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Comment by NonNefarious | Hacker News Reader

You must be kidding. There's no excuse for Android's incompetent architecture, which orphans millions of devices with every release because it apparently lacks a competent hardware-abstraction layer and driver model.

You can install creaky old Windows on millions of devices with disparate hardware configurations on the day of its release, but Android users must wait weeks, months, or forever for their telcos to dribble out hacked, proprietary versions of Android for every model of device ONE AT A TIME. Seriously, WTF? And this is from the great "open-source" OS that was supposed to free us all from vendor and telco tyranny.

What a fraud.

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Welcome to the wonderful world of ARM and driver blobs. Half of the waiting time is waiting for Qualcomm to release a blob (and that's if they even want to), the other half is including it in your build, and eventually making your fork's changes if you want to do so. For every single SoC in your lineup. Then testing if they can support the new requirements of Android.

Apple would have the same problem if iOS was open source and distributable by anyone, their chips being able to be made by anyone. Once again, Apple has picked the easiest (and least open) path, so, yeah, they can upgrade easily.

Thanks for the info. Why can't the driver be abstracted enough to allow a new OS install as long as the ABI of the driver doesn't change? Major Windows versions installed over the same drivers for years. I've never written a hardware driver, so I'm left to guess or speculate.

That's out of date. They added a very competent HAL and driver model yonks ago:

https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/hal-types

The big lift here was scrapping the Linux driver model which was at the root of most of the pain.

So now everyone can update their phones on the day of a new Android release?

No, because generally very few/no people want to install a totally untested OS onto their phone. But the work needed by phone makers to update to a new Android is drastically reduced, so they can reduce the latency by a lot.

A released OS should not be "totally untested." If it is, that's a whole other problem right there.

Untested on that device.

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