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