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Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

I was amused to notice last week that Android 8 - which has been "available" (for not very large values of "available") since Aug 21, is showing less than 0.1% market share (on the Android dev dashboard), while iOS 11 which doesn't come out for another few days was already showing 0.2% of all iOS devices already...

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I'd love to run the latest Android, but my two year old phone can't run it. In fact, I'm stuck on 6.0. My iPad II (the second one) runs iOS9. Still runs fine for youtube, which is it's primary purpose.

When I finally retired my iPhone 4S after years, it could still run the latest iOS.

And more importantly than just features, the high rate of latest-OS-adoption on iOS means security updates get out fast.

This has a side effect of "herd immunity" in that iOS is a less-desireable platform to develop exploits for than Android, since the shelf life is much better for an android exploit.

I'd love to see google innovate here, for now it seems like they're not even trying to match Apple when it comes to this metric.

Have you not heard about Project Treble and the HAL separation efforts going on? Google is indeed trying to innovate here. With Android 8 at least, the situation should improve - it might take some additional enforcement through Play agreements and such to really get it locked down though.

The OEMs are still the ones expected to push updates....

For now, yes, but it opens up the possibility of changing that down the line or for users to manually perform those updates.

As we say in Portugal, better wait seated.

It's primarily the chipset vendor (i.e. Qualcomm, Nvidia, etc.) at fault for lack of updates, not the OEMs. Treble removes one more excuse for OEMs to hide behind. (Not to mention the infrastructure is now in place for Google to push device-agnostic system images directly.)

I don't belive it will change anything, unless Google actually forces them.

My brand new 2017 LG stuck on Android 6.0 kind of proves the point.

That won’t help with many kernel related issues or issues in the HAL drivers themselves, only userland.

Speaking of being amused, when I upgraded my devices to iOS 11 I noticed a lot of apps wouldn't work or install until the developer updated their app to iOS 11. I've never had this type of problem on an Android device.

This is possibly because iOS 11 completes the transition to 64-bit[1]. If they apps haven't seen updates in a while, they may still be 32-bit only, meaning they cannot run on iOS 11. We have a handful of apps in this position right now, but clients are reluctant to pay to have them updated.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2017/06/06/ios-11-32-bit-mac-app-store-6...

I've been hearing a lot about people not wanting to upgrade. My question is, putting aside the overhead of submitting to the App Store, writing release notes, etc. I thought that the only step that would actually be involved would be to recompile the app? Unless you have something like hand rolled modules of Assembly or inline functions, would it really be that difficult?

Fetching the project from archives (most of the time, just a git clone, but you have to find it), re-familiarizing with the project build process (do I need to fetch some assets that are not in git?), Xcode updating the project and breaking everything, having a gazillion of deprecated warning, code signing certificate have to be re-issued, the SDK you had is not available anymore so you have to update the APIs...

It can quickly take a day, a week... depending on the App.

Yeah, 3rd party SDKs are a problem for us. We've got a project waiting to go live, but one vendor won't give us an iOS11 "certified" SDK until 2 weeks after iOS11 ships... (And yeah, their current SDK crashes in iOS11... It's almost like they don't even know you can get access to iOS betas...)

For apps that are still 32-bit only, they have to be several years old. I believe the first version to support 64 bit was iOS 7 and at that point, I think Xcode would compile with universal support by default. Most of our affected apps were built for iOS 6 (or lower) and the clients have not wanted to pay to keep them up to date. As a result, an update at this point requires quite a bit of work because of deprecated and removed APIs preventing us from recompiling. Then you have the issue of third-party libraries that may not support 32 bit, so you have to go find updated version (if they exist. If they don't, you have to completely remove it and find a replacement)

You are correct, though, that in the best case, it is just a recompile.

32-bit app support has been removed. I'm guessing this will allow them to remove 32-bit support from future processors. It might already be gone in the A11 chip.

High Sierra will be the last version of macOS to support 32-bit apps, so this same transition will happen next year on the desktop.

More importantly, it means you don't need to ship 32-bit copies of system frameworks, and those 32-bit versions don't take up RAM just because 1 app needs to load them into the cache.

