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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."
What would using Lollipop do for me that whatever version of Android I'm currently using not? Is there a major benefit?
They haven't pushed the OTA upgrade to my Nexus 5 yet.
Usually jump all over new ROM's, new OS updates, all part of the fun. Though... I'm still not sure about this new Material look to everything. Running on a AMOLED, and rarely go outside, I prefer the black background, holo look. So... the 'xp feel' is spot on, I'm in a good place, everything works, and it looks good.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
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.
I don't think the comparison holds up well, because in the case of XP users had control of the upgrade while in the case of phones it's usually the handset maker and to a lesser extent the carrier in charge. Adoption of Lollipop is mainly a function of how many handset models ship with it installed and how quickly people are upgrading to newer models of phones. Most of the flagship models are shipping with some flavor of 4.2 or 4.4 on them, and enough people seem to have bought those models in the last year that it'll probably be summer at the earliest before we see the next cycle of upgrades start in earnest. The only way we'll see Lollipop uptake pick up faster than that is if Google manages to convince the handset makers to roll 5.0 out to phones like the Galaxy S4. It'd also help if carriers stopped insisting on different "models" where the difference is strictly in branding and the actual phone hardware is identical.
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.
Yeah people! You've had two whole months to be doing that upgrade! What's taking you so long?
Anyone would think people had more important things to be doing than spending Christmas attending to their phone. All those poor androids out there running an OS literally 60 days out of date! It's enough to make you weep. I guess some folk just have no shame.
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
People have to wait for their vendor or carrier to release an update, or use an alternative ROM like Cyanogenmod. In the case of the latter, Cyanogenmod only started releasing official nightlies for a limited range of devices 2 days ago. Prior to that, it has been a case of scouring forums to obtain unofficial releases of alternative ROMs.
Even after the upgrade has been released, people actually need a chance to perform the update. For some people, that may be several months down the road -- e.g. when they know that they'll have a chance to perform the update and get used to the changes. It isn't a matter of being good enough. It is a matter of giving people an opportunity to perform the upgrade.
There is no Lollipop upgrade available for any of my devices yet.
There is... your cellphone company wont let you install it however. That needs to be addressed. Either by Google or Congress.
Part of the problem is that Lollipop offers little new, but does destroy existing functionality. Google Calendar is much less usable than before. Personal and business email is now handled by the same application, making it much more difficult to keep private and business separate. Etc..
In return, we now have fancy animations when you touch the screen, gee, golly, wow. Oh, and existing, well-known icons have been redesigned; just as an example, to go to your home screen you no longer press the house icon, now you press a circle. I'm sure some designer is real proud of that, but they must have forgotten the user-testing.
Lollipop is Google's version of Windows Vista. I'm sure they'll fix it, but in the meantime I wish I could do a rollback to KitKat...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Ironically, Apple fanboys don't have to buy a new device just to get a software upgrade.
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!
Apart from Apple fanboys, I don't think anybody is stupid enough to buy a new device just to get a software upgrade.
Then you are in denial, naive or just plain stupid. I work at a phone company that also happens to sell mobile phones, I assure you, plenty of people say they would buy a new phone just for a new version of the OS.
The real question is WHY SHOULD I UPGRADE to the next version. Apple spews new features all over in press info and even TV commercials. You don't have to go looking for it, they tell you.
Android on the other hand uses silly code names so it takes normal (i.e. non-fanboys) a long time before they even know WTF lollipop is, and the real kicker is ... unless you go digging, no one anywhere has given any reason WHY you would want to bother upgrading. The people rushing to upgrade to lollipop are the same ones that run beta OS releases, and thats why it has an non-existent user base. No one else cares.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I had a perfectly functional Nexus 7 before Lollipop. After the upgrade, which I performed in a trusting manner, the performance is horrible, with apps taking forever to load and some functions just gone forever. This has been by far the biggest disappointment I've had since owning Android devices.
Now I've got to figure out how to root the damn thing and either go back to KitKat or find out if I can run some custom ROM on the thing. And I hate dicking around with that kind of stuff. There was just no need for this update.
Further, the UI is much worse. The three little icons at the bottom are way too tiny for a tablet, the screen you go to in order to kill off apps that are running in the background takes forever to load and instead of a simple swipe, I have to find this little "X" in the upper right corner, like in Windows. I hate it, absolutely.
There is not one thing about Lollipop I have found that I think is an improvement in any way. Maybe it's something under the hood that's keeping me safer, but I doubt it.
Now yesterday, there was another update to Lollipop, which made a tiny improvement in the perceived speed, but it's not even close to enough to make my tablet as nice as it was just a few weeks ago. Thanks for nothing.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"There is no Lollipop upgrade available for any of my devices yet."
There is no Lollipop update for almost all devices!. How the hell should anyone update.
Seriously, do the jack asses that write these articles think that you can just install whatever the heck you want like a PC? I think they have a fundamental misunderstanding of the Android ecosystem.
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.
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Apple is in the same boat, but the new "superflat" UIs that are the current fad are horrible. It's rarely intuitive how anything works or what is or is not an interface element. I get that UI developers think buttons, switches, and sliders are ugly, but if you remove all of them it's really hard to use the device. People still aren't trained to swipe randomly all over the screen to try to figure out what mystery gesture does what, they just think the features are removed. Heaven forbid the UI tell you what gestures are available too, that would be cheating. Phones should be like puzzle boxes apparently.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.