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For Android Users, 2012 Is Still the Year of Gingerbread
First time accepted submitter brocket66 writes with this excerpt from BGR: "Three major revisions of Google's Android operating system have launched since the company released Android 2.3 more than 21 months ago in December 2010, but Gingerbread is still the most widely used version of Android by a wide margin. A study conducted early this year by graphic designer Chris Sauve projected that based on Android adoption trends up to that point, Android 2.3 Gingerbread would be the dominant version of Android in 2012 despite the fact that Android 3.0 Honeycomb and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich had already been released. Now, as the fourth quarter of 2012 approaches, data from Google's Android version distribution tracker confirms once again that those projections were accurate."
Speak for yourself. I like a having a hackable smartphone or tablet that lives outside the Apple walled garden. I do not like that developers are being forced to code to an API that Google froze as obsolete almost two years ago. Nor do I like the fact that a few braver developers are writing cool apps for the current API, but IU can't run them because phones I can afford are stuck on Gingerbread.
Android phone sales may be fine now, but technology is a grow-or-die marketplace. No matter how well it's doing now, Android doesn't have a future if it's stuck like this.
And sadly, I don't think that the platform vendor is keeping up. I've recently started heavily writing my own reusable components, with the idea of spitting out a lot of small easy apps (to try and force myself to think in those terms, since I usually dream up giant multi-month efforts). Some of the things I had to write myself were ridiculously common, yet every damn dev is writing their own.
*Splash screen (and side note: the tutorials I found on the web on how to make one were all horrible, involving spawning threads and making sleep calls).
*Intents to just play full screen video, or audio and matching image.
*An Image widget that can use a resource or a URL as the source.
*A wrapper around their gyroscope and accelerometer to form a compass sensor. Something they used to have (ORIENTATION_SENSOR) then deprecated.
*A single function call method to get a URL as a string (or as an image, etc).
*A view that displays the output of the camera, and manages requesting access to the camera when the activity is paused/unpaused. Really, how the hell did they miss this?
*A JSON parsing library that will take JSON and an object definition and use reflection to turn the JSON into a java object.
Really, most of these are extremely common. Most aren't that hard, only the compass took significant time, and that because I needed to figure out the linear algebra and then clean up the sensor data. But google isn't providing it, and there aren't any good common Android libraries so everyone is rewriting most of these. And sure, some of these have limited use, but there's still ridiculous amounts of time being wasted by rewriting these thousands of times. Give us better tools to get out jobs done quickly, and we might have time to play with more advanced features.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
There's no real problem, this is just clickbait hype. Phones are lasting longer than 2 years, and normal people don't upgrade their OS. That's being spun as an issue.
No, the issue is that the manufacturers and carriers aren't upgrading the software. I bought my phone in January, it was released last October, eleven months ago, and the manufacturer (HTC) says it won't push ICS, and my carrier has been mum. I could install the alpha build of CM9 on it, and give up video recording and get "wonky" camera operation (according to the single dev on the project) - but I like having a camera on my person all the time.
THAT'S the damn problem.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.