The reason is a staged rollout, they seem to start slow (probably to catch early issues then ramp up).

I was only offered the 8.0 on my Nexus 5X last Thursday. Whilst the release might have been a month earlier I think the gradual rollout is to help frontline help desks and App developers.

No it isn't. The reason is very few people have Nexus/Pixel phones and they're pretty much the only ones that can get 8.0.

7.1 is only installed on 1.6% of phones and that has been 'available' for nearly a year!!

For context, I have Samsung tablet at home, that is still being currently sold by the company as new. It is stuck on 4.4.4. They have "no plans" to issue an update, according to support.

Sure, Google run staggered rollouts for the Nexus/Pixel line, but all the other OEMs (Samsung, OnePlus, etc) take months to release their customized OS versions, if they ever do.

In addition, Android devices often have very short OS update support lifecycles (2 years seems to be common), while iOS 11 looks to be supporting as far back as the iPhone 5S (2013)

Why do they do staged rollouts instead of just releasing the OS for all ala iOS?

iOS rollouts are staged.

If by staged you mean that some people download the beta a couple months before the release date then yes. But on the release date iOS is released to all consumers with supported devices.

iOS updates are available for everyone at the same time, but Apple does stagger the update notifications. So users that know an update is available can go to Settings and find it immediately, but notifications go out in stages after the release.

Sure, but for the purposes of this discussion I think it's enough to say that Apple releases it all at once. Apple stages their updates over the course of hours, maybe a few days tops. The Android+Custom Skin sort of staging ends up spacing things out over months.

I never understood why Google's Nexus/Pixel security updates are staggered over weeks, leaving a lot of people vulnerable.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/123401/are-stag...

Stage rollout is usually done over hours and days, not months. Apple also uses staged rollouts but you'll usually get the notification within 12 hours after release.

Not with OS updates. Even Windows can take months to push major updates after availability. This isn't just to take the load off of Google's CDN (they could honestly handle all of the Nexus/Pixel owner's downloading a 1GB update the same day without noticing a blip on resource usage). They want to avoid some device-bricking or otherwise major bugs happening, which is easier with a slowly staged rollout. Impatient users can always install manually with minimal effort.

Part of it is that android is used way more often, on very old hardware that is long discarded by apple users. Part of not (only) catering to the wealthy.

Average device age is more than 3 years. Average!

In my experience iPhone hardware doesn't get discarded but handed down to grandparents, children etc and continues to live a long life.

Do you have a source for your device age numbers or are you just making up stereotypes?

My experience too. I gave my 5s to a friend when I got my 6s, and she was overwhelmed and said it was the nicest phone she'd ever owned. That was 2 years ago and she has no intention of replacing it anytime soon as it still runs fine and will get iOS 11. My iPad 2 is still going strong. I don't have a single iOS device that wasn't used 4+ years by someone close to me, and I started with the 4s.

Yep. Every single iPhone I got continued its life in the possession of someone else.

Meanwhile my Nexus 7 is in a drawer with a cracked screen alongside the remains of the Nexus 4 that stopped retaining the SIM. Then there is a defunct Moto G that I washed.

Either Android gizmo toys are poor quality or a common use case for Android could be to use it until the gadget is dead. Perhaps Apple owners buy more shiny and have more perfectly usable gadgets to give away. Perhaps Apple users are more fashion conscious, wealthier and keener than Android users to have the latest features.

The used car market can be similar.

iPhone screens crack and smash just as much as any phone, if not more. I've cracked one, my wife's done 3. (!)

But you can almost always get them repaired for significantly less than the resale value of the phone, so it's worthwhile to do so.

If you look through the model breakdown about a quarter of those devices are 4 years old or more. Many of those are iPads, so it looks like iPads generally last longer than iPhones, supporting the theory that slowing iPad sales are partly due to long device lifespans.

Actually this may explain why more iPads are on older OS versions that iPhones - more of them are older devices with insufficient RAM to run recent OS versions.

So this data is strong evidence for the opposite of what you're saying. iOS devices have such long lifespans that they actually skew OS version adoption rates. You don't see that clearly for Android because even current devices on the market often come with several years old OS versions so you can't reliably infer released OS version from device recency as you can for iOS.

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