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

Yes meanwhile..

[Virtucon]

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.

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[viperidaenz]

If you want prompt OS updates, don't buy a Samsung. They never promised they'd give you later Android versions.

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[ahaweb]

Samsung Galaxy S5 got Lollipop yesterday.

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[Thelasko]

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.

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[farble1670]

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.

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[DigitAl56K]

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.

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

Based on my current, admittedly short, experience, I'm blaming Google.

I recently completely reset/reformatted my 2012 Nexus 7 and put CyanogenMod's CM12 ("Lollipop") nightly on it. I intentionally did NOT install the "gapps" (Google apps) add-on.

So far, my own 2012 Nexus 7 has been working great, better even than it was with CM11 ("Key Lime Pie"/Android 4.4.4) with all the Google bloat.

Google has been shoving more and more of the "Android" experience into their apps instead of the OS. The not only are the "apps" and "services" getting more digitally obese, but there seem to be more and more of them every release, just loading up and clogging up ram and occasionally "updating" themselves online doing who-knows-what.

I feel like I saw similar (though less obvious) improvements in performance with previous now-"obsolete" devices that I've similarly purged and custom-ROMmed without the Google Search/Play/Music/Plus/News-And-Weather/Mail/Now/etc.

You're kind of stuck with it if you're dependent on apps that are only available from the Google Play store, but I'm finding I can get everything I need from f-droid instead, or through the web browser, at least so far (and for my own needs).

Anyway, point is, so far it doesn't seem to me like it's really "Lollipop" that the 2012 N7 has a problem with...

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[ami.one]

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.

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[sd4f]

My first (and only) experience with android was heavily coloured by optus. Similar to telstra, they just don't release updates. What I learnt is, if you buy a carrier locked android phone, you're going to have a bad time. You never ever get a carrier locked android phone, it just adds another piece to the chain, and while the manufacturers are slow to release the updates, the carriers are even worse, and what for? They only install bloatware anyway.

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.)

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[san9jay]

Follow these steps to fix the Nexus 7 crawling after the 5.0.2 build of Lollipop. I have done this and the Nexus 7 is now working reasonably well.

Turn off your device.

Press and hold Power and volume down buttons simultaneously until you see a large arrow at the top of your screen.

Press the volume down button repeatedly until you see “Recovery” in the arrow.

Select it by pressing the power button.

You’ll see an android mascot with a red triangle and exclamation mark.

Hold down the power and press the volume up button once and then release the power button.

Press the volume down button repeatedly to select “erase or wipe the cache partition” from the list of options.

Wait for the process to complete and then restart your device.
If successful, you should notice an improvement in your tablet’s performance.

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Google absolutely can update 4.3 to patch the webview vulnerabilities. Whether or not that update is pushed out to any given device on any given network is another matter. Currently, your only choice is to get 5.0 or get fucked. Further, 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. The only missing piece would be rollback functionality on the off chance that the patch breaks something critical on the phone (well, given the overall state of Android, maybe it's not an off chance). A simple bootloader option would handle this, just like Windows has had with fucking system restore points for ages.

Shoving everything into apps isn't done for security or updatability. It's done because these apps are now sold separately as a separate item to all OEMs who want to include them.

Nor does it reduce fragmentation. Many users refuse to install updates because they drastically alter the functionality and appearance of the apps. You're bundling security fixes and feature updates into a single channel and giving users the same old choice as with the OS - update or get fucked. Read the reviews for Google Calendar, Google Plus, Maps, etc. I believe Calendar was the latest one - no more weekly view. The app was drastically altered making it unusable for many people. Luckily, I didn't update. Then again, who knows what security holes lurk in whatever version I have. And many devices aren't given the option to get version X of app Y. Your device has to have special flags buried somewhere within it to tell Google it's okay to let the user download Google Wallet or Google Talk / Voice / Hangouts / Whatever or even the latest keyboard. If you don't have those flags the app simply doesn't appear in the store. Of course, if your phone came with Google Talk and doesn't get Hangouts, then you're stuck with Talk, which sort of kind of halfway works, but is probably vulnerable to all sorts of shit and will never be updated. Or if you got hangouts but don't like it, your only option is to go back to the stock option the phone came with (or root and grab what you want from some 3rd party source).

