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Comment by drb91 | Hacker News Reader

I really wish they used version numbers rather than names so i can tell there’s a new version of android. I thought this was a just a distro for raspberry pis.

It’s pretty clear in the article though, no sweat :)

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They sort of do, the first letter of the new name is always the next one in the english alphabet. That said, they do have version numbers but almost no marketing uses them with or instead of the codenames.

Kitkat Lolipop Marshmallow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history

The stupid thing is that these code names sometimes span multiple versions of Android and even API levels making it all even more of a clusterfuck of a platform. My suspicion is that they do this to hide all of the fragmentation and pretend that more handsets are up to date than they actually are.

The major "dessert" releases seem to happen about once a year now, with a big marketing push, and often substantial user-visible changes.

API levels change when there are major developer-visible changes. I assume any time there's a backwards incompatible change for app developers, they bump the API version, as is standard for any API.

No conspiracy theory required.

What's the difference between named releases and Apple's semantic versioning? Both create groupings that hide fragmentation.

What fragmentation is being hidden behind Apple's iOS version numbers?

I should have said can hide fragmentation.

Funnily, I've been using Android for years and I never noticed until I thought "Why on earth would they call it Pie?" and it struck me. Guess I'm not as observant as I think.

For app developers, the API level (which is 28 for Android 9.0 / Pie) is significantly more relevant, since it determines API breakages, behaviour changes and backwards compatibility.

There is a version letter, P in this case. The last version being O(reo).

Ahh, this does in fact make sense!

You can even use the Android letter to determine how outdated your Eclipse installation is and vice versa.

I hate this with Ubuntu, too. And then you see that you systems since <crazy name> are supported and you have to google to find out the actual Ubuntu release number and compare it to that of the target system. Annoying!

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