Android 4.1 Jelly Bean is now available
developer.android.com
developer.android.com
(edit: In addition, the Nexus 7, running Jelly Bean, while available to purchase today, will itself not be shipping until mid-July. I really don't think it is available yet.)
Does all this finally mean it has actually caught up with iOS in terms of touch-lag? And is this finally admittance that there was a problem all along?
I know some may jump to the defence of Android here, I've seen this argued ad nauseam before, and yes I've tried some Android phones that didn't have noticable lag, but the 'top of the range' Samsung Galaxy II tablet is indisputably laggy when compared to an iPad 2.
If this is finally the fix we've (or maybe just I've) been waiting for then congrats to Android, I'm really glad to see it.
ASUS also makes far less modifications to the OS, too. Their devices are very close to stock Android with just some small additions, some new apps and wallpapers and whatever.
It still irritates me that I bought a Samsung specifically because I heard they were easy to root compared to other vendors, but didn't realise that had changed in recent months -- or that they were laggy. I should've gone for a new-gen ICS device instead; an S3 perhaps.
I'm still enjoying the Note's screen size and the Android app ecosystem, though. There are some great apps out there to play with.
The Android JVM basically means Android needs a faster processor to get the same level of responsiveness. So that's what they're giving it.[1] That's fine, since the benefit of Android is being flexible enough to run on scads of devices. That's emphatically a benefit, not a curse, just like being able to buy all different configurations of PCs is emphatically a benefit.
[1] Reports of A5x being faster than Tegra 3 are overblown.
Edit: That said the difference is so vast, that combined with these announcement details I'm also inclined to believe no to-date Android tab is as smooth as iOS prior to this release, otherwise there would be nothing to improve on and make the above claims about being "Faster, Smoother, More Responsive" which is why I'm excited about this and have high hopes for Jelly Bean.
Yeah, iOS has been smoother for awhile. Android improved a lot in recent generations (to the point where Android was "smooth enough" rather than blatantly irritating), however. I've only used Honeycomb, not ICS, so not sure how much or if that release improved response. Hopefully this "Project Butter" will make them more or less equivalent in smoothness.
"Google: Android 4.1 Jelly Bean coming to Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Nexus S and Motorola Xoom mid-July"
from: http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/27/google-android-4-1-jelly-...
If so, I'm glad to hear that Google is addressing the problem of not having their own devices be up-to-date (which was an embarrassment for some Android updates on previous Nexus devices).
Normally when new versions of frameworks or software that I use come out, I like it. Except Android, because every new version of Android has lots of nice features that I won't be able to use and it is guaranteed to further fragment of the marketplace.
Android is the (old) Internet Explorer of mobile. I've never seen one application skew across versions so hard, or single-handedly fragment the space as much. (BTW kudos to MS for strongly encouraging their IE users upgrade).
What makes this perplexing is that Google has solved this problem with most of their other installed software offerings, Chrome particularly. There's basically only one version of Chrome (v 19 as I write this). Heck, even MS realized their mistake and is making efforts to roll up old IE users into the latest version. And of course Apple has done a fantastic job keeping all of it's users at the same iOS version.
I am well-aware of the OEM madness that drives Android fragmentation, and that you might think it's not "Google's fault" because of this. But I disagree. Google has vast resources and can basically do whatever it wants. If it wanted to require OEMs to build Android-upgradable phones, it could force them to do so. In fact, if they started doing this today you would hear loud cheers from around the world (and bitter complaining from the OEMs, but so what? There's a lot of money to be made and they'll get in line).
The fact that that's not true is precisely why timely upgrades aren't done. Verizon and Motorola sold you that Droid RAZR. They get nothing from spending engineer time to update it.
Also, what is this implication that Google is just being lazy or has some incentive to not have everyone running the latest OS. You really think Google so powerful that they can snap their fingers and make OEMs do what they want? Isn't the very existence (and initial struggle) of the Nexus line evidence against that?
P.S. I think you are a troll, based on this and prior discussions, and this is the last time I'm responding to you. I'd appreciate it if you'd not respond to my posts either. Thank you.
Here's what's going to happen to motorola's profits. I will never buy another phone from them.
If you aren't going to buy a Nexus, you have to accept the fate of sparse official/OTA updates if you're lucky enough to get any at all. This is the fault of carriers and the ignorant masses that prop them up. An alternative exists if you're interested; buy Nexus line.
But most of all, the platform fragmentation, I mean in the sense that even this instant some OEMs are selling Android 2.3 devices is the price for cheap phones being available at all. Sure, Apple does update it's phones (though not really old models so people still have to upgrade), but for a price of iPhone, you easily can get three or four cheap Android devices. This is because they can use old software that has lower hardware requirements and because reusing software has little R&D costs.