Architecturally, divorcing the apps from the core OS is good, but you're still maintaining a single, bloated, ever-changing version of each app and the OS itself. Users are forced to update or get fucked. The apps and OS should rely on services or modules that you can patch separately from the apps and OS themselves. This is how sane OSes and applications do it. Further, users should have full control over the apps and services running on their devices. There's some merit to protecting them from themselves, but staged rollouts, magic flags to enable the download of certain apps, the inability to uninstall system apps, and hell, the inability to find out what the fuck half of the system apps/services are make Android a complete mess. Top all of that off with the incessant changes and you've got a mess no one can truly get a handle on because it'll keep changing forever, for no raisin.

Of course, Google has no reason to make Android stable or secure - they've got a conflict of interest built in. They need to tie people to the latest version in order to maintain control and to kee

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[serviscope_minor]

Then why do people keep purchasing Android devices from manufacturers that don't provide updates?

Two reasons. Firstly, people haven't cottoned on to the fact that phones are, well, I don't know. I was going to say small, shitty PCs in a neat box, but that doesn't quite sumarise it. PCs never needed updating (major OS upgrades) anything like as often as phones seem to. And they were almost always reasonably straightforward to upgrade (there are many small shops which will do such things for you).

An I know how everyone used t ojoke/quip/whine/brag that PCs went obsolete after 2 years. Technically that was true, but for most people, they bought a PC and a bit of software and it would run for a while. Then it would break and the neighbour's 15 year old would fix it (i.e. reinstall) and it would be fine again for a bit.

These days of course because much more is web based, you have to keep up with modern browsers and their requirements.

So people buy android phones because they're available in a huge range of sizes, shapes, prices and form-factors. And they don't realise that the software ecosystem around Android is quite astonishingly bad.

That's a combination of vendors who like locking bootloaders, and ARM which having never really been in a PC like place doensn't have the kind of hardware self-discovery stuff that x86 has. I'd blame network operators in the US too, but the situation is the same everywhere else in the world where SIM-only deals abound.

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[Simulant]

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.

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[AmiMoJo]

You are comparing Google to Apple. Apple announce an OS update and it is available immediately on all their supported hardware. Google release OS updates to their open source and developer channels first, and then they get released on devices fairly soon afterwards but not instantly.

Personally I'm fine with Google's system because day 0 updates sometimes go badly wrong. These are feature updates, security fixes get rolled out via Play to everyone as soon as they are available. App updates are also separate via the Play store.

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[swillden]

You mean it is pure coincidence that all the components that get pushed into the play services app are now closed source? (keyboard, location service etc. etc.)

It's not coincidence, but it is a very unfortunate side effect. If we can find a way to fix the core system update issue I think this stuff will get pushed back into the base system.

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[swillden]

Why not? Google sold me my Galaxy Nexus, they wrote the software. No reason they couldn't update it, they just can't be arsed.

The GNex is a problematic case.

Google actually doesn't write all of the software; even for Nexus devices the SoC manufacturer and device manufacturer provide quite a bit of the low-level stuff needed to make a device boot, and Google doesn't get the source code. For example, I worked on low-level integration for the Nexus 9 and I integrated with a lot of nVidia and HTC code which was provided in binary form only.

In the case of the GNex, the SoC manufacturer (TI) is gone, and it seems that no one has a copy of some of the critical bits of firmware. Google should have foreseen that possibility, and required that the relevant source code be escrowed, or something, but didn't. Such problems can be avoided going forward, but there's nothing that can be done for the GNex.

Out of curiosity, are you still using your GNex?

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[swillden]

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.

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[swillden]

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.

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[asavage]

Android 5.0.2 seems to only be released to fix bugs on tablets. It doesn't seem to be released for any phones. Google did release 5.0.1 for Nexus 5 quickly but Google only updates devices slowly over a number of weeks. If you are unlucky you might get the update 2 or 3 weeks after others. Google should really allow people who want the update to install it without having to download the factory image and install manually.

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[swillden]

I'm not going to argue about the feasibility. I don't actually know the details of why the GNex can't be upgraded. I could find out (and probably will), but I'm sure I won't be able to share the details, so there's not much point in trying to convince you. I'll just mention that since Android doesn't support blockwise updates, updating GNex requires generating and signing a complete new system image. It's more involved than you're assuming, and therefore there's more scope for it to be problematic.

Re:Yes meanwhile..

[strikethree]

I gave my girlfriend my "old" Nexus 4 with Cyanogenmod on it. It works very well. It has good battery life. I think it is technically considered Lollipop.

Looking at Windows phone is like forgoing a wife who needs time to become accustomed to being a wife for a $2 whore that you saw hanging out it in the seedier areas of town, all in the hopes of a long term relationship.

