No one wants yearly Android releases
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
The problem is the carriers and manufacturers, not the users' wants. They aren't updating enough. And I can totally understand the pain for them, having to QA all those new versions and release them.
I wish it was disintermediated from the carriers. I bought a generic android phone from BLU last year for $99 and wanted to update on my own to latest version of android, and it was such a pain to figure out how (I gave up).
Still I agree the problem is devices are not getting update and it's not a problem of want as the article hints, but of can't, at least at the user level: Of course carriers and manufacturers hate having to support devices instead of selling new ones!
The problem that Google apologists/Android fanboys forget... is that deploying an Android update is a HUGE cost to manufacturers for customization, testing, and deployment.
Google ships endless new versions without any respect to this, and leaves most of the work, and the cost, on manufacturers, who already had thin margins to begin with. Especially on entry level phones, hardware costs have been a race to the bottom.
These people are afraid to point out that Google has created an OS that's hard to update universally, requires a custom deployment for each and every hardware model, and is shipped without working hardware support for most of the hardware using it or even a modicum of stability even on their own reference platforms.
if the linux kernel driver model wouldn't be so hostile to driver backward compatibility, it'd be trivial for soc provider to have a single device driver delivered with the soc and cut the certification costs by orders of magnitude.
this is something google could fix, btw, creating something like FUSE but for wireless chipset integration and keeping that backward compatible.
Manufacturers can get their drivers merged into the mainline kernel and they won't have a driver backward compatibility issue to worry about.
They choose not to for business reasons (market segmentation/artificial hardware limits via drivers) or because they are being cheap. And because much of the market doesn't know enough to care, it mostly works for them.
In the long run I think it limits the IoT ecosystem from progressing and it's a practice which must stop. If your hardware is not fully supported by the mainline kernel, it may as well not exist.
The argument isn't bad per se, it's just that reality disagrees.
That said the fact that a new Android release has to pass through two other sets of hands before it can get to an end user sure ain't helping.
Now it's mostly backend stuff as Play Services regroups much more of the user visible stuff. Boring is good too though, just not as exciting
Statistically, I don't know what percentage of people want upgrades vs don't, but anecdotally, I feel that most non-technical users don't want upgrades because they've learned how to use the phone and they're comfortable with it.
It takes money and time to upgrade all their carrier-specific "value-added"(i.e. shit) software on top of the new operating system, and they hesitate to do it, because they've already got it working, and taking no action is much easier and cheaper than upgrading.
Besides there isn't enough customers yelling about it anyway (the ones who really care only buy the phones with known fast OS upgrade cycles, like Nexus).
and these people are usually out of touch enthusiast-types who are happy with half-baked releases that require a lot of tweaking, rooting, and replacement launchers and such to be usable. The 5.0 release a year ago was just a nightmare. It was slow and introduced a significant memory leak that I find impossible to believe that Google didn't know about at launch. But Google likes to cheer on its product and have Nexus yearly launches. Tying your physical product to your software one seems a questionable strategy at best, and a boneheaded decision at worst. I'd be happy with a new version every two years with significant refinement done in the meantime.
I have a Nexus and I fear every major update. It just breaks my phone and causes me stress until a .1 or .2 update finally fixes the issues Google introduced. If we're in a position where even Nexus owners are scared of updates, then there's something fundamentally wrong here. Worse, this morally empowers OEMs to say, "Well, google releases unfinished code, so we'll going to skip this update for a while." Honestly, the phone OEMs that went from 4.x to 5.1, skipping 5.0, were on the right side of history here. Every other Google update is half-baked and everyone knows it.
I don't think Google is giving itself enough time to iron out the issues. Slowing down this train is the only solution here that makes sense, imo. Meanwhile my ipad is bulletproof. Sure it gets minor issues now and again, but Apple's QA level is leaps above Android.
Lastly, the mobile revolution, at least in terms of phones, has long matured. Every update is just another denial about how close we are to the innovation grave here. There's just nothing compelling that requires frequent updates. Its time to move into a refinement period, the same way MS took NT4/2000 and made XP/2003 or Apple took a 3-4 year innovation break between Tiger/Leopard and Lion/Mountain Lion.
