Slashdot Mirror
Is Kitkat Killing Lollipop Uptake?
BarbaraHudson writes Remember how Windows XP was "good enough" that people took forever to upgrade? The same might be happening with Kitkat vs Lollipop. "According to Google's latest Google Play Store results for early January 2015, less than 0.1 percent of all Android devices were using Lollipop. By comparison, the last major Android release 4.4, KitKat, reached 1.1 percent of its audience in its first month out. In January 2015, almost two months in for Lollipop, KitKat is still number one with 39.1 percent of the market. It's followed by the various Jelly Bean versions, 4.1.x with 19.2 percent; 4.2.x with 20.3 percent, and 4.3 with 6.5 percent. Trailing them is Ice Cream Sandwich, 4.03-04 with 7.8 percent, followed by antique Froyo, 2.2, with 0.4 percent."
Yeah that is going to work well for people who don't replace their devices every six months.
... whatever
Or maybe the phone manufacturers are being dog slow at rolling out Lollipop upgrades for their recent phones. We don't all have a Nexus.
------- Mark
Remember how Windows XP was "good enough" that people took forever to upgrade?
No, but I do remember that Vista was found to be so wanting that many people went back to XP, and those that had waited heard the horror stories and stayed put.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Kitkat is killing Lollipop uptake the same way cars are killing rocket-car uptake.
There is no Lollipop upgrade available for any of my devices yet.
Apart from Apple fanboys, I don't think anybody is stupid enough to buy a new device just to get a software upgrade.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Of course! Look at the bottom of the screenshot. Does the circle take you to the home screen? Or the square? Better try both and see!
Doesn't it include performance and power management improvements? That's useful on its own. Having said that, most people are probably limited by the vendor-provided update offers anyway.
Ezekiel 23:20
Didn't they make the same claim in the past only to leave customers with certain phones behind? Why believe them this time?
MS can say all they want but their past behavior tells us their mobile OS updates are slow to come and they are still playing catch up on features.
It would probably be more realistic if vendors and carriers guaranteed all OS updates the first year after a phone is released and after that just security updates until the phone is no longer sold.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
The easiest way to guarantee that is NOT to provide any updates after launch and instead of "upgrades" start completly new lines of mobile OS. Remember? Windows CE, Windows Phone, Windows Mobile.... I have a GPS with CE lying in a drawer somewhere. It STILL has the most recent version of WinCE.
bickerdyke
One man's fragmetation is another man's product differentiation/branding
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
I switched to WP and hated it..
The apps either didn't exist or were featureless, including Microsoft's own ones. Needless to say, I was happy to go back to Android
I went Android with my first smartphone in 2012 (McClane: "Welcome to the party pal!") and I never looked back. But as my family joined me on my plan, including my parents for a total of 6 phones, two wound up being Nokia 521s. One was my son's. He's a self-taught tablet jailbreaker and he only grabbed WP cos it was on sale and his hand-me-down starter Android phone was a pig of a thing. He liked WP well enough but, like others have mentioned, bemoaned the poor app support and went back to Android once he saved up enough for a proper device.
The other Lumia WP went to my Dad, later to the smartphone party than I was. As an intro phone, for a non-geek, it was perfect. It did everything he needed it to (GPS, news, basic camera) and the Tiles interface was easy enough for him to understand and customize to his liking. Ultimately though, he and my mom grabbed a pair of LG Optimus L90s for $100 each out the door and both are very pleased.
Apple and Windows never appealed to me personally because of their locked-down nature and my need to customize my UI to within an inch of its life. But I respect what both competitors have done with their OSes.
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
I'd agree with your second point, but not the first. I really like Windows Phone's UI and structure, but it lacks several important bits of core functionality and (more importantly) lacks third-party apps to fill in the gaps. If Microsoft had managed to get developer mindshare earlier (not helped by breaking all existing Windows mobile apps), they'd be in a much better position.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's pretty much how I fixed Android to make it usable, but in my personal opinion Android shouldn't be broken in the first place. Why is "rooting" a device even a concept? Shouldn't it be sold that way in the first place? Why are we having to jump through hoops and put up with shenanigans?
If Google is truly worried about n00bs doing something by mistake then all they have to do is make it a multi-step process with several warnings to enable root using a default-included tool. They don't do that, which means that isn't Google's true worry.
I've observed the following on my wife's Windows phone:
- The Line app doesn't do emote pop-ups like it does on my Android phone. If you want to use emotes, you have to look them up manually
- Her phone lacks turn-by-turn navigation, and won't narrate directions. It's useless as a car navigation device for those reasons.
- As far as I'm aware, Tubecast is the only Windows app that'll stream to Chromecast, and I think it's Youtube-only
- Daily reminders to reboot the phone, with the statement that they don't recommend continuing to operate the phone without restarts
- All the games advertised on TV: No Windows Phone version.
- No emulators
- No on-device scripting environments
- No on-device command-line
- I like having my ssh +ftp clients+servers available on my phone, because they're easier than connecting a cable
- No Dropbox app
I am overjoyed that you don't care about any of the things I've listed...but I do. Most of the items aren't critical requirements on their own, but the combination of all of them together means that using a Windows Phone would be a serious reduction in what my phone could do, for me.
My certainty is that the Windows app store lacks most of the software that I want.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.