carriers. Google releases the latest version to providers and they must then try to check it on their own to check whether the operating system is working properly on their devices. This causes significant delays in the release of Android on devices that are not pixels. But it’s not just providers who make sure that the latest release works correctly on their handsets – there’s a much worse problem that stands for an accelerated release of Android. That problem is .
9. Carrier bloatware (continuous)
Of all the flops that are linked to Android, none brings out the anger of users more than carrier bloat. When a network provider receives the latest version of Android, they not only ensure that the operating system works on their devices, but they also add their own applications. These applications are usually unnecessary, inferior and otherwise a waste of valuable local storage. Google should have put an end to this a long time ago.
10. Malware (continuous)
Malware on Android is an endless problem. There are many reasons why this makes Android security a flop, but the two most prominent issues are poor research in the Google Play Store and the ability to load applications. No matter how hard Google works to prevent malware, the problem does not diminish and we are still dealing with malicious software. This puts the security of Android devices square on the shoulders of the end user.
There you go – my top 10 Android flops of the last decade. Were there more? Oh yeah. But these are flops that are certain that more Android users nod in agreement.
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