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That is great for you, but for 99% of the rest of the planet that doesn't give a flying f* about open source or couldn't care less about hacking a phone, the fragmentation of the Android market is only going to piss them off when they eventually encounter the day where their friends can do some cool thing on their Android phones, and they can't. With the iPhone the path of progression from one phone to another is simple and clear. Not the case with Android.

Uh, there are obvious differences between different versions of the iPhone and/or iPod Touch that lead to new version envy. Otherwise why would anyone upgrade?

The thing is though--if you go into a store and by an iPhone, you're guaranteed to have the newest version. If you go and buy an Android phone, you never quite know what you're getting.

They still sell the 3G.

And that's kind of a tautology. You're tied to one manufacturer and one carrier. I can walk into the Verizon store and purchase the most expensive HTC phone and I know that I have the latest HTC on Verizon just like you know you have the latest Apple device on AT&T. A lack of choice doesn't mean you automatically have something better in your hands.

Sorry, I should have been clearer: you can't buy an iPhone that isn't running iOS 4. Yes, it may be older hardware, but you're guaranteed to have the newest version of the software.

Which, ironically, completely crashes my iPhone 3. Thankfully, downgrading is still an option.

Actually, they sell the 3GS which is a year old and is running iOS4. So there is a difference in the way that the two operating systems are being adopted.

Unless you go into the store and buy the $99 old model?

99% of the market for smart phones, before the iPhone were corporate customers. We do care about what our users can install on OUR phones, we also don't want to only be able to install OUR software on OUR phones for OUR users with Steve Job's permission.

Corporate customers can side load apps on iOs now.

Company handsets no longer make up 99% of smartphone, if at all they ever did.

Apple's corporate side-load program requires you to prove that you have 250 employees. Running a local service company with 120 employees? Sorry, you're too small to qualify for side-loading. Build your custom competitive advantage apps and load them into the iTunes store for everyone or go without.

I couldn't believe this when I read your post, but it turns out there is a minimum employee count requirement, and it's now 500 employees.

Just wow.

Now, to be fair, the non-enterprise developer program lets you distribute your app to 100 devices too, but you need to pre-enter those devices's IDs beforehand. There's no way to hit between 100-500 devices.

If you want to install on more than 100 devices, it might be cheap to just buy a second SDK license. But yeah, beyond that its probably less painful to just submit your app to the app store.

Yes, exactly. With Android, they can be upset, do a Google search, and have the same software as their friends. With iOS, they're out $600 for a new phone, sorry.

With all due respect, you're going off another tangent.

Froyo, aka Android 2.2, was released on May 20. It's now July 19th, almost two months later. The fact that only one phone will support an OS for more than two months is a problem.

Froyo was not released on May 20th. It was formally announced at Google I/O at around that time. I don't know the exact release date but a quick Google reveals a staff member denying that it had reached final realease as recently as June 23rd.

Why you (or Mr. Gruber) would consider it a problem that one phone model would receive updates sooner than others is something of a mystery to me, particularly on such a short timescale. It's not even out for the Nexus One in my country yet.

edit: US rollout began 28th June, and phased in with most users getting an update notification within that first week, http://googlenexusoneboard.blogspot.com/2010/06/new-android-...

I hope Google learns from this and doesn't announce future new version until the day they can ship the code. Android bashers have been complaining that 'it's taking months to get 2.2 deployed' which is a complete misrepresentation of the facts.

I wouldn't call it a problem; it's an artifact of a completely different ecosystem. If it wasn't an open platform, and was all built by only one company, it wouldn't have been announced until just before it was shipped.

I'm sure some people are frustrated by it, but following "publish early and often", and all that goes with it, is how open source works.

What's frustrating is that pretty much every Android phone is sold with a "with Google" stamp on the back, and that this basically means fuck all.

It should mean "this is an Android phone that is built with Google's blessing and with Google's support, so lean back and don't worry".

I recently bought an HTC Desire - there's no "with Google" stamp.

I don't think your statement is correct.

Indeed. The "with Google" mark carries meaning; it means you are getting AOSP (the consistent version of Android that is actually usable), instead of the handset's bastardized version of Android. (HTC Nonsense, Moto-durrr, etc.)