In the end, saying "I want no Android fragmentation" is pretty much saying "I want smartphones only for rich people" and I don't think that's worth it. Even if, maybe, in US, people can buy iPhones all the time and it would not be a problem for them, there are other parts of the world too.
And I trust a open-source beta more than I trust most "production grade" proprietary tools.
Apple doesn't have a problem with releasing timely updates. So how come the Android OEMs can't ?
Because Android doesn't have the same ridiculous cult around it that Apple does. The iPhone made enough money to make carriers beg Apple to let them carry their phone -- more often it's the other way around, which is why bloatware and disabled features and all that other stuff infects every non-Apple phone. The demand for iPhone is astronomical, and that is the only reason Apple is in a position to instruct the carrier. If normal OEMs try this, the carrier will simply destock their items, remove the subsidy, and the OEM will never get any meaningful sales.
Sun/Oracle can put out timely JRE/JDK updates for Windows/Linux - why doesn't Apple? Similar situation, and one which I thought was incredibly stupid for Sun to get itself in to years ago. If Java is really that core to your business (changing stock symbol to JAVA even!), don't let a third party control the availability and release schedule of that software for some of your users. Sun did it with Apple/Java, and Google's going it with multiple manufacturers and Android.
Not only will I never buy another Motorola phone, after the experience of release delays by carriers I'll never buy another Android phone.
With Motorola, it's just sad, but after encrypted bootlockers and soldered everything to make their phones unrepairable and unmodifiable, I would say it is to be expected.
What's the incentive to give you a free update a year into your 2-year contract? Nobody else is doing it, so not providing an update isn't going to influence a decision to switch carriers. Providing the update will cost significant money, while doing nothing will cost nothing. Why would creating an update "be more profitable"?
An update would be profitable if they charged for it.
Theoretically, at least.
Whenever any of my friends go shopping for a new Android phone, they immediately try to find the one with the highest specs. OEMs aren't going to waste time releasing an update for a phone that won't make them money anymore, they're going to spend time instead on making better hardware that will make money.
Android phone manufacturers do not care about this. They are not in the business of promoting the operating system or cultivating a developer base. They want to sell hardware. They sell hardware by introducing new models with new features, not porting those same features to older models that have already been sold.
The maximal return under the Android model is to deliberately obsolete your older hardware so people purchase new phones.
Forgive me for asking something that some googling could answer, but... is there a good such device (sans rooting) that has a keyboard?
Sure worked for Apple...
1) a still growing cell phone market 2) a rapidly growing Android market
As long as the market's still growing, and as long as the vast majority of Android users aren't disgruntled about being left behind, their efforts are best spent on building new phones and acquiring new customers.
I'm curious how many people purchasing a new Android or iOS device even know it can be upgraded. Apple has features in iTunes and now in the phones themselves to advertise new versions and strongly encourage users to upgrade. I'd wager most Android users, because their phones never advertise updates to them, are aware it can even be upgraded and, thus, aren't the least bit put off by these vendors apparent negligence.
Until the market stops growing, or until the vast majority of users get angry about being left behind, vendors like Motorola have zero incentive to spend time or capital on maintaining old devices.
You are making a large assumption when you say this. Your assumption is that it won't hurt them in the long run. Maybe that is true, but it's a risky bet to make. I certainly won't buy another android phone. Maybe most normal users will, but I'm skeptical of that.
Here's how normal users will realize they aren't getting updates, because it happens to me often. Somehow they learn about some cool app they want and they go to the Play store to get it. But they can't find it. It doesn't show up on their search! It won't take long for them to figure out that they can't get it because it doesn't work for their old version of android.
This happens to me about once a month.
Yes, but is there anything that enables them to make the cognitive leap from "my phone runs an old version of Android" to "my phone should have been updated to a new version of Android"?
What's to keep them from instead coming to the conclusion of "my phone is old, I should buy a new one"? You assume they understand what "Android" is, who creates Android, who creates their phone, and that the thing running on their phone that's called "Android" can be upgraded but the entity that created their phone prevents that from happening.
Many people are just buying a phone. Heck, many people are just getting a plan which happens to give them a free phone. They don't, and have no desire to, understand the nuances of the phone they just got. It makes calls, browses the internet, and may let them install these "app" things.
And what's to say some of the people who do understand some of these nuances don't erroneously blame Google and Android rather than their phone's manufacturer?
I really do bet most people out there just say "damn, my phone's old" and go try and buy a new phone as soon as they're able. Which is a win for companies like Motorola.
The entire notion of "the long run" has implicit in it various "ceteris paribus" assumptions that are very frequently false.
In particular, the "long run" makes little sense in the context of rapidly changing business and technology fields, and even less sense when it comes to mercurial public opinion.
