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Google Quietly Unveils Android 5.1 Lollipop

Posted by samzenpus on from the latest-and-greatest dept.

An anonymous reader writes Google today announced that Android One, the company's standard for bringing smartphones to the developing world, is coming to Indonesia later this month. This makes Indonesia the fifth country to roll out Android One, in addition to India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Yet the bigger news is that these latest devices are shipping with Android 5.1 Lollipop. Before today, the latest known version of Google's mobile operating system was Android 5.0 Lollipop, which debuted in November 2014.

4 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Yes meanwhile.. by Virtucon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Here in the US with new devices we're still waiting for 5.0. It's still amazes me how slow the carriers and the device manufacturers are to put their bloat shit into a distro, test it and get it released. I'm going to see if CM is now ready and supports the Note 4, screw this lag time.

    --
    Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
    1. Re:Yes meanwhile.. by Thelasko · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I have a Nexus 7 with 5.0 Lollipop. Trust me when I tell you this. YOU DON'T WANT IT! It's plagued with bugs! It's like Windows ME all over again. There's a reason it wasn't rolled out by major manufacturers like Samsung. It never made it through their quality testing.

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      One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
    2. Re:Yes meanwhile.. by DigitAl56K · · Score: 4, Insightful

      On a Nexus 5 here.

      - 5.0 shipping was announced something like a month before I could actually get either an image or an OTA update
      - The Nexus 5 got the 5.0.1 fixes well after other devices like the various Nexus tablets
      - The Nexus 5 still hasn't got the 5.0.2 update despite several other devices having it
      - That's awesome that 5.1 is out! But for nearly all of us who care, it isn't: https://developers.google.com/...

      Basically, Google does an awesome job talking the talk, and a shitty job of meeting the expectations they themselves set amongst their most fervent followers.

    3. Re:Yes meanwhile.. by swillden · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Google has been shoving more and more of the "Android" experience into their apps instead of the OS.

      Yep, and for good reason: Because the apps get updated while the OEMs won't update the base system. By moving functionality into the Play services app, Google makes it updatable, reducing fragmentation and enabling security patch distribution. In 5.0, for example, the WebView component was moved out of the system and into the Google apps. This is the component that is riddled with security holes in 4.3 and earlier devices, but which Google can't update.

      (Disclaimer: I'm an Android engineer at Google, but my posts contain my own opinions only.)

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