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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

Android has been one of the most negative contributors to general computing.

We entered the new millennium with the concept that most computers could use most extension hardware with (relatively) little effort, and you could upgrade your computer's basic operating system at will; even change it to another one entirely.

I'd love to update my still-decent Android phones that have long since stopped receiving security updates, but I can't. This is objectively inferior, a massive regression from general computing.

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> We entered the new millennium with the concept that most computers could use most extension hardware with (relatively) little effort, and you could upgrade your computer's basic operating system at will; even change it to another one entirely.

> I'd love to update my still-decent Android phones that have long since stopped receiving security updates, but I can't. This is objectively inferior, a massive regression from general computing.

this is one of the smelliest BS i've read on hn in the last year or two. phones before android were not upgradable AT ALL. if you were lucky, you could put a bigger memory card, and that was it.

nowadays you can access most of the sources of the os for your average android smartphone, you can rebuild the os and reflash it yourself. doing such thigs was a basically just wet dream in early 2000s.

> phones before android were not upgradable AT ALL.

They weren't general computing devices. They were for making phone calls, sending SMS messages, and tracking contacts. The security risk profile did not include access to social media accounts and/or online banking.

For many folks, and a growing many folks, their phones are now their primary computing devices. For many folks, their primary computing devices no longer receive security updates.

> you can rebuild the os and reflash it yourself.

Tell me how I do that if I cannot root the phone.

You don't need root access to an OS to replace that OS with something else.

What you need is a bootloader that is not locked so you can boot a different OS instead.

In my experience most major Android vendors do support bootloader unlocking.

You also need drivers, otherwise all you can really do is change the launcher and remove some of the malware.

He did not say that phones were upgradable; he mentioned 'computing devices'. Calling another comment dumb does not help your argument.

Please tell me an android phone that upon flashing will not null out the proprietary camera firmware and other things? I want a truly open OS but android just hides behind AOSP being open and it can only exist on certain phones with quite some negatives.

If you show me such a device, I would instantly ditch my iphone, pretty much the only reason I have one is the great hardware and the lack of google supervision. I even bought a pinephone, but it needs a lot of work (and a new hardware iteration) before it can become truly usable.

Err... The Nokia N series received frequent updates before Android ever came along. Blackberry constantly updated its OS.

Sure, some carriers restricted updates - but that's still a problem Android faces.

The Nokia N900 got its last official update in November 2010, if I recall correctly. It had only been launched a year and a half before. Yes, there was then a community effort to improve some of the userspace, but the device was eternally stuck on a 2.6 kernel due to blobs. I loved my N900, but let's not pretend Nokia made their hardware future-proof.

PostmarketOS still runs on it.

All the more reason to choose an unlocked phone over a carrier locked device.

An unlocked phone is as locked as a non-unlocked one if it depends on proprietary drivers of blobs.

Another one living under a rock before iPhone make it into the world.

Apparently I dreamed of doing Series 30, Series 40, Symbian and Windows CE updates.

And who enabled that? Not everyone wants to admit it, but it was IBM together with Microsoft which made this possible. This openness was thanks to a proprietary vendor wanting to make one operating system that ran on a wide variety of hardware.

The chaos of the embedded world is Linux's doing.

IBM was as surprised by the "open platform" IBM PC as everybody else. They tried to fix that mistake with PS/2, but it was too late.

https://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-1/

https://www.filfre.net/2016/08/ibms-new-flavor/

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