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Comment by chakalakasp | Hacker News Reader

My favorite part of android is how security patches go through a multi-tiered trickle-down system of testing to make sure they work with the dozens of custom flavors each manufacturer has so that by the time you get patched it's been in the wild for weeks or months. Oooh, ooh, no that's not my favorite thing, my favorite thing is how each cellular company gets to put their own bloatware on top of the bloatware that each phone manufacturer gets to add to it. Oh wait, maybe it's patch support ending for new phones 3 years after they were released. There is so much to love about how Android turned out it's hard to pick just one thing.

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> My favorite part of android is how security patches go through a multi-tiered trickle-down system of testing to make sure they work with the dozens of custom flavors each manufacturer has so that by the time you get patched it's been in the wild for weeks or months.

This is not the reason for security patches taking too long to be released to certain phones; Google has a monthly cadence of releasing security patches and zero-days have rarely (I can't remember a case of that happening but maybe it has happened) missed do you have a source for it?

> Oooh, ooh, no that's not my favorite thing, my favorite thing is how each cellular company gets to put their own bloatware on top of the bloatware that each phone manufacturer gets to add to it.

There are unlocked phones available and honestly this problem is mostly a US problem. Rest of the world isn't in the iron fists of their carriers.

> Oh wait, maybe it's patch support ending for new phones 3 years after they were released.

You can vote with your wallet and choose vendors where this is not the case; Google, Samsung and Recently OnePlus offer 5 years of security updates.

> This is not the reason for security patches taking too long to be released to certain phones; Google has a monthly cadence of releasing security patches and zero-days have rarely (I can't remember a case of that happening but maybe it has happened) missed do you have a source for it?

Yet and still Microsoft solved this problem years ago. Why can’t Google? Hell my 2006 Mac Mini got years of Windows 7 updates after installing Windows on it.

This is interesting, they’ll try to tell you it’s because the cellular modem requires extra testing by the carriers and manufacturers, but windows can support upgrades that don’t affect an add-in card cell modem… so what gives?

Yet Apple is able to send updates worldwide without interference from the carriers and without their “testing”

I'm sure they do the same testing but because they control all the hardware and there are so few models to test on, it makes things much easier. I don't think there's anything in particular about Apple's process that would scale better to the number of devices supported by Android.

You think Apple tests their phones with all 120 carriers with every point release?

If they don't; its going to be hell when people can't call 112/911

Yes because I’m sure an update to Safari and messages will cause the dialer not to work without proper testing…

Tbf the pixel phone does have issues making emergency calls, every time they claim to have fixed it we hear another report of an updated phone not being able to connect.

I don't, and that's not what I said. My point was that Apple doesn't have to think about testing vendor-specific bloatware every release across a wide range of very different devices.

> they’ll try to tell you it’s because the cellular modem requires extra testing by the carriers and manufacturers

That's crazy, though. It's not like there isn't a module for that cellular modem, and they don't touch that code for every release.

That's like blocking a Firefox update because the Windows driver for the mouse could be impacted.

>There are unlocked phones available and honestly this problem is mostly a US problem. Rest of the world isn't in the iron fists of their carriers.

In the rest of the world phones are unlocked in terms of being able to use different SIM cards, but mostly the bloatware is still there and can only be disabled (not removed)

I like having a back button.

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