With Google's Android 4.1 - Jelly Bean release having landed at Google IO 2012, Google seemed to be poised to continue its strong market share growth in the US and internationally. A lot of users stating for the first time that Android as an operating system was good enough (read fast and smooth enough) to take on iOS.

Having been a huge fan of Android and the ANdroid philosophy for years, this was great to see. Android 4.1 was truly faster and better in a lot of ways. Google focused more on polish and stability than on new features.  Having said that, it is now November of 2012, and we have yet to see Jelly Bean on more than 3% of devices. This metric is disappointing, but the blame can clearly be placed on the US phone carriers and on the manufacturers.

Now than Android 4.2 has been released as the latest version of Jelly Bean, Google seems to be shooting themselves in the foot even further. They are back at adding additional features to the platform, with major revisions to Google Now, Camera, the Play Store, and Gmail. They also have made several frustratingly minor updates to the UI of the platform, moving the Back, Home, List buttons from the lower left of the UI to center of the bottom of the screen. Allegedly this is to match how people really hold the device, but as someone that always holds my tablets by the corners, I'm skeptical.

Additionally, tons of user reports are coming in, myself included, that Android 4.2 is really slow on the Nexus 7. I notice that starting up the phone I experience tons of "Jenk" and lag before I can get in and perform actions. Even things like rotating the device can be greviously slow now, taking upwards of one or two seconds.