New Phones Still Sold With Old Versions of Android
wired.com
wired.com
For those that do (e.g. 3D games), you simply state that it requires a snapdragon or whatever CPU. Customers will soon be more familiar with their phones specs, as they are with their computers.
As long as customers understand that their low-end phone won't be able to run the sexiest games out there, I don't see too much of a problem. The developers just need to figure out how many people have the highest-end phones (and what they'll pay for games that utilize them).
INT. WHITE ROOM
We see two men -- (pudgy but adorable comedian, wearing a robot costume) and (douchey hipsterish guy) -- standing side by side.
DOUCHEY HIPSTER
Hi, I'm an iPhone.
ADORABLE COMEDIAN
And I'm an Android.
DOUCHEY HIPSTER
Hey, Android, have you played this great new game?
You can fill in the rest of the script from here, and perhaps in so doing you'll realize how quickly this could become a major marketing problem for Android...
What this suggests is that the solution for Android will be to have some easily-understandable number or naming scheme to roughly classify the power of the phone, so apps don't have to list compatible phones en masse. For desktop software, most people basically used the required and recommended CPU speed as such a number. Even though it didn't really capture the full nuances of whether an app required more RAM or more CPU, it was a good enough rough metric.
Edit: In short, I'm saying that if you cannot tell the difference and are a low-end cell phone consumer, then you can just as well do without voice search on your $50 phone. Beyond that, the good phones update themselves.
Generalizing from this if too many vendors start to arbitrarily decide to only run certain versions, then android as a platform could be in jeopardy since developers will have to decided between targeting some lowest common denominator, only developing for a subset of android phones or developing several versions of their app. Once users experience that they can't run certain android apps on their new android phone then they'll lose faith in android as a concept.
What may help is Google changing their licensing agreements to require that manufacturers using 'Google experience' phones/Android brand allow Google to maintain sole control of software updates. Google can release an SDK a few months before a new distribution is pushed out, allowing enough time for manufacturers to update drivers.
This reminds me of a sort of retort to linux on the desktop not being so great, that "Linux is the kernel, it has nothing to do with GNOME usability issues".
The details don't matter to the end user, what matters is brand Foo doing what they expect brand Foo to do. The real question is, are they expecting their Google Android phone to behave a certain way, or are they expecting their Motorola Droid to behave a certain way?
Needless to say, I'm now using a Nexus One.
Did you really buy a Nexus ONE to replace your touch and don't use the phone portion of the Nexus?
Now, on the substance: the reason why many of the phones lag behind is that the manufacturers and carriers have the ability to customize the system - sometimes to add features (multi-touch appeared in some HTC phones before the Android core), sometimes to junk-ify the phone.
Some of this I predict will fade, as manufacturers/carriers find the value of having the LatestAndGreatest OS will outweigh the perceived benefits of customization. Some of it probably won't, which is the unfortunate but mostly unavoidable consequence of producing an open/open-source platform.
My guess is that over time Google will make a greater effort to distinguish the phones that will be kept up-to-date (because they have few OS customizations) from the ones that just use the Android OS as the basis for their own distro (this is the very fine semantic difference between "Android" and "Android with Google"). How closely consumers will distinguish the two, is of course another matter entirely.
Edit: As an aside, I've been surprised (though perhaps I shouldn't be) how many of my non-tech friends don't even really identify "Android" as a brand - when I tell people we develop for Android, I often get a blank stare - they don't realize that the Droid, Nexus One, etc. have much of anything in common. A branding failure, on the one hand - but also an opportunity to correct some of these other issues.
I think that's a big plus for Google. "Android vs iPhone" doesn't make much sense since it's a comparison between a platform and a product line (as you essentially stated earlier), but "Nexus One vs iPhone" is something people can understand, and something which (right now anyway) tends to favor the Nexus One (to those who have used neither).
Sense UI is good looking, but i am not sure if its a good enough reason to stick to older platforms. Especially when the APIs on the older platform suck.
Having said that, there are a few enhancements that are integrated with the Sense UI that are not in the mainline release(which makes you wonder why they're not). So its not a complete loss.
The phone definitely has its faults from a design perspective(who's bright idea was it to put the speaker on the back) so for my next purchase I will reconsider where i get my set from.
(Obviously, most people won't do it, but at least those of us who visit HN can).
Windows also didn't really have its poor reputation among mainstream consumers until XP's many security/malware problems and Vista's flop.
It should automatically update (barring the unforeseen) to the most current level of Android OS it can support, as it has done for all the existing Android users as new releases became available.
The only thing I can foresee as a problem is that older hardware may not be able to support the newest Android versions. The HTC G1 doesn't appear to support Android 2.0, which makes sense, as it's MUCH older than the Droid or Nexus One. That causes problems more for the developers than for the end users I suspect, but I think that people are used to the logic with PCs -- I can't play the new game, need to upgrade.