I switched to iOS on iPhone 5S last year after Lollipop being a shitshow, but iOS 9 has shown me that Apple isn't anything better, because they have to sell new hardware, so gimping older devices on purpose is the name of the game. I don't care about version numbers, if the OS is a stutter show after an update.
All those iOS update bragging would be interesting if Apple would allow downgrades to previous major versions of iOS until next one gets released.
Now a rule of the thumb is find the device/software you like right now and decide about updating it only after research of feedback.
After the signing window was closed, I was stuck with it. I tried ongoing betas until 9.2, but then just had enough and sold it. I refuse to buy into the Apple greed of selling new hardware with shoddy software updates and so far I've read at the time, this wasn't the first time (iOS 7). The majority of non-power users just think "hey phone is too old I have to upgrade" and buy a new device.
I mentioned fear of updating because this was the second time in one year I was burned with an update on two different platforms.
The grass isn't greener on the other side.
This is becoming more and more important to me as I have ranged from the updating on nightly builds to only updating when I see real performance benefit - and even then I wait till I see more users from my model and service provider commenting on how much the change benefits them.
*edit - of course application updating is an entirely different process and I allow this to update ASAP due to unlimited data plans but updating core os features has become more and more towards the above versus the application update idea.
Arguably this already happened, depending on who you ask. Google moved all? of the high level APIs into the Google Play Services Library, which google can update whenever they want, they can even enable / disable APIs as they see fit (for example, google wallet if it detects you're on a canadian carrier)
Now the only reason to buy a new phone is if you want a new phone, otherwise all your apps will work regardless of what phone / what version of the OS you have.
Think about stagefright , your personal data is at risk just because some stupid company doesn't give fuck about you (and me), and wants you buy more phone.
Android update issue is clash between whole hardware and software industry. remember when you buy software you was going to get update for 5year or more most of the time. at the other hand in hardware industry when you did bought (before android) any phone, there was no update. no body cared about updates, and lets be honest the technical capability was not there in that time, so no one excepted companies to update their phone.
But regularly updating their phone require a lot of investment from companies (and at the other hand will a little decrease selling phone). which companies resist, which absoulouttly they don't have right to do. This is fight right now between customers and hardware companies.
Specially from now on this is going to be interesting , because phones from 2015+ , is capable of doing your ordinary computation (reading mails, watching movies, etc) for maybe 7, 8 years. (just like old pc , which does run latest version of Windows 10/Ubuntu good enough right now for you browsing/chatting/watching/etc, but you cant play high end games on it).
> Or you don't know what OS is or I do live in entirely other world than you.
My comparison was (pretty obviously) between iOS, which bundles all of the apps I mentioned with the OS, and Android, which does not. I can only ask for your forgiveness for my "ridiculous logic".
Perhaps the comment could have been worded a little more diplomatically ('cuz we're all sensitive, special flowers here), but I'd say the criticism is spot-on. If one thinks that "oooh, my apps get updated, who cares about OS updates?" (yeah, I know what you actually typed), a little correction is deservedly coming your way. The explanation for your "comparison" still doesn't tell me that you have a good grasp on the point 0xFFC was trying to make.
I think it's more that it's easier to discuss without people being massive jerks.
It's possible to express opinions without going all over the place
This is not true. And developers need all APIs, not just the ones Google wants to license to OEMs to maintain control of the platform.
For example. Android N will use OpenJDK, and this will be a big shift for us.
And we can't get those because carrier stranglehold, proprietary drivers that need to be compiled for every kernel variant instead of using generic hooks, and so on. Android is still Wild West of smartphones, and it's embarrassing that Google's updates are hilariously terrible compared to Apple.
Software costs money to develop, most users don't care enough to pay for software updates (would your "mom" pay $20 to have JDK 8 support?) and unless the update enables a feature the vendor expects you to pay for (say, iCloud or Google Drive) no one is incentivized to provide timely updates.
On the flip side, software updates allow vendors to differentiate their new phones (yeah they both have A123 processors, but this phone has snapMessage *due to the new update)
I think the only other alternative is fully open source phones, which exist, but in terms of updates they're not any better
I should also mention the support library. I can now use some new niceties like vector assets on all Android versions.
However, not everything is part of play services. You can patch some security holes through play services, but some core elements of the platform need a full system update (however Play Services can detect apps trying to exploit a security flaw).
