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Comment by krschultz | Hacker News Reader

The fact is that Google has fixed the bug. The fix is in Android 4.4. From Google's perspective, the onus is on manufacturers to then ship Android 4.4 to the end users.

In retrospect it was a poor assumption on Google's part to think that these manufacturers were actually going to support their customers. That is why they have spend the last 2+ years re-architecting the system to shove a bunch of functionality into things that Google can update or libraries that developers can incorporate into their apps. I imagine when they started out, they did not intend to have a huge amount of the system in a support library that is packaged inside every single app. I bet they also didn't intend to have the bulk of new features be in the Google Play Services package. Yet here we are, largely because the manufacturers are much like PC makers in that they put their own interests far ahead of the ecosystem interests.

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The problem is that even GOOGLE does not support their customers on the Nexus line. I have, in my drawer, an otherwise perfectly good Galaxy Nexus that is stuck running 4.3 because Google cannot be bothered to update it to 4.4. If Google will not update its own Nexus hardware to 4.4, how can anybody reasonably blame other hardware vendors for behaving the same way?

Wasn't that because Texas Instruments pulled out of the mobile market?

Glass runs the same TI hardware - and also 4.4.

For another anecdote, Galaxy Nexus also supported BT 4.0 BLE with its Broadcom chip, but Google decided it wont enable it for 4.3 release. When I've found that out, it pissed me off immensely, so I found a solution how to enable the support and posted it as a flashable .zip on xda [1]. Same was also for N7 2012 and N10. After flashing BLE worked just fine.

Google doesn't care for its old devices, nor did it cared when it shipped, Nexus line was always awesome hardware, but not fully utilized by software, which is sad from an engineers point.

[1] http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-nexus/development/mod...

That may be the excuse, but it isn't much of a reason. Google's got the clout to get rid of problems like that. They just didn't deem it worth the expense.

Do you have like 0 experience in hardware or just trolling people? If TI refuses to support the hardware, there isn't much you can do. Besides the enormous technical challenge of reverse engineering all of the software, there's likely legal issues as well.

If a hardware vendor pulls support for your product, it's almost always better to end of life the device.

A better argument is that vendors of consumer hardware should require that their partners sign up for long term support agreements where warranted. Let's not pretend that, just because a software company is big, they can force one of the largest chip vendors in the world to bow to their demands.

If you're an end user or a small shop, you SOL when the hardware gets dropped. But a company like Google always has options. It's not like TI went out of business or stopped answering Google's phone calls out of spite. Google can totally afford to buy a source code license for the drivers and firmware, and they would realistically only be taking on a small added QA burden since they know everything works as-is with the old OS version and they know what they changed with their new OS version. If they were really serious about maintaining their product leadership, they could even hire some of the original team that wrote the drivers and firmware.

They answer your phone calls, they just say "it's not a priority for us to fix this right now" and then the negotiations start. Some times, that's where things end, because you just can't meet the demands of the vendor. Happens all the time in hardware for big and small businesses alike.

I don't get your point. Since TI pulled out, Google can't fix a software bugs (in webview for instance) which have nothing to do with hardware ?

[edit] Just saw this comment that make sense : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8943924

I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect Google to update a device to the latest version when the hardware manufacturer has exited the market -- http://www.cnet.com/news/google-to-samsung-galaxy-nexus-owne.... While Google does control Android, that's not the only software that is present on the phone. Short of the Nexus series starting to have open source baseband and radio firmware, we'll be at the mercy of hardware manufacturers.

First, as others point out, there are several devices with either the same (or very similar) versions of the ti omap chipset running 4.4.

Secondly, I purchased a Galaxy Nexus from Google in late April, 2012 with the understanding that it would receive updates for at least 2 years. That is why I was very disappointed when it was not eligible for an update that arrived less than 18 months after I purchased it.

It is truely sad that a perfectly good phone is essentially e-waste, and cannot be used due to this bug.

This myth needs to die.

Google Glass uses a TI OMAP SoC from the same generation (4430). The brand-new Moto 360 uses a TI OMAP SoC from the preceding (!) generation (3630).

Google Glass runs KitKat, the Moto 360 even runs Android Wear 5.

It's not that much of a myth. When Google first announced that the Galaxy Nexus was not getting KitKat, I was pretty disappointed, as I had one too. I looked into why there was no official support, and when I found out it had to do with the firmware, my gut reaction was "WTF, that makes no sense." Digging some more, I found out that it actually has to do with kernel driver-firmware compatibility. Google wanted to ship an update, but they needed changes that TI was no longer willing/capable of making. In order to release KitKat on the Galaxy Nexus would either require Google to reverse engineer the hardware and make their own radio firmware (not likely) or holding back the kernel to the same one on 4.3 (subpar experience if it even works).

Neither the Glass nor Moto 360 suffer from this problem since neither has a cellular radio.

Ah, this is interesting. I had always though that it was something about the graphics system. Forgoing an update due to radio firmware is even more embarrassing. They probably could have done a shim layer, to translate between the old & new APIs.

Even shipping 4.4 with a 4.3 kernel would be far superior to having what is essentially a brick.

My immediate question is whether requiring an upgrade to 4.4 is substantially more difficult for the manufacturers and carriers to make it work with the affected hardware. That seems like a much messier job than just patching WebKit.

Was it poor assumption on my part that what was once opensource in the baseline OS would stay open even after being extracted into "library" apks ?

What I mean here is that Google's move here is far from being only a support matter.

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