Unless you're in the UK where Vodafone have delayed the OTA update so that they can fiddle with it first.

It turns out that the Google mark really is meaningless.

Myself and most of my friends who I recommended the Nexus One to on the basis of first updates and vanilla software, we are now all running CM6.

This isn't quite true. For example, the fairly new HTC Droid Incredible has Sense and the "with Google" stamp. Also the Motorola Droid X.

Maybe it's not the majority of phones then, but my point still stands that the stamp is fairly meaningless.

Do you use Linux? Every Linux distro comes with a Linux kernel. Yet none of the distros are supported by the kernel team. It's a different task. In OSS world there is a concept of upstream, where cool newstuff happens and the package maintainers who pack the released software. The two almost never happen together. If you care to go into business of testing and delivering Android OS for every single phone out there - go ahead. You might even make $$ off of it. But in the mean time the official maintainers are the manufacturers and they are nit going to all agree on when to release the next update - it is a competitive advantage to them to keep the current OS + all the ads and proprietary features running as long as possible.

no, it was announced on 5/20.

From the perspective of one of my parents, neither of whom have probably ever heard of Git, it's not supported by any phone model. This is a serious problem with the ecosystem, and saying that that's how Free Software works isn't going to make it not a problem.

No, it's emphatically not a problem with the ecosystem. Android 2.2 phones are being designed as we speak, and Android 2.1 works perfectly fine for people in the meantime -- it's not like Google had to play catchup with Android 2.2 the way Apple did with iOS 4.

Like you said, typical users such as your parents have no idea what software their phone is running; they just want it to work. Android 2.1 works perfectly well, and the fact that 2.2 has been announced but is not yet commercially available is no hindrance to people who don't care for such matters.

The only people who really seem to be getting up in arms about Android 2.2 not being available right now are the Apple fanatics.

It's a problem in that the old phones should continue to be supported and get the new OS's in a timely fashion. They shouldn't need to worry about which OS is on there, but I think the OS should continue to get better over the life of the phone regardless. I'm not saying it needs to be out there right now, it's more of a question of whether a random model x will ever get it. Some probably won't, even if they can support it, and I would say that's a problem.

Why would you expect that to be the case? Can you install Windows 7 on your 2000-era PC? Can you even install it on your 2005-era PC and expect it to perform well?

Some phones will be updated, and some will not. Some won't get the update because:

1. The hardware is too old/slow/underpowered/too little RAM for the new OS

2. The manufacturer/carrier doesn't give a damn and doesn't feel like pouring money into an old phone when doing so doesn't give them any new revenue.

Either way, your complaint isn't with Android or Google.

Some phones are too slow, but I think the vast majority of android phones in the wild (by number sold) fall under the umbrella of #2 right now, and that's the much bigger issue. It's hard for a consumer to tell whether the phone they're picking up will be supported a year after the fact.

That is a problem with the structure of the Android ecosystem, which by extension is a complaint with Android itself.

I don't agree. How is Google going to require that all manufacturers of Android phones continue to support each model with sometimes-major OS upgrades for X number of years? Why would they even want to?

Apple has, what... 8 devices (4 generations of iPhone, 3 of iPod Touch, and the iPad) out? Hell, at least that many new Android phones have or will come out this year alone!

And even Apple can't keep all their devices up-to-date: people with the iPhone 3G are reporting slowness and instability with iOS 4. I imagine the 1st-gen iPod Touch (and maybe even 2nd-gen) would have trouble as well. And last I read, iOS 4 isn't available yet for the iPad. So Apple's track record is (on the generous side) that 50% of their potentially-capable devices work with iOS 4.

There's an easy way to solve the "what version of Android does this phone I'm considering buying have on it?" problem -- ask a salesperson. If they don't know, ask the manufacturer. Or just google for it. I'm sure someone else has the phone and has noted it somewhere, or some reviewer has gotten a review unit and has noted the version.

And how do you know if it's going to get upgrades? You go by the manufacturer's past record with such things. The interwebs can tell you all this, and more.

I would be pretty annoyed if I couldn't install W7 on the laptop I bought today. Well, actually I wouldn't, I hate Windows 7, but you get my point. We are not dealing with old hardware, we are dealing with problematic manufacturers and carriers.

