Android updates are getting slower and slower, despite Google's best efforts
unlikekinds.com
unlikekinds.com
For example, I have to update my entire iPhone OS to get an updated web browser or photo library or keyboard. Google can update all of those every day without a reboot.
As an iOS developer I can't use new OS features until all my users have upgraded. As long as what I need is in the support library I can adopt the latest and greatest for Android right away.
I just wanted to point out that there are some good things about a more decoupled model too.
It seems Microsoft needs some help in this department as well https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/4500988/windows-upd...
On a more serious note, Microsoft is (was?) famous for its QA processes. They have (had?) huge computer farms, tens of thousands of machine to be able to QA with every strange configuration out there. Windows, despite the hate it gets, is one of the most QAd pieces of software out there.
And considering the shoddy architecture it has to support for backwards compatibility (CP/M, MS-DOS, Win32), it works amazingly well.
You're right about platform features used within apps, many (most? all?) are made available to developers with the support libraries.
However, users will get none of the following until they get Pie (for example)
* ML adaptive battery
* App actions (ML predictive app shortcuts)
* Digital well-being dashboard and limits
* A lot more, as shown on this page (there's a lot of smaller items in the collapsible categories at the bottom): https://www.android.com/versions/pie-9-0/
Each update has a heap of interface improvements, and users miss out on these
>
> * App actions (ML predictive app shortcuts)
>
> * Digital well-being dashboard and limits
These sounds like gimmicks to me (ML buzzwords). I'd welcome an update that would sort alphabetically the apps I want to share content with for instance. No AI needed for that.
I have no opinion on App Actions/Digital Web-Being.
These days, I'm beginning to wonder if it's even possible for a company to alphabetize without ML.
I don't know. Wouldn't be easier to simply close the app when a user closes it ?
A frequent usage pattern, also, is quickly switching between several apps. There's no definite “close” on mobiles apart from force-quits, which are unhappy for all apps, too.
Thanks for the explanation, I didn't know starting from scratch was so expensive. I had always wondered (and fumed) about that but it makes more sense now.
The state is lost and, for most apps, background processes are killed.
Whenever a for-profit company introduces a new feature, one must ask himself, what is the business case for it.
Personally, I see this feature as a way for Google to legally track which apps people use, and how often. Essentially, it does for Google what Onavo VPN did for Facebook.
From the data collection point of view, whoever came up with this idea at Google must have been worth a promotion. Especially, after GDPR came into force.
This specific change is pretty much just a good thing, unless you want to get meta-cynical.
Is my Android data usage by app stored somewhere online by default? I thought the stats are only kept locally at the OS level, and are not connected to my Google Account.
In any case, "Digital well-being" seems to be about tracking screen time, not data usage. And as far as I understand, it sends that data back to Google.
But as far as I am aware, Google Play doesn't collect data about the actual usage of each app in terms of screen time.
That's where "Digital well-being" fills the gap for Google.
That sounds like a gimmick.
> App actions (ML predictive app shortcuts)
More stuff I don't want. I don't want "predictive" app shortcuts. I want shorts that I specify. I want to control which shortcuts are shown and in what order. I don't want anyone (developer, carrier, whoever) to see what shortcuts I've selected, used, or how often.
> Digital well-being dashboard and limits
This sounds like stuff that should have been in the first release.
> A lot more
I don't see any improvements here whatsoever. All of this is the wheel which should have been shipped with my phone is being reinvented.
> interface improvements
"Improvements" is a buzzword for "let's change everything and give it a facelift and make all of our users waste time relearning how to use their device". No thanks. Actually, not even thanks. Just no.
Edit: Dear Me: less swearing plzkthx
Which can be a traumatic experience for non-technical people, like my mother or my niece, the end result being them learning to automatically refusing any kind of update, out of fear of change.
I really don't get this unhealthy obsession of the tech industry wit change for change sake, what most people want and need, is stability, so they can take of their lives.
Or a 90s Nokia?
I don't know about the rate and speed of support library from the Top 5 Android manufacturers, which is Samsung, Huawei, BBKs, Xiaomi. I know they do get some regular update, but on all devices? And do those user actually update it?
iOS Users Update are on a much faster cycle. iOS 12 is on 70% of compatible iOS devices within 3 months of release. iOS 11+ on 95% of all compatible iOS devices. That is pretty damn crazy if you ask me Having OS that is only 2 years old on nearly all devices.
The iPad is in perfect condition with no hardware issues. It's the software that will make it an ewaste soon.
