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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.
I have no problems at all with Lollipop on my Moto G
Here in the US with new devices we're still waiting for 5.0.
Then why do people keep purchasing Android devices from manufacturers that don't provide updates? Buy a Nexus device. It's not perfect but you'll get updates for around 2 years at least, and you'll have the cleanest, most stable, least bloated Android experience.
Google is about the software, so it behooves them to keep their devices running the latest. Manufacturers are about the hardware. Once you buy that device, their revenue stream ends. There's little to no incentive for them to provide you with updates. I've worked at a phone manufacturer, and it's a BFD to get a new version of Android out. Really big. Massive engineering resources.
Google isn't in Nexus to be a player in devices, they are in it to force other manufacturers to adhere to a better business model. They know the manufacturers won't do it until someone shows that it's viable. It's the same thing they did with cheap tablets when everyone was trying to sell them for $700. Buy Nexus, and show the manufacturers that you'll pay to have extended support and updates.
My experience for custom ROMs like CM is hit and miss. Often hard to find dists for your phone unless it's a flagship device, and when you do, they are buggy and unstable. It's a fine choice if you are trying to eek a little more life out of aging hardware, but otherwise you are better off with stock. It's the same reason the only Linux boxes I own are my otherwise outdated ex-Windows machines.
Ya, N7 2012 is completely unusable with Lollipop.
But you can download any F2FS (filesystem) Lollipop ROM and it'll be fine again. For some reason F2FS is amazingly fast, at least on N7 2012.
I settled for a ROM called slimkat or something (see here: http://forum.xda-developers.co... ).
But even otherwise, on newer devices like N5 etc where its quite fast, Lollipop seems to be a mishmash of fisher price colors, too much wasted white space etc. Windows ME is an apt comparison. Though they may have been aiming for iOS 8.
It is true your colleagues will think you are an utter nutter, but they think that anyway - mostly because you are,
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Wiping the cache helps - a bit. But it does not become as responsive as Kitkat again. I have flashed 4.4.4 again and its like someone released a brake...
I'd lay much of the blame at Google's feet. 5.01 remains pretty broken on my Nexus 4. The carriers are wise not to jump on it.
For two months now I've lived with a dialer that takes 3-4 seconds to respond to screen touches and random, complete phone lockups (about 1 every few days)
I'm not the only one: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=81593... and NO ACKNOWLEDGEMENT from Google.
I have a phone that can't reliably perform the most basic function of a phone and I'm fairly pissed off about it at this point... Windows phone is looking like a real possibility now. And you can forget about converting my iphone using wife. She's laughing her ass off.
Google absolutely can update 4.3 to patch the webview vulnerabilities.
So can the OEMs. They don't actually need Google's assistance to fix this. Google absolutely needs theirs. And they won't do it. If they were willing to do updates, they'd move to 4.4.
Currently, your only choice is to get 5.0 or get fucked.
Or 4.4. KitKat's WebView is still in the core OS, but all of the known WebView bugs are fixed in it.
ALL of the OS updating business could be handled by Google offering actual patches that users could install, similar to how every other sane operating system does it
What sort of patches? Source code diffs? How would users install those? Binary patches to binaries built by many third parties with unknown modifications? Google can't create those.
Shoving everything into apps isn't done for security or updatability.
It actually is. Google is remarkably transparent about its goals and intentions. Sometimes I think the level of transparency backfires because everyone assumes there must be something else being hidden. People are so accustomed to assuming that corporations veil their true purposes, but I actually can't think of a case where the internal and external stories differ in any significant respect. And it's not like Google execs could be keeping a lot of stuff from the engineers like me, because we're the ones who actually make all of the key product decisions.
Nor does it reduce fragmentation. Many users refuse to install updates because they drastically alter the functionality and appearance of the apps.
The security upgrades are all in the services app, which has no UI, and maintains backward compatibility. You can update it without updating any of the apps that rely on it, if you don't like the new versions.
I believe Calendar was the latest one - no more weekly view.
The Calendar app has a weekly view. What was removed was the monthly view, but only on small screens where it was useless anyway. Tastes vary, I suppose, but I think the new Calendar app is awesome. In any case, if you don't like Google's calendar, there are a zillion others in the Play store. One of them will likely be to your taste.
Further, users should have full control over the apps and services running on their devices.
I disagree. I completely agree that users should have the option of taking full control over the apps and services running on their devices. This is why all Nexus devices are unlockable, and Google tries in various ways to encourage OEMs to make all their devices unlockable (with very little success, obviously). But making such control the default state is a bad idea because 99.99% of users would be harmed by it, not benefited. A modern operating system is a complex beast and securing it is hard, even without opening the door to random modifications... which may be made by the user or by someone with malicious intentions.
These are difficult and complex issues, but I think the approach Google has taken is a reasonable one: The security model assumes that the device is in a known configuration, and that the build number tells you everything about what's in the system, if it's a standard build. Users who want something else can unlock their devices and install whatever they want, but they are also taking full responsibility for the results.
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Google actually doesn't see taking it out of open source as a benefit, but a cost. At least, that's the perspective that I see around me.
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