Also, in order to add something like the new permission model or a better version of the runtime, an OS update is still necessary.
I suspect that if the carriers instead forced upgrades they'd see a much higher rate of upgrades as newer OSes would bog down the older devices and make them less usable. Users would become frustrated and upgrade to newer devices out of necessity.
Not to mention every upgrade to my Nexus 4 has made the Bluetooth behave badly in new and more frustrating ways.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. My HTC M7 GPE is only just beginning to show its age in terms of performance. My SO's Samsung S4, however, has been literally unusable for months now: battery performance issues, only able to run ~3 apps at once (low RAM), unable to update any apps because there's no free space despite having around 50 less apps than me and also despite having an SD card, overall performance is laggy & slow, certain apps won't even run now, the list goes on.
These phones came out within months of each other in 2013, and in spite several hardware advantages the Samsung is no longer meeting its users needs compared to my M7. Of course, my SO has no idea why this is, like you said she barely knew what kind of phone she has (lol), but the end result is that she's having to upgrade the phone (early, I might add), and the differences can largely be boiled down to software and updates.
If google stops allowing manufacturers and carriers to customize the device and handles upgrades we'll see the same stats as iOS has with regards to market reach of the latest os version. Further, if they clean up the API's and develop better standards its less likely that apps will crash phones or cause significant lag or issues when running on old devices with a new os
0. I say this as an android dev who only wrote a little iOS with swift.
One of the real problems is carriers. They have no material incentive to push software updates and are often in hot water about security updates. They actually have a disincentive to push updates. If Samsung doesn't update the Note X to Android Y, you buy a new Note X2 phone from them with fresh Android Y. It's a broken system with misaligned interests all over. So, to contradict the OP, customers, carriers and manufacturers want yearly android releases.
Another problem is the difficulty in updating between releases. I can install Windows or Linux on any junker motherboard and get it to run, but I have to pray to the manufacturer/carrier tag-team to allow my $800 phone to get the next version a year later. Why can't we remove them from the equation, easily? I'm sure this point is full of naivety on my part. It just smells like planned obsolescence.
Another problem is the shift from AOSP to Google Play Services. The deprecated Android browser even had unpatched security holes as 'wontfix, switch to Chrome' last I checked. So many apps rely on GAPPS for anything and everything now, what's the point of an open OS when everything is behind a blackbox service?
Another problem is the centrality of the Play store. F-Droid is a life-saver, but how can I get my Brother Printer Service driver? I can't download it from Brother. I have to get it from Google Play. I've been spinning up a Genymotion emulator with GAPPS just to download, repackage the apks I need and then move it to my Nexus. Then I get hit with 'this app is not available for your device/version/location' and it's spoofing the build.prop file to let me download the damn apk. The whole ecosystem is DRM'd lockin at every turn.
F-droid allows private repos with closed source APKs, I wish a decentralized system like that, like the web, would gain adoption.
But I don't understand how the carrier is involved at all. What if you update your phone on WiFi so you aren't using the carrier at all. They can't intercept that so how are they to blame for whether you can upgrade or not?
I know there's recent legislation on it, but for a long time there were carrier locks on phones sold with plans and they were the only one you could have on it. Before LTE, CDMA phones couldn't switch carriers but with the grace of heir current carrier as it was on the carriers end. There was no removable SIM. I'm not sure if modern CDMA phones still require explicit requests to the carrier regardless of the LTE SIM as I'm on GSM which has always had them.
Modern android even has a SQL database file in their phones for things like carrier-locked-down tethering and limits. So if you have a version of android that doesn't have these bit-flags getting sent with packets or has new ones, I'm not sure your carrier would allow it on the network. Of course you can root it and make all data, even tethered, appear like it's coming from the android browser. Carriers seem to have a lot of hooks in the OS is all I'm saying, blindly flashing is unfortunately asking for trouble.
And just because a lot of people wait to update until they get a new phone doesn't mean they don't care about that update. Or that handset manufacturers don't care about the update. Or that Google should stop making new versions of Android. Or whatever the author's point is...
So let's have fun with numbers...
1.4b Android users. 7.5% updated to the latest. That's ~105m.
500m iPhone users. 84% updated to the latest. That's ~425m.