On the other hand, the one thing that consistently has a good long-run outcome is to make money now, since, "in the long run", not only can accumulated capital stick around, but it will usually even appreciate.
Huh? I've been on custom ROMs for almost 2 years now, but I remember when I was on the stock ROM, I got a nice little notification in the notification bar when an update was available.
My point was more that most phones aren't receiving updates at all. No update means no notification.
But I don't understand about you not having option of buying phone. They won't allow you to use different phone with your sim or anything? You can just drop to a store, buy unlocked Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy S III, Xperia S or something, and use it right?
Nice of you to edit and sneak that in there. All I did was mention how it's in the interest of OEMs to push new devices. You continue to call me names, not reply to what I'm saying and be rude. Apparently you learned nothing from the last time you did this to me. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4158857
Google owns the Android platform, but only a few Android devices. The carriers and device OEMs just want to pump 'n' dump devices. They don't care about the long term health of the Android ecosystem.
This problem isn't quite as severe as its made out to be. Dealing with the diverse hardware ecosystem and implementation bugs are both much larger problems, IMO.
2.x and 4.x are very different beasts.
Microsoft has always been quite good in backporting their developer libraries. So even you did have users on XP you could simply bundle these with your app e.g. .Net, DirectX.
Google may have to look at doing something similar for 2.3 users in particular.
It provides support for features from Android 3.0 (namely fragments) for all versions down to 1.6. IMO it's essential for Android development.
We develop windows applications and have to support XP and up. We certainly notice fragmentation "in the developer sense".
To give some examples, we can't use true filesystem transactions[1] or the ribbon UI[2]. These aren't available as "backported developer libraries". Sometimes we run into bugs[3] which were never fixed in earlier versions.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_NTFS
[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd37...
[3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/617253/is-anyone-successf...
Backported to XP APIs have always been limited and just building software for XP is becoming increasingly difficult (probably as it should be, but the reality is that there are a lot of XP machines still out there), whereas building for both Android 2.3 and 3.0 is laughably simple. You lose out on some APIs, but most of the best stuff is in the support libraries. The "fragmentation" for OS updates (IMO) is really only a serious negative for the end user not getting new stuff, bug fixes, and security updates, not a real negative for developers (yet).
The bigger fragmentation problem for developers is different hardware and different drivers, but OS updates would not generally help with that since the vendors are probably worse with fixing driver bugs than they are with updating their phones (and that "fragmentation" is rather overblown, in any case).
I understand why they had to showcase Android 4.1 now - to release with their brand new tablet. And Android 5.0 will be released this fall. But next year they really should just release Android 6.0 at I/O (their biggest and most professional event), and be done with it. Then Android 7.0 at I/O in 2014 and so on.
http://opensignalmaps.com/reports/fragmentation.php
It claims 2.3 and 2.4 make up for ~75% of the installed base, and the remaining 25% is just a mess.
According to that chart, about 84% of devices that have accessed Google Play are on Froyo or Gingerbread, and another 7% are on ICS.
Pretty much all of the phone market is concentrated in Gingerbread and Froyo. I think fewer than 10 types of phone are on ICS.
However, compared to hardware variations and manufacturer/carrier modifications, API level is a piece of cake to handle.
Disingenuous. 65% of that 72% is 2.3. And now, yet another major version has been released.
1. They are guaranteed to run the latest version of Android for 5 years.
2. They are guaranteed to have a clean version of Android, without any carrier or device maker modifications.
No doubt the marketing people can come up with other things to add to the list, but that's the gist of it.
If such a certification existed, personally I would only shop among those options.
Such a certification would require that Google have some sort of compatibility criteria, and that their future development efforts run well within those criteria. So it constrains Google just as much as the OEMs. The certification should be cheap, but not free. And I picked the name for Sergey's buy-in.
The nice thing about this (voluntary) certification program is that OEMs don't have to participate. And in fact could have certified and uncertified devices. The program captures the essential qualities that made the iPhone successful, in my opinion. The App Store is a big part of their success, and developing for the iPhone is far more pleasant because of the stability of the platform.
EDIT: Okay, if it was 3 years I'd still be happy.
> They are guaranteed to run the latest version of Android for 5 years.
5 years is too long. The HTC Dream, the first Android phone, was released less than 4 years ago. It only has a 528Mhz processor and 192MB of RAM. I don't want to know what the ICS or JB experience would be on that device...
Keep in mind the iPhone only turned 5 this year (the App Store turns 4 in a couple weeks). And the last version that supported it (with limited features) was released 3 years afterwards.
I think 3 years is more reasonable. Most people are eligible for a discounted phone upgrade every 2 years. I think that would fit in for most folks.
Or to put it another way you should expect to receive software updates for the phone for the duration that you are still under contract.
Back in 2008, we could easily see that the 500mhz single core ARM chip was going to be short lived. We had tremendous strides in performance available to us in just upping core clocks, and then we had the mobile multicore revolution.
