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Goggle's lack of joined up thinking strikes again. Android Blogger Fail.

I use Google's blogger platform for this blog and I have a Samsung Galaxy phone running the Google Android operating system. One might be inclined to assume therefore that posting to my blog from my phone would be well supported. One would be wrong. Some months bag Google updated the blogger posting interface and I haven't been able to get it to work properly on my phone since.

Fist attempt: Using my preferred Opera mobile browser on the phone. It really is a terrific mobile browser and seems to work well with every website. Except for Blogger. I can read posts well enough but I cannot create new posts. I get a message saying "This browser is no longer supported by Blogger".

Second attempt: Using the default Browser built into Android (Gingerbread edition). Surely Google's own Android browser will do the trick? Sadly no. I can get the page for creating a new post but it refuses to activate the text entry box and give me a keyboard.


Third Attempt: There's an app for that. Well of course there is. There is an app for everything these days. I downloaded the official Blogger app from the Android market. I was a bit disappointing that it doesn't appear to facilitate reading and writing comments but at least I can finally create and edit posts. At first I was satisfied. Then I noticed that I was experiencing problems with low battery life and phone slowdowns.  Looking at running processes I was surprised to see that the official Blogger app has a persistent process that runs constantly on the phone regardless of whether you are using the app or not. When I kill the process it re-appears so the only way to get rid of it is to uninstall the app. Most suspiciously my phone runs better (better battery and fewer slowdowns) when the app is not installed.


Final option: There are a number of third party blogger apps available on the market. I haven't tried any of these yet because I am worried about handing over my user name and password to a third party app. Since I have yet to find a satisfactory solution for posting to my blog from my phone I will probably have to look for a trustworthy one and try it.



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Comments

Stabs said…
That's spectacularly bad.

I have to say the one that particularly annoys me is the app that constantly phones home. It's like having a gratuitous teenage daughter on your phone bill.

I recently got a memory stick for my laptop. It's quite expensive to buy portable memory and things like Steam or even Windows completely screw you up. Is it so radical to expect that I should get to decide who makes internet calls on my own computer? Bah!
1:58 pm
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