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Comment by harigov | Hacker News Reader

It's unbelievable that they were not able to capitalize on all those Android devices that are still running very old versions of Android. Given that Google and the device manufacturers basically disowned those devices, I was expecting (or rather hoping) that someone will fill in that gap/need. I guess its more complicated than it seems, but I do wonder how.

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Have you tried rooting and re-imaging an android phone with a custom rom? I'm an experienced software engineer and it took me a painful while to make it happen. I supposed they could make it easier, but the amount of effort that would go into maintaining install kits for every phone out there would be crazy.

This.

It's actually massively soured me on Android (as well as several vendors, yes, specifically you, Samsung) as a result.

Sony are great - key, unlock bootloader, flash twrp, install. Not that much harder than installing linux on modern laptop - enter bios, disable secureboot, curse 4 times until you find the second secure boot setting you also need to disable, exit bios, curse till you find the boot menu hotkey for this exact laptop, boot, install

Thanks, something I'll keep in mind.

The Samsung hardware, fetters and chains excepted, is tolerable. The software is crap.

What? All Samsung phones, at least in Europe, come unlocked and can be reflashed easily.

I think it is the carriers adding (or turning on) extra security features like Knox in the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Knox

I actually just installed CyanogenMod on my Galaxy Nexus last week, and it was easy as pie. Is there something I'm missing? Or are newer Samsung phones more fettered?

AFAIU, the distinguishing characteristic of Nexus devices is that they're unlocked.

Yes, per Wikipedia:

"All Nexus devices feature an unlockable bootloader[3] to allow further development and end-user modification.[4]"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Nexus

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/12/its-not-rooti...

http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/03/galaxy-nexus-gets-rooted-...

Note that this still does you comparatively little good if you don't have CyanogenMod to put on it. Mind, I didn't say "no good", I said "little good".

It's the CyanogenMod dev team at Cyanogen Inc who've been impacted by the layoffs. There's still the independent effort, but it's lost a major employer and investor.

Good to know. I'll keep that in mind for my next phone.

Even if CyanogenMod suffers, there's plenty of other open-source Android versions out there. Unfortunately finding a clear, unbiased comparison of them is even harder than it is for different Linux distros. :(

I had to go through the goldcard process to flash my first Android phone, it took a while to get the right microSD card and you also had to install the Android SDK to use their flashing utilities, which wasn't the easiest thing to get up and running at the time.

I got there in the end, and I'm pretty sure most newer phones can be flashed in far easier ways.

For future reference you can user the Minimal ADB & Fastboot application rather than the full ADK.

Now, yes, but not when I was doing this for the first time.

I agree it's a pain - I've installed Cyanogenmod on a few Nexus devices (which are supposed to be the easiest ones) and it wasn't simple.

However is it intrinsically hard? Could you imagine a software tool you would run which would ask a few questions, automate as much as possible over the OTG port, and guide the user for the rest?

That's the kind of tool Cyanogen Inc could write. Of course monetizing it is another thing.

I think it is just a hard problem. Many devices with many Android versions and many provider customizations. And, oh yeah, the carriers are often going out of their way to make rooting as impossible as they can. Screw up badly enough and you can easily brick a phone.

They had 136 people. Solving the hard problems is what makes companies successful and what proprietary companies are good at, or so I'm always told. All the information you need exists on the Cyanogenmod wiki pages, it's a matter of grinding that into code.

I wrote something a while back that did this as a proof of concept/learning exercise... but it never took off:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2391493

Hey tire!

I've been wanting to do something like that for a long time, get away from the recoveries and politics of the different factions. Make something a user can just pick up an old device, run an install process, and have a fast new OS.

Google of course doesn't make it easy, mostly due to carrier and manufacturer demands. But also due to the lack of a defined ABI between the user interactive parts and the libraries for talking to hardware.

There's really no reason an operating environment couldn't be compiled for ARM and run on the majority of devices if this specification was enforced. I'm looking to gonk and a new Google initiative as a possible solution.

It may be intrinsically hard. The one time I installed Cyanogenmod, I rooted the phone thanks to a misconfiguration resulting in local privilege escalation. Now, if only the phone manufacturer or the carrier cared to close this vuln with an OTA... Cyanogen could find themselves in a security arms race, where they are the attackers. I don't even know if that wouldn't make it illegal to sell their kits in some countries.

I remember a time when apparently you could just navigate to get.cm on your phone and it would download an .apk specific to your phone which would perform the rooting/unlocking and install of cyanogenmod. But that effort seems to have failed. http://www.xda-developers.com/how-to-install-cyanogenmod/

You use fastboot to unlock the bootloader flash a recovery image then flash the main Rom. Its not too hard.

You say that as if there aren't countless pitfalls that can stop the process, e.g. phone not rooted, installing the tools to do it can be complicated, differences across operating systems, USB permission issues with the android tooling, tooling just not working for whatever reason, phone not behaving the way its supposed to once you are in the bootloader, recovery image doesn't install, the ROM download is bad, etc etc etc

These are not random examples - they ALL happened with the phone I am now typing on.