We are done with both the main vein and the secondary digs of the mobile CPU goldmine (in reference to Herb here) and we are already pretty deep into heterogeneous computing. Remote processing is next, when the telecom monopoly is torn down so we can get the data speeds we are actually capable of today without paying monopoly rates.
The hardware WILL get significantly better between 2014 and 2019 - a 2019 smartphone will almost assuredly be as powerful as the 2014 consoles that will be coming out for gaming - but we can actually predict that. A 2014 console will have approximately a GCN 7850 graphics card and quad core 3.5 ghz cpu of some sort. So expect the mobile chip of 2019 to operate at ~4ghz with some number of cores and a lot of compute nodes approximately equivalent to modern mainstream desktop graphics at similar wattages to what we have now.
If the version of Android in 2019 can't run on an Android device of 2014, then that isn't the hardware not keeping up with software - that is just terrible design. Just like how desktop hardware peaked in 2006, mobile hardware will peak soon as well, after which performance is "good enough" for average joe consumer, and the UX won't change.
Another good example is how Google can keep pumping out new versions of Chrome without hesitation that the last version's user can run the new version. The browser is not getting exponentially more power or resource hungry, and in many ways they optimize its performance as much as they sacrifice it each release for better experience (of course things like webgl are pressuring browsers upwards with new usage in an environment without resource contraints) but the basic device, or in this case application, is not growing more and more computationally intensive by large jumps each release, or they would not be able to push out silent updates like they do.
Same thing with Android. Once it plateaus, there is no excuse not to use the silent continuous always backwards compatble update model, because the device is now "good enough". Just like how a dual core 3ghz pc from 2005 with 4gb of ram is still good enough today for 95% of use cases.
While this might not seems like much, waiting for something one minute instead of five makes a difference, and 2006 computer won't play FullHD video, and you'll feel the difference on js heavy web pages.
Other than that, it's a great idea.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Android_devices
This is how it has panned out so far: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2397729,00.asp
tl;dr: As of December 2011, only Sony had lived up to its pledge. HTC came close.
I think it's worth trying again, perhaps under a new moniker, and with some changes. One big change is option #2 - no device or carrier modifications. That means that the onus really isn't on the manufacturer to support an upgrade, other than getting the initial certification. After that step is taken, they have Google's assurance that future updates will run on the device.
Another potential change would be for Google to spend some marketing dollars on the initiative.
Finally, Google could make certification a required part of the Android licensing process. It becomes a non-voluntary program. The drawback to this, of course, is that it raises the bar on all Android phones, probably reducing the cheapest options to close to zero. (Although, who knows? I'm not a marketer or analyzer of markets. I truly have no idea what this change would do to the Android landscape, and I'm sure there are people with comfy 6-figure salaries at Google and the OEMs that can answer this question with more confidence, if not more certainty.)
I don't have the technical details of the updates, and I doubt anyone will for a short while.
MediaPlayer supports chaining audio streams together to play audio files without pauses. This is useful for apps that require seamless transitions between audio files such as music players to play albums with continuous tracks or games.
Best feature by far!
If Google can't get its act together on the update situation, a lot of people, myself included, will not be buying Android phones the next time our contracts are up.
So what you are actually asking for is for tremendous engineering resources to be spent to port the bleeding edge OS to your soon to be obsolete phone so that you can use it for a few months and then toss it in the bin.
Now I'm not necessarily arguing that there isn't an issue with upgrade on Android phones etc. But I find this particular tone of "I will be stuck forever with an outdated OS thanks to Google" that appears regularly in these comments to be somewhat disingenuous.
PS: Jelly Bean was not released last year, it was announced literally just hours ago.
But my point stands. Most people buy new phones on a 2 year cycle when their contract expires. I buy phones on a 2-year cycle.
I am not expecting tremendous engineering resources to be spent on porting on bleeding edge OS to an obsolete phone. I am expecting some resources to be spent on porting my phone to an OS that was announced and available to OEMs when my phone was released. I am expecting an OS to be released on a phone which has the hardware to support it.
I am stuck with an outdated OS thanks to Google, becaues they won't do a damn thing to pressure carriers or manufacturers to remedy the update situation.
And you know what? The money I use to buy my phone is my money. When the time comes to vote with my wallet, if Google has not fixed the update situation it created, I will vote for something other than Android.
Better yet, consider switching to prepaid, and you will be less annoyed every time your carrier withholds the update. Most of the international versions do get updated, even if their record is not as stellar as Google/Apple.
Why didn't you just buy a phone which already had the latest OS on it at the time if having the latest OS is important to you? Are there no custom ROMS for the phone you have?
2) I connect to a corporate server. I cannot use a custom ROM for security reasons.