This is the same problem we had in the past, but it is more of an issue now. This is what Apple freed us from, no matter what carrier it is on in the world, I can upgrade my phone.

Android do a lot of things right, this is not one of them.

> I would be pretty annoyed if I couldn't install W7 on the laptop I bought today.

Huh? We're not talking about the laptop (phone) you bought today. We're talking about the one you bought a year (or more) ago.

And the laptop comparison is limited: new laptops generally have more than enough power to run the current OS and apps. Embedded devices usually have just enough and not much more. People don't like to buy $1000 phones, so we get a single-core 1GHz Snapdragon with 512MB of RAM instead of a dual-core 1GHz Tegra2 with 1GB of RAM.

> This is the same problem we had in the past, but it is more of an issue now. This is what Apple freed us from, no matter what carrier it is on in the world, I can upgrade my phone.

Well, unless you have an iPhone 3G -- reports are that iOS4 is unstable and slow as hell.

And I have a Nexus One, and I can use it on whatever carrier I like, and upgrade it to whatever software I like. Granted, custom Android mods aren't for your average consumer, but I expect (ok, wishfully hope) that to change in the next few years.

In order the remedy this problem, the unlocked multi-carrier phones should be just as available as ISP-neutral PCs. This is clearly not the case, a typical user does not know where or how to buy an unlocked Droid X (and even if they bought it on eBay, it only works on Verizon anyway).

So your comparison is not adequate.

Sure, the laptop comparison falls down in some ways, but I'd argue that your point argues in favor of mine. A phone is much more locked down and difficult to upgrade. Most customers won't upgrade unless it comes in a nice automatic OTA package from the carrier or manufacturer. With PCs you have the option to relatively easily purchase or download a major new OS version and install it yourself. PCs are commodity hardware; phones are not (yet).

The fact that unlocked multi-carrier phones aren't readily available is a problem with how the carriers and wireless service works, and has nothing to do with Android, or iOS, for that matter.

Consumers, rightly or wrongly have been trained to have absolutely zero expectation that their phone OS will be upgradeable. Apple is the one company (outside of Android) doing that at all and I think most consumers are quite surprised when iTunes starts telling them they can upgrade. I don't think this is an issue at all, at least not yet. It will become so as the app market matures and large numbers of consumers find they can't run high profile apps that require newer OS version.

Yeah, that's a decent point. I'm probably tainted by my exposure to the iPhone - it seems reasonable that most people probably don't even know about OS upgradeability. Good point about the app market, that will likely be one of the main areas where it matters. I know my friends who got a G1 felt stung by not being able to upgrade their OS to include new features within a year or so of buying it, though.

I agree up to a point, but on the other hand we've seen a situation where the latest OS release for a particular range of phones does not run well on the oldest model of that phone. Someone made a humorous video recently illustrating the problem.

Some support cutoff point for old models makes sense.

Nah, it's not significantly different that Apple announcing IOS before it's available on a phone. I mean, are your parents waiting excitedly for the features in 2.2?

It's not a problem, it's a trade-off. Given the rapid advancement of Android lately, it can be argued that it's an appropriate one. Pick your poison, eh?

So the options are either bloatware or git?

How about something that just works?

Why is it that iPhone fanbois have such trouble understanding metaphors? I chose the word bloatware to imply that trusting the provider was not the best option; sure, carrier ROMs might not support Android 2.2, but what's so good about carrier ROMs anyway. I chose the git example as contrast -- it's the opposite of carrier intervention; it's a guy in his house, talking to nobody, making and Android 2.2 build for his own phone.

In the real world, the perfect balance lies somewhere between the two. For every Android phone I have owned, there is always a middle ground. On one side, is the carrier ROM with their ads removed. On the other side, is a community-supported open-source build, like Cyanogen Mod. These are the sort of possibilities alluded to by my posts, without worrying the reader about concrete problems (like how the first is copyright infringement, and the second can be unstable).

Oh well, next time I will just write a computer program to unambiguously represent the set of possible meanings, so nobody will have to do any thinking on their own.

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Why does wanting something to work make you a fan boy/girl? Should someone want something that doesn't work and needs to be fixed manually?