I hope they don't do an Android I.e 18 fragmented broken rarely upgraded OS's with horrible carrier customisation.
This is the area that Microsoft with WinPhone 7+ and Apple with iOS have got right.
This is the area that Microsoft with WinPhone 7+ and Apple with iOS have got right.
What I don't get is why they don't allow me to put a vanilla Android on the device. Oh, wait: they want me to buy a new phone when a major Android update comes out. Nope, guys, I'm gonna stick with iPhone or Nexus. Too sad the majority of customers likes to be fooled.
Not really fooled, just ignorant. Google is partially to blame for not marketing and cultivating Android as a brand more and leaving it up to OEMs (who mostly ignore it as a brand to differentiate once again).
I think with Android, carriers are slow to upgrade because each update can create hardware incompatibility. With FF OS, they can hopefully upgrade Gecko (thus exposing new functionality to web apps) without messing with the device drivers etc. For whatever reasons, that doesn't seem possible with Android updates.
They can also upgrade the UI really easily (it's just HTML), but I assume that wouldn't be able to expose new APIS/functionality to apps.
WebOS tried the same thing around 3.xx when they moved the App catalog out of ROM. How will you handle overriding user changes to the apps? Will you overwrite them automatically?
Part of this simply has to do with Android's fledgling early versions and their rapid development. There were a lot of things that required core updates and driver updates that OEMs drug their feet on. Now, that's pretty well smoothed out with 4.0 and 4.x and hasn't been an issue and should be much less of one going forward.
[not true:] The great irony here of course is that Firefox OS uses SurfaceFlinger and relies on the Android stack. They can add new Gecko functionality, but if Android improves the graphics stack again -- guess what? If Firefox OS wants to leverage those (and they should) then they have to make the same core difficult-for-OEMS changes. [/not true]
The analog of "add APIs through Gecko" is "Android Compatibility Library" that adds new functionality to older versions of Android to allow targeting of older devices.
https://github.com/cgjones/mozilla-central/blob/master/widge...
[Edited for tone. Frustration got better of me]
Apart from the Kernel, 7.5 and 8 are pretty much identical and 99.9% of all apps work fine on both. I have both devices sitting in front of me.
The same cannot be said between say Android 2.3 which is still in circulation and 4.whatever-is-current.
Pfft. Says who?
Says Google, with 45% still using 2.3. Also, all my apps outside of ones for root users are still a majority of 2.3 users.
It's just a silly excuse to try to slander Android and I'm tired of people like meaty using "fragmented" to try to make some sort of "point".
I just misinterpreted your context to mean you were calling in question how many users were on which OS. Android fragmentation is much overblown by those that have probably never even tried to build an Android app. Especially if one is targeting 2.3+. I generally target 2.2 and above without any issue.
If I do run into issues, it's really because I'm playing around with things that were never intended to be messed with (reflection or things that require root). Neither of those two examples are fair to blame on Android though.