The Chrome beta on ICS is great, but it's only accessible to <4% of all android devices. ICS has been out for months, and the providers are completely dragging their feet on it.
Chrome Beta needs to be backported to at least 2.3
Chrome Beta needs to be backported to at least 2.3
Can anyone explain why this is such a problem? Does Android not have a proper hardware abstraction layer or driver model that would allow OS updates immediately, as long as these layers remained compatible and a build existed for your processor family?
Windows has supported disparate hardware configurations for many, many years. Yet, generally, you can run out and buy the new version and install it. Why can't Android do this (albeit with a version for each processor)?
For example, I worked on an app to be included with the device by the OEM. The OEM had roll a custom OS and kernel to handle their hardware and replace/update the mail and calender app because they are very tied to Google by default. We needed hooks into the the mail and calendar app in ways that are not supported by Google so the OEM also had to add those hooks for us. At this point, we were deep into unsupported territory by Google, but supported by the OEM. These things change unexpectedly with minor OS updates from Google which make them brittle to maintain. An update to a newer OS would be a hell of a lot of work.
All that said, if we could have based off of 3.0 instead of 2.3, many of these issues would not exist because of some abstraction layers added just for this purpose. I expect 4.0 to make that even nicer.
Too bad the providers have to degrade the experience with their crap, instead of just providing additional apps if they feel it's necessary.