Google Quietly Unveils Android 5.1 Lollipop

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.

Comments

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[swillden]

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.)