What the fuck, Google?

<rant type="angry" attitude="bad" language="bad">

Dear Google,

What the fuck?

How?

Seriously, how?

Do you test before you fucking ship?

For those of you who don't know, Froyo shipped Tuesday for the EVO 4G (and has been shipping on Nexus One for a while -- and for those of you totally living under a rock, Froyo is the new version, 2.2, of the Android phone OS). I installed it today on my phone, and like every-fuckin'-body else who has an Android phone, I got in the car, plugged my phone in, fired up Pandora, and went to work.

There was a problem.

Pandora sounded like ass.

"Well, that's funny. Maybe the sound got kicked down to low quality on the cell network?" I flipped the option to 'low quality on cell network', and restarted Pandora. It sounded worse. I flipped the option to 'high quality on cell network', and restarted Pandora. It still sounded terrible. It sounded like someone had decided to downconvert it all to 22KHz at a low bit rate.

I got to work, and looked the issue up online. It turns out that approximately every Android forum out there was full of people complaining that Pandora just sounds like ass after they updated to Froyo (and a few other people complaining about streaming music services that nobody has ever heard of). All of them pointed to one solution (originally described in this thread on XDA-Developers):

as root, just run the simple command setprop media.stagefright.enable-player false

Oh! Yeah! Well how could I not know that? Just change a system property (as root, which most users can't do, because most users aren't "allowed" to have root on their own fuckin' phones) to fix a bug that the operating system shipped with.

I did some more investigation. What does this property do? Well, it turns out that previously Android used a package called OpenCORE to do audio rendering, but recently, they switched to a package called StageFright. This property, then, disables StageFright's audio renderer, and switches back to OpenCORE. I felt that the switch deserved some thought -- what was the advantage? I searched the web for info on this, but the Android forums were about as helpful as most of the rest of the Android documentation. I can conclude from this only that this was a result of the standard Android development model, which JWZ nicknamed the CADT model (he was talking about GNOME, of course, but it applies here).

It turns out that StageFright, when it got rewritten from OpenCORE, broke an audio encoding format called AAC-LC (which some call AAC-HE, HE-AAC, or AAC+); it ignores the "high efficiency" bits, and just plays back the total noob baseline audio. It also turns out that if you want to stream audio over the web and have it sound good for not many bits per second, you use AAC-LC -- no questions asked. So, if you play back an AAC-LC file on Froyo, it sounds like crap. But hey, it's not as if the Android documentation specifies that AAC-LC is a supported format, right? The Pandora guys must have been running on borrowed time there... Oh wait. It fucking does.

Also, other things in Pandora don't work any more. For instance, when I unplug the headphones cable on the Evo, it doesn't stop playing automatically any more. Presumably nobody found this because they just fuckin' turned it off as soon as they realized it sounded like shit. And if you think about it, it is kind of a non-issue compared to the big one, right?

So, what happened here? Maybe it's Pandora's fault, for not testing something or other and updating their code to be compatible?

No. It's Google's fault. Dude, you fucking shipped an operating system that doesn't work right with Pandora. I don't fucking care who wrote the incorrect code, you god damn shipped the update that broke Pandora. It's not a small thing, like you broke some tethering app that only rooted users can use (although you did), or like you made HTC's mail client use up 100% of the CPU forever if something goes wrong (although you did -- well, maybe that's HTC's fault). No. You fuckin' broke Pan-fuckin'-dora. It's only, say, the fuckin' killer fuckin' app for 3-motherfuckin'-G.

[edit: After I wrote this, I went and grabbed some statistics. To give you an idea of how inexcusable this is, let's look at Pandora Radio's statistics on the Market. Well, I don't think I have to say much more than its position; it is the number one free application. Above Google Maps, above Google Earth, above The Weather Channel, above Face-fuckin'-book, above Twitter, above MySpace. Number fuckin' one. You idiots.]

What were you thinking? Do you regress anything before you ship? Do you spend six fucking hours with your phone before you ship? Here, someone even opened a god-damn bug report for your sorry ass a month and a god damn half ago, to which you haven't even acknowledged the fucking issue.

Christ, Apple might say 'fuck you' to developers, but at least they test the god-damn big ones before they test. This is fucking shameful.

So, dear Google: get it together.

No love,
joshua