Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.