Its also not something a business could be built on top of, which is the original topic of this thread. Users expect single click installs.

Rooting and unlocking the bootloader are different. Root is having root on the OS. The Bootloader is what loads the various partitions. If your phone's bootloader is locked obviously flashing is a lot harder.

The mobile phone market is massive. Even if you can capture a small subset of the users you can make money. Not everyone needs a one step install process.

Problem is that on some phones, for instance my S4, if you don't root first, you can't install an alternative recovery ROM. Without an alternative recovery rom, you can't install a new OS that is not signed, so you can't install CM.

I think the problem with supporting "all those Android devices" is the long tail Android has [1] once you get past supporting Samsung/Motorolla/HTC devices.

[1] http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/08/05/this-is-what-androi...

Samsung is bad enough. Take a look here [2]. Click "Tablets" and then choose "Galaxy Tabs" as the product.

I'm sure a lot of the devices are similar at a hardware level, but still, the sheer volume of them is ridiculous.

[2] http://www.samsung.com/us/support/downloads

It costs too much in engineer time to maintain just the hardware support to do that. This will continue to be the case and also block GNU/Linux on these devices until the manufacturers start to send drivers and patches to Linux mainline before selling their devices. Unfortunately the hardware world moves so fast that the devices will be obsolete before they are supported by Linux mainline.

How exactly would one make money off abandoned android devices? This users would pay?

They seemed to be considering partnering with advertisers to integrate ads into the base OS. Question is, who would voluntarily sign up for such a thing?

This users would pay?

I would. I have a GalaxyTab 10 (the abandoned Google I/O edition) still running Honeycomb that I would happily pay $10 to easily update it to something vaguely more modern. It's been useless for years, not because the hardware is bad, but the software is useless. I still can't figure out how to get something more modern on it. It's been sitting in a drawer (plugged in, oddly) collecting dust forever.

Well that's the problem right there - you'd pay a whole 10$ and from the tone of your post, you consider that generous. The amount of people who even know or care about Android version on their devices, intersected with the amount of people who'd pay reasonable rates, is tiny.

Even worse, you need people who:

* Care about the Android version on their devices

* Would pay reasonable rates

* Stick with an older phone / don't buy Nexuses

What's so special about Nexuses in this regard? I find the duration of support still pitifully short on them even if it's slightly better than what some other phones manage. Whether or not people care about their version, everyone should if only because of security.

It's not as bleak as that. There are a lot of people with manufacturer-abandoned phones that would probably be willing to shell out a modest sum to get less ancient firmware. As with everything, the economics are a question of quantity and effort. A billion Android devices enter the marketplace each year.

I think the real problem is that it is just turning out to be difficult to make a silky smooth upgrade process, the kind that is consumer-friendly enough to create a mass market. It all fundamentally starts with "hack the device" and most people can't. Maybe it's just a really hard problem because it varies from device to device and base OS version to base OS version.

Don't have experience with that specific device, but it looks like an Android 6.0 build is available: http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-tab-10-1/development/...

Why is Honeycomb useless?

You might have specific usage patterns where shows but I would say that there's anything wrong with Honeycomb but, rather, that the major problem is that the hardware itself doesn't really stretch enough to run newer Androids or newer websites/applications. I'd just keep the less resource-hungry Honeycomb installed until the hardware can no longer do modern content.

A big chunk of apps require at least 4.0. Or maybe they don't but if you have an older version you will have to use an older version of the app with less features.

You can always find ways to monetise an operating system. Some possibilities include:

* add products/referral links to os search results (like ubuntu lenses)

* add ads to the base operating system (like kindle's sponsored homescreen)

* sell spots for default search providers (like bing for siri)

And you target old phones by providing them with an upgrade path to cyanogen mod based on a more modern android version. Many devices are technically fully capable of running modern android versions but have been abandoned by their manufacturers.

> You can always find ways to monetise an operating system.

That's news to pretty much every *ix vendor except Apple, Red Hat, and maybe Canonical.

The amount of work you need to bring an Android device to a modern version is very, very big.

Does a new kernel version work? (Android will require it). Will the device drivers work on a new kernel version? Will driver blobs be compatible?

Chipset manufacturers will definitely not send you a new version of a driver if you're not the mobile manufacturer (and sometimes, not even if you are). You're on your own, updating the driver, or writing a shim that acts as a proxy between the driver, kernel, Android, etc. It's just not feasible.

Fully agree with harigov.

It would be recommended to charge for Cyanogenmod instead of giving away the operating system for free.

Further it would be recommended from a revenue point of view to support the Android devices with the biggest user base. Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi. These devices should be super easy to upgrade.

Smartphone market share http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-market-share.jsp

CyanogenMod is open-source, though. They can sell a value-added version with extra apps and stuff, but unless they come up with something really amazing, most people will still just use the free version.

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