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Google - please, for the love of God, stop buggering things up!

What is it with all those forced updates to Google Play Services? And can I send you a bill for the amount of my monthly data allocation you have p!$$ed away on maybe not quite possibly hiding the app permissions far enough away from sight?
Really - what the hell:
In October, the forced updates add up to 39.5MiB. That's about 8% of my monthly (500MiB) data allocation. Do you think you are somehow special that you can:
  1. Ignore the "only update over WiFi" setting
  2. Update without prompting
  3. Bloody go ahead and bloody do it regardless

You'll see there is 15MiB in November. Well, November 25th brought the joy of a 20.5MiB forced update. Cheers, Google.

But I'm not done yet. What are these updates? Because, I'll tell you what - my phone is getting slower and slower and I put the blame squarely on these updates (as I rarely bother to update an app that is working okay unless the update adds new features). Is it acceptable to choose a name in "keypad" and the phone may or may not get around to placing the call seconds or minutes later? You can't keep tapping the name, because the result of that will be one of three things: The phone will begin a call and report "Call could not be sent" (or something like that) for all the rest, the phone will freak out and reset itself, or the phone will place the call and once done will call again (repeat as many times as the icon was tapped).
This last update is especially galling. You have broken the ability to listen to music with the phone. I don't know what or how, but every so often (30-45 sec intervals) there is a tiny pause which is enough to interrupt the music playback. Congratulations, you have managed to take a 1GHz device with 368MiB RAM (probably 512 with some reserved for GPU?) and make its MP3 playback capabilities worse then a decade old RISC OS machine. And for the programmers among you, RISC OS is somewhat notorious for disabling interrupts left right and centre (instead of dealing with re-entrancy correctly in the first place!). Yet, it can play music reliably. Which is more than I can say for my Android phone now. Thanks.



You know, I didn't tend to keep backups of my Google apps, because those updates that I applied tended to add newer and often useful features. Well, thank you so very bloody much for the most recent update to Google Maps.
Actually, Maps is not the problem. The problem is your crappy navigation app and its sudden unexpected change of measurement system.

Here is a screenshot from Google Maps v6.14.5 (#6140502). It is the latest available for my phone.

There is no specific option to configure the distance units (apparently this was introduced in v7 which isn't available for my phone). This is no matter. My phone is set to British but the map is of France so the measurements are in kilometers. Which is logical as it matches what is on the road signs.

Here is the route via Google Navigation:

What the hell Google? Please tell me you have done something ass-backwards like "assume" that British people use Imperial measurements, and it isn't something even more cretinous like "this is what we use in the US so...". Either way, it has been nearly 13 years since I've seen a road sign in miles, and I learned metric at school so I cannot translate in my head when giving directions as I am actually physically incapable of visualising "110 yds". Google tells me it is "100.58400 metres", so I guess a yard is just slightly less than a metre. At any rate, it is a wholly unnecessary complication, and to provide Imperial measurements in a country where all the signs are in Metric (and not even think to ask which would be preferred) is utterly utterly ridiculous, and it makes me wonder if the person that made the decision to make this change is a bit "special ed", if you know what I mean.

Still, at least I can be certain that your tracking will no longer know where I am going. I'm sorry, I can't deal with Imperial in a metric world. Until this gets fixed, I'm just not going to use your navigation any more. It is broken. I'll go back to a paper map like I had before...


And, of course, it is day two!

I hadn't forgotten, I just needed to rant. ;-)



Your comments:


David Pilling, 4th December 2014, 18:43
Kind of addictive watching the advent calendar. I expect someone has done it but is there an idea here - video in the real world, people go to life size doors with numbers painted, on strange things on the other side, tells a story.
Rick, 4th December 2014, 23:43
I'm glad you're enjoying it. 
Your idea is interesting, but sadly a little out of my budget...

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