My Android phone updates all the apps (even many OS services) without any problem.
If you haven’t downloaded it before, you can download it with an older version of iTunes or a newer device if you have one and then it will let you download on your old device.
Nougat: Slightly better battery with doze mode; Built-in Night Light so I no longer need cf.lumen or Twilight
Oreo: A better AutoFill API for my password manager
Pie: Adaptive battery? I lost the ability to record calls when my phone got the Pie update, so I wouldn't really consider that a feature.
So basically, other than having to use a third-party screen temperature app and needing to manually copy-paste passwords, there wasn't much meaningful difference in the experience between my Nexus 7 running Marshmallow and my S8+ phone with the Pie update.
Though they did generally manage to entirely screw up do-not-disturb and notification settings in a gross attempt at simplification...
The heartbleed bug remaining unpatched for so long really did it for me.
Reading this on a Nexus 5, running marshmallow. I stopped upgrading when I stopped seeing a reason to, now I just get the old models on the cheap and only occasionally wonder if I'm missing out.
In those moments I'll remember your comment, stop wondering, and continue treating my phone like the sub-$200 commodity that it is. Thanks.
Where you write "stopped upgrading", do you mean hardware only -- allowing Google system plus apps to push all software updates?
How do you assure yourself that your Nexus 5 has gotten adequate security fixes?
iPhones have better longevity, hence their higher resale value.
Is this applicable to all Pie phones or just your particular one? I wonder why did they do it.
I still use Android because I need the control. But parts of the platform are just inexcusable (imo) in 2019.
Dont get me wrong, Apple has their own problems as well. But Fps drops aren't one of them (at least on my iPad)
If only apple let me actually have a non-terrible home screen...
I switched back to iOS when the SE came out, but I still miss Nova Launcher. Especially being able to put two actions on each dock icon, one for tap and one for swipe up. So if you have something like friends split over two main chat platforms you can stuff Discord and SMS apps in the same icon and have them both quickly accessible.
iOS lets you delete most 1st party apps: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208094
Almost all apps can be deleted now days on iOS, including most of Apple’s stock apps. The only exceptions are a few core system apps, like Settings and App Store.
Accessibility still matters even if you aren't blind, and apps for blind users can still be malicious.
Android has been steadily removing user control features to be more locked down like iOS but without privacy controls.
A real address book app could still harvest your contact data and sell it for marketing purposes, but if google cracks down and says “Hey flashlight apps, you aren’t allowed to scrape Contacts information anymore” that would be entirely reasonable.
Abuse of android’s accessibility services is particularly dangerous, hence the push for tighter controls on who can use it.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-android-banking-malware-s...
I also find Android notifications and the Google keyboard way more ergonomic than on iOS and third party keyboard support on iOS is still pretty buggy.
But the real kicker is being able to side load apps when necessary. I didn't like the idea of giving Apple complete control over what I can run on my phone when they first announced the App Store and I still don't like it and consider it a serious threat to the future of general purpose computing.
I can connect to my ps4 controller through Bluetooth
Tasker
I can inject a payload into my switch over usb-c
I can literally run Linux (and do all the time) using a 20 dollar hdmi adapter
https://www.reddit.com/r/tasker/comments/al2gd4/android_9_in...
What advancements? Both iOS and Android have for a few years reached maturity, not much exciting with each new update. At least not without new hardware, as most updates are to support something physical (notch, fingerprints, face scan etc).
I used to hate my phone not being updated, so switched to a brand of Android that kept them up to date. But lately I don't really mind. Only reason I upgraded to Pie this weekend (after being bugged by the updater for months) was because of a few emojis I couldn't see properly when being sent to me. The update hasn't done anything big. Things are a bit rounder, the clock is now in the wrong corner. Some BLE issues as well, making me regret the update.
Security?
Security on even older phones is so good most non-tech oriented people think that phone viruses are a myth
and added Night Light to compensate for breaking Twilight/BlueLight etc.
That's on top of the fact that my carrier refuses to stay on top of updates for my device anyway.
I don't get why the carrier has to be involved at all. It has nothing to do with them at all so why do they even get a say in when a phone gets an update ?
Carriers want (demand, even) that their online portals, customer support apps and (most importantly) ringtone shops be pre-loaded on devices, and have always tied that to critical firmware drops for network defaults, radio compatibility testing, and a lot of other (truly critical) functionality that only actually exists on the device's radio baseband and has zero to do with the handset OS these days.
