Android Jelly Bean – Is It Always ‘Tasty’ Enough?

With a device distribution share of nearly 60%, Jelly Bean is, undoubtedly, the most popular Android operating system platform. Jelly Bean is not entirely free of problems though, and we focus on some common user-complaints about the OS here.

Since its release in July 2012, the Jelly Bean has been widely hailed as the best operating system rolled out for Android devices. Recent surveys have shown that, the Jelly Bean OS comfortably outstrips the popularity of the Gingerbread, and has stood strong in the face of the recently launched Android Kitkat too. However, not all is hunky-dory with the performance of Android Jelly Bean – with users around the world having certain common complaints about it. Let us here take a look through some such Jelly Bean issues:

1. Poor Bluetooth Connectivity – While the Bluetooth features in the Android 4.1 version were pretty much okay, that of version 4.2 leaves much to be desired. In fact, those up top at Google admitted that the version had minor bugs, and users needed to upgrade their devices to Android version 4.2.1. While the corrected version does promise fast Bluetooth connectivity, the process of upgrading is far from easy.

2. Unreliable wireless network coverage – The rather mediocre quality of wi-fi coverage of Android Jelly Bean allows many iPhone application development companies in India and abroad to steal a march over those exclusively into developing Android apps. Being able to connect to a wi-fi network is not always possible, and users have also found the coverage to be going off on its own at random too. Turning the router and the wi-fi settings off and on again (basically, a reboot) can serve as a temporary fix to this problem.

3. Device lags – Particularly after an Android phone has been kept on standby for a few hours. According to users, phones powered by Jelly Bean on Android 4.1 (in particular) took quite a bit of time to start functioning normally, after being removed from the standby mode. The issue even compelled many people to avoid keeping their phones on standby.

4. Alarmingly low battery life – If you are in the habit of installing every alternate app released by any random mobile application development company, the battery life of your smartphone (nothing to write home about, in any case) will go for a toss. However, it has been seen that devices with Android Jelly Bean had even lower-than-average battery backup period. To be fair, this might not be a specific problem with the OS – since turning off stuff like Google Wallet has often resulted in improved battery performance.

5. Automatic device reboot – A mobile handset should reboot only when the user wants it to – but that is not always the case with Android Jelly Bean phones. Once again, version 4.2 is the worst offender, with the screen of devices also often freezing at random. Although doing a complete factory reset can get the phone back to life, this problem is reported to recur. A probable cause might be the presence of smartphone apps from earlier versions on the Jelly Bean powered handset.

6. Incompatibility with the default music application on Samsung phones – Hardly anyone has been able to listen to interruption-free music on the go, on their Samsung smartphone, running on the Jelly Bean platform. There have been reports of a frequent stuttering of the music, with the playback even coming to sudden halts in certain cases. Understandably, Samsung-users are looking forward to a fix/update from Google, so that the music app can be used without any hassles.

7. Eleven months in a year! – Okay, let’s just say that Android 4.2 was a bit of an embarrassment for Google. People who had newly upgraded from version 4.1 were shocked to find that there was no mention of the month of ‘December’ in the default People app calendar whatsoever. One of the many reasons why the corrective 4.2.1 update had to be released in a hurry.

8. Problems after receiving a call – Make no mistake – there is no room for complaint about the voice-clarity or other calling features in devices using the Android Jelly Bean platform. Things, however, can go wrong after you have received an incoming call and finished talking. The device can freeze/hang completely, or become inexplicably slow. Unless a hard reboot is done, the problem tends to persist.

9. RAM management features not up to the mark – Not a general, sweeping statement against all Android Jelly Bean handsets, but an issue that many users have actually faced. Managing the internal memory space of Android devices is not always the easiest task, and setting up a few mobile apps can easily exhaust the default storage space of the phone. Of course, if you are careful about regularly removing unnecessary files, apps and other stuff from your phone – such RAM problems would be a lot less likely to crop up.

Probably as an offshoot of the Bluetooth problems in Android Jelly Bean 4.2, the in-car audio performance of devices running on it is less than satisfactory. To keep up with iOS handsets and products from any good iPhone application development company in India, Google needs to get these problems fixed as quickly as possible. At present, Jelly Bean is still ‘tasty’ for users, but there is considerable scope for the OS platform to become even ‘tastier’!