(I'm pulling these numbers from different sources, but they're probably of the right scale.)
My only point is that there might be an argument that Android's deploying new versions on about 1/4 of the devices that Apple is, not 1/10. Which is an important distinction if your argument is that Google is failing at getting people to update their devices.
It's webdev for IE all over again supporting balls old versions.
Releases are always additive, and (to my knowledge) have never removed anything (even when they really really should have).
The only reason to target a newer version is if you need things that were actually added to the OS (like fingerprint scanning). And even there it's pretty easy to gate functionality. The vast majority of apps don't need to care in the slightest and with appcompat almost everything useful is available.
It's not like you have to make completely separate apps for Lollipop and Marshmallow the way you used to for IE and everything else.
Also, just to check, we're talking about versions and not API level, right?
I'm very happy now that I've switched to a Nexus device.
I don't get the logic there. Why is it "essentially an irrelevance" just because it takes time to reach a wide user base? Today's releases will have tomorrow's wide user base and be as relevant as last year's releases are today.
Articles like this always seem to be some awkward attempt at turning a strength (Androids wide adoption, budget friendly alternative phones, etc) into a weakness, via the magic of nuance-free comparison.
It is all a mater of what Google is willing to put on their Android contracts. No excuse.
From what I'm seeing, from the developer perspective these releases don't introduce too much fragmentation. Tooling-wise things are reasonably seamless too (with android studio). Am I missing something?
And although HN usually likes to bash Microsoft about bringing out new libraries and frameworks, Google is also very good at making "last year's best practices into deprecated APIs this year".
Which means multiple code paths if you want to provide good support across all versions, even with the help of SupportLibrary.
Wow, years are a lot shorter than I remember. Android Marshmallow was announced May 28, 2015 and was released with the Nexus 5X and 6P on September 29, 2015. So 11 months since announcement, and 7 months since release.
The author has a point about too few users being on the latest release, but let's get the facts straight.
What rubbish.
In a strange way, this article confuses latency with throughput. It takes a long time for each Android update to gain a majority of the installed base. But it does get there. Slowing the frequency of updates will not change that.
Android continues to develop at a fast pace. Android N previews large-tablet/desktop OS features like proper mouse support and resizeable windows. This would not be the time to slow the release schedule.
One reason I hope the tablet market grows to where it can influence the overall Android market is that tablets do not need carrier approval for updates.
Phones don't need it either.
If Google deserves criticism it's for not pushing harder and more consistently on initiatives like Google Play Edition and Android One.
There's too much conflict of interest to trust cell companies to finance your phone.
I love open-source, and I'm a huge believer in the possibilities it represents. But I think those beliefs blinded people in the beginning, who assumed that carriers and manufacturers would similarly care. They don't. Hell, they're even slow to respond with security updates. Google is moving in a better direction, but it'll take a while. If we're really lucky, carriers and manufacturers won't notice the gradual changes and raise a fuss.
You'd think that, as long as they get to customize things to their heart's content and install their bloatware at some point, they'd be able to realize the benefits of a better update model. But then again, major UI changes that are clearly visible help differentiate new devices. So there's a nasty vested interest at work there as well.
From my recall, Apple actually has a "Verizon team" that works on ensuring iOS updates meet all of Verizon's certification requirements for release ahead of announcement, which is why Apple software updates never suffer that terrible additional wait Android updates have before they end up on Verizon phones.
Google can keep pushing out updates but the percentage of devices on any particular version will keep getting smaller. The whole thing is fundamentally flawed.
Why? They're the ones that wouldn't agree to the terms that would have prevented an unnecessary bottleneck.
Seriously, this whole problem is caused by manufacturers and carriers installing their bloatware (which is what people really don't want). Without said bloatware (goodbye TouchWizz) there is no barrier to users updating when a new release is pushed by Google, because carriers won't need to lock versions to ensure new versions of Android don't break their bloatware.
So if you don't like it, stop being part of the problem. Stop buying anything non-Nexus (particularly Samsung), they are detrimental to the Android ecosystem.
If that doesn't improve your life, check if there is an aftermarket distribution, like Cyanogen, that runs on your tablet.
EDIT: You may also be able to disable built-in apps you do not use, even if you can't uninstall them.