Re:Because 5.0 is a crap?

[viperidaenz]

I have no problems at all with Lollipop on my Moto G

What is with naming software after candy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or after stuffed animals, or after women, or after star wars characters, or after booze.

"We had major Stability problems in Donut that popped up again in Gingerbread, but we fixed them in Ice Cream Sand-witch."

"FSCK did not work in Feisty Fawn as well as it worked on Maverick Meerkat, but that's fixed now in Uropic Unicorn (Fuck we have stopped even using normal words now) with the new switch "FSCK -it", which makes things just work now irregardless of what you run it on."

Just Stop. Stop it.

"We didn't have that kernel panic issue since Jack Daniels, but then again we started getting sigfaults in Captain Morrigan which caused a lot of page violations to occur."

Just fucking stop.

You sound bad enough talking geek, now your boss and every single sysadmin since forever is going to look at you like you are have about as much sanity left as bag of peanuts in a insane asylum lobby vending machine.

There's a very good reason why developers of the 40's through the 90's used version numbers. You finish the meticulous assembly of a mechanical cryptanalysis machine to crack the nazi enigma code and you don't want to officially name that sucker "munch-face"? No, you do the versioning because, professionalism.

The joke is done

Re:What is with naming software after candy?

[sexconker]

This.
I'm also sick of idiots who use shit like "1.2.6.27 beta" as some sort of version string.
No one knows what your asinine convention is, so it's meaningless.
No one in your office understands that asinine convention either, and for the 3 people who do, they'll change "1.4.2.12" to "1.5" for marketing purposes anyway.

MS got this right - you get a straight sequential build number if you need it, otherwise it's a simple "Windows 7" or "Windows 7 SP1" convention.
Of course, they fucked that up with "Windows 8.1" and "R2" for all their server shit. Essentially they're:
1) Killing off service packs for the server software because they want to charge for another license when the historical precedent was a free service pack.
2) Refusing to release Windows 7 SP2 because it will trigger a support extension.
3) Refusing to release any service pack for Windows 8 because they want people to forget it (despite the fact that there's nothing wrong with it).
4) Skipping 9 because they REALLY want people to forget Windows 8.

Re:What is with naming software after candy?

[Sreerambo]

I think more people are starting to use semantic versioning: http://semver.org/

The gist of it is:
Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.

This way the numbers actually mean something in a somewhat consistent way across programs.
npm packages use this for example.

Re:What is with naming software after candy?

[Shados]

+1 for that. Semver is awesome.

Re:What is with naming software after candy?

[Anne Thwacks]

Unfortunately, it is not possible to google for numeric strings in any useful way, naming 3.17.5 "Pregnant Pussy" makes it possible for a search engine to find the information you want (or a load of cat sequin porn and some Hello Kitty related spam - but you always get that anyway),

It is true your colleagues will think you are an utter nutter, but they think that anyway - mostly because you are,

Re:What is with naming software after candy?

[swillden]

Semver is a re-branding of an old idea... and the original was slightly better, IMO.

In the original approach, major and minor had the same meanings, but "patch" (AKA subminor) was for changes that are both forward and backward compatible. If the version numbering scheme is applied to a shared library (the context in which this scheme was invented), and you have a program which was written and built against version x.y.z,

The program must be modified and recompiled to run with version x+1.?.?.

The program can run against x.y+1.?, or indeed any version with major version x and a minor number greater than y. However, a program built with x.y.? may not run if dynamically linked with x.y-1.?. That is, changes in minor version number are backward but not forward compatible.

The program can run against any library version x.y.?. Subminor version number changes are forward and backward compatible.

Re: Small phone for First World

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think a 5" is a monster, I feel sorry for your girl!

Android 5 is broken

[Sean]

Android developer here. Samsung has good reason for not pushing an update: The update breaks a lot of stuff.

We have lives?

[Imazalil]

We grew up and got lives and/or jobs. A good number of us deal with software and hardware all day, so want our phones to just work without too much hassle.

Re:Not so much anymore

[farble1670]

what's hard to believe is that you are complaining about that. you should buy Apple friend.

the idea that Google could instantly roll out a major OS version upgrade to tens of vastly different devices from 10" tablets to 4.5" phones across at least 4 different manufacturers is really nuts if you have the least inkling of what's involved the engineering process.

p.s., my 2017 N7 Wifi has had Lollipop for over a month, along with my Nexus 10 that was released in 2012.