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Android Update Alliance Already Struggling
adeelarshad82 writes "Earlier this year many Android phone vendors and U.S. wireless carriers made a long-awaited promise, which was to push timely OS updates to all new Android phones. Seven months in and especially with the release of Google Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), PCMag decided to reach out to all those vendors and wireless carriers to see how things were coming along. Brace yourselves Android fans, you're not going to like the responses."
Why is anyone surprised? A pledge, not backed up by, say, a money-back guarantee, is meaningless. If these people could get a refund for their phones if they weren't updated, the "pledge" would have teeth. This is why nobody trusts companies who pledge not to sue over patents. This is why people didn't trust AT&T about their merger pledges. Pledges are just for PR and they mean nothing.
Android is more like a collection of related but not entirely compatible operating systems. The inability to have a consistent version of the operating system across current smartphones is really surprising for something that's supposed to be an open source project, but one of the big drawbacks of Android is how much control Google gives the carriers over your phone.
It seems to me that phone vendors have not changed their mindset from the pre-smartphone era. Back then, no one cared about OS or version. You got an integrated product and it never changed. Today, it feels like phone makers still think "we put it together and ship it - this idea of later changing or upgrading the software is kind of weird to us."
To them, a phone is complete and unchangeable one it leaves the factory. Alas for their mindset, consumers see phones as customizable, upgradeable devices. If they were $50 each, sure, just replace it, but at $500+ (even if it's stretched over two years), people are making a more significant investment and don't want to be left behind.
Looking for a job in Portland, Oregon?
Irrelevant. The kernel isn't the issue, the applications require a certain level of hardware to work effectively. If that wasn't enough, all these companies are in the business of selling new units, not keeping old tech going on the latest OS and applications.
Apple do the same, they just have a tiny selection of devices and only churn a single model (storage options vary) once a year, or thereabouts. These other companies have a shotgun approach and have to compete on function/price between themselves, not on whether it has a fruit badge on the back. No mobile device company wants their current gen tech to last longer than the next incarnation. Just look the the home PC market to see where that leads. Sooner of later the tech is sufficient for the vast majority of people. We're a way off this with mobile tech, but it can't be far away. Quad core CPUs out in a few months, 1GB RAM in a fucking phone, plenty of storage for most people, screen of all sizes from the tiny iphone's up to near slate sizes. Two years, three? Not long that's for sure.
The solution to that is not "let Google control things instead!" The solution is to start freeing cell phones from restrictions, so that people can upgrade the OS themselves. People should not be forbidden from upgrading their phone's software any more than they should be forced to do so -- just like nobody is forced to upgrade the software on their PC if they do not want to (and plenty of people have reasons for not wanting to upgrade). Instead of talking about how to give Google control over everyone's Android phone, we should be talking about ways to give the users themselves control.
Palm trees and 8
Yes. Thats why Apple release Siri for older phones. Its because they dont want you to buy the latest iProduct.
Oh wait...
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
This has little to do with Google, the exception being for hand sets that Google made themselves. Would you blame MS if HP didn't release Win7 drivers for old printers for example?
which is totally what she said
Only for driver vendors that refuse to cooperate with the kernel community. They want to take advantage of Linux as a platform but not contribute to its success. The Kernel should be forced into a static ABI set for the sake of uncooperative, unhelpful vendors.
Sounds like a pile of shitty hardware vendors and shitty handset vendors. Pointing at the kernel ABIs is incorrect.
Or maybe these hardware vendors could actually start upstreaming their shit. Google too, since their shit infects so many drivers so deeply that many have to be rewritten to be pushed upstream.
Screw their pledge, just let us root our phones easily.
This.
What burns my ass is how phone makers continually work to "secure" the devices they make against not criminals, but the people who actually purchase and own said devices.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The problem is that very few people actually want that software, and the quicker the manufacturers get this through their thick skulls the better. Sadly they've had years to do that already and it looks like its not going to happen.
The solution is to start freeing cell phones from restrictions, so that people can upgrade the OS themselves.
Spot the geek. Suggest a solution that isn't a suitable solution for 99.9% of the population.
A real solution promptly offers to upgrade a phone's software when a new version comes out. Rather like iOS.
> Sounds like a pile of shitty hardware vendors and shitty handset vendors. Pointing at the kernel ABIs is incorrect.
Great strategy. It worked brilliantly as a way to bring open-source winmodem drivers to Linux. Oh, wait... it didn't, did it? We basically had proprietary binary drivers for Lucent winmodems that worked under a few specific distros, and IBM eventually did the same for THEIR audio/modem chipset for Thinkpads.
Yeah, someone finally did develop a true open-source HSP driver for his college thesis a couple of years ago and released it to the community, but for all intents and purposes, there were never open-source Linux winmodem drivers until almost a decade after they ceased to actually *matter* to anybody. It won't do us much good to get true open-source wimax drivers for a phone like the Nexus S 7 years after Sprint has switched to LTE.
This IS the #1 fundamental problem of American Android users, because it's the one problem we can't fix ourselves. Bootloaders get cracked, and just about any phone can be JTAG-reflashed if you're really determined. But without a way to use a radio modem (or camera, or GPS, or ???) .ko compiled for 3.x under a 3.y kernel, we'll be forever running into brick walls every time a new version of Android gets released, and forced to choose between ${new-version} and fast data/gps/camera/etc.
My personal experience: HTC never released any update for my phone, which was running (a very buggy implementation of) Android 1.6. For half a year after the phone was released, they told us users that they were trying to port Eclair to the phone, and then they dropped any effort, saying that the phone hardware couldn't support it - coincidentally, they launched a new equivalent phone model natively running Froyo.
Then I decided to void my warranty and I installed CyanogeMod on my phone: now I'm running the latest version of Gingerbread, and it runs acceptably well, certainly much better than the buggy Donut rom that HTC had originally put on the phone.
A few hackers, in their spare time, with no documentation about the hardware, and without the software keys theoretically required to obtain full access to it, managed to do what the multinational corporation that designed the phone said was impossible to do. To me, this means that manufacturers do not want you to be able to upgrade your phone's software without buying new hardware for them. Hardware fragmentation, kernel drivers, processing power are just excuses they adduce. If Cyanogen can do it, so HTC/Samsung/Motorola could.