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..

[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..

[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..

[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..

[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: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: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.