Source: I was one of the program managers for the flying circus that was Vodafone 360, when we tried to work with Samsung to build a vertically integrated handset like the iPhone. This sank (mercifully) without a trace, and to this day I summarise what happened by explaining that Samsung actually had two engineering v-teams: the Galaxy team and... everyone else.
And we got everyone else. It doesn't excuse a lot of what was decided, but it was instrumental in killing the service.
When we started discussing customisation with Apple, all they ever allowed us to do was add a default bookmark to Safari. Period. Finito.
Looking back, that was the sanest thing any handset manufacturer ever did for the entire industry.
Edit: Name, not logo
This is why Android moved as much as possible to the core Google Play services app instead of the OS.
I had an older HTC phone that was great for dev testing perf on lower end devices. It had a terrible memory leak that caused the phone to run slower overall, and you had to make numerous tweaks to fix it. One of them was to replace the default launcher. It made an immediate difference.
Although I do concede that Google's apps are terrible for lower end devices.
The last samsung phone I bought had 2GB free of 8GB on delivery, almost all of that space being used by their bloat.
Google's own software isn't that heavy in comparison and Android One comes with very little of it, most of which you can still disable.
> The reasons for the slowing updates aren’t clear
IMO it is clear: people often "update" by retiring the old device and buying a new one. The metrics in this article are all from Google -- they show market share of android release (out of android devices).
People are refreshing less often because smartphones released in the last few years are: (1) not terribly different from the ones on the shelf now, (2) more expensive than they've ever been. People are spacing out their upgrade cycle because their current phone is good enough and because phones are more expensive.
Personally, I think it's due to people keeping their phones longer (and, of course, carriers not passing on the major updates).
Why can't the old phones run the new versions of Android? There's been no architecture change has there?
Hypothetically old phones could get updates... but it doesn't work that way, does it?
Let the manufacturers do what they do best (make slick hardware) and let the OS developers do what they do (make slick OSs).
As it stands now, every phone maker has their own flavor of Android, and updates for proprietary stuff doesn't make sense to companies that make money from new phones.
Even OnePlus, which is better than most, tails off after that. They've just released a public beta of Pie for the 3T, which hadn't had security updates for the last four months or so.
The problem is that the entire android user space is built as a single monolithic project that gets forked and closed by the OEM and all of the components have to be updated at once.
IMHO: fuscha will probably make things worse: at least with Linux the code needed to boot the device gets published due to the GPL combined with the monolithic kernel architecture making community projects like cyanogenmod (or whatever it’s called now) possible. I seriously doubt that will be the case with fuscha, it will just get forked and closed like the AOSP components do now (which have the same license.)
iOS gets that in a few hours.
I have a Nokia 8, which isn't a particularly popular handset and I'm thinking of switching to an old Samsung S8 or something - but it's striking to me how badly the experience has declined since 8. The phone was wonderful with 8!
Also it's nice (and not very hard) to install AOSP/LineageOS to get a lighter, faster, smoother, bloat-free, but still feature-rich experience, without all the tracking and shady stuff that OEMs put in.
I used to have an S5 with LineageOS + F-Droid (no Google apps); the phone was faster and the battery lasted longer than my new S9 (from which I have purged all the unnecessary apps I can including Google's stuff).
This seems quite wrong, older Android versions do receive some security maintenance releases from google. It's of course up to the device vendor if a particular model gets it though. This is info is a bit hard to find but it seems like KitKat was supported until October 2017, Lollipop until March 2018 and Marshmallow until August 2018. (taken from wikipedia and here: https://www.quora.com/Will-the-Android-5-Lollipop-still-exis...)
So you could be running a phone with KitKat, which was released in 2013 but still got the last update 1.5 years ago.
At the time of Android 4.4, many people got an Android device for the first time, so adoption was high. At the time of Android 8, the market is already mature and many people still hold to their old Android 6 device.
Better integration with password managers (works great in apps, not so much in Chrome)
S reasonable desktop experience (shout out to Samsung DeX FTW)
Android is an awesome OS, but the app store feels "unregulated" and I feel like I'm not in control who and what copies my data.
There is no real return on investment in fast Android upgrades (which only cost money for them). There are also other risks (things will get slower, things will break).
It's all about the money.
Very happy with my Nexus 5X, and why would I upgrade? The Pixels are just expensive and I don't see any benefit. A shame that I'll be in real trouble if this one ever dies.
I'm also angry at Google for removing functionality. I won't upgrade to Pie because then my call recording app won't work and I make a lot of customer service calls. I could root my phone but this introduces other issues. Google has made people reluctant to update.