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Google Can't Ignore the Android Update Problem Any Longer
An anonymous reader writes: An editorial at Tom's Hardware makes the case that Google's Android fragmentation problem has gotten too big to ignore any longer. Android 5.0 Lollipop and its successor 5.1 have seen very low adoption rates — 9.0% and 0.7% respectively. Almost 40% of users are still on KitKat. 6% lag far behind on Gingerbread and Froyo. The article points out that even Microsoft is now making efforts to both streamline Windows upgrades and adapt Android (and iOS) apps to run on Windows.
If Google doesn't adapt, "it risks having users (slowly but surely) switch to more secure platforms that do give them updates in a timely manner. And if users want those platforms, OEMs will have no choice but to switch to them too, leaving Google with less and less Android adoption." The author also says OEMs and carriers can no longer be trusted to handle operating system updates, because they've proven themselves quite incapable of doing so in a reasonable manner.
If Google doesn't adapt, "it risks having users (slowly but surely) switch to more secure platforms that do give them updates in a timely manner. And if users want those platforms, OEMs will have no choice but to switch to them too, leaving Google with less and less Android adoption." The author also says OEMs and carriers can no longer be trusted to handle operating system updates, because they've proven themselves quite incapable of doing so in a reasonable manner.
But the doom-saying is inappropriate:
FTA: "Otherwise, it risks having users (slowly but surely) switch to more secure platforms that do give them updates in a timely manner."
Among the problems with this conclusion, the most egregious seems to be: Android is used in a way that Windows and IOS are not. People use it for lower-grade hardware that they are still manufacturing today. Go buy a $39 "unlocked" phone at your local Fry's (search for a brand like Blu). What will it be running? Android 2.3. Which is wonderful. They are calling this "fragmentation," but it's really people who could never spend the money for a $400 dollar phone finally getting access to one to what was a $400 phone 5 years ago. It can't run the latest O/S, but that's fine. The 2.x series phones (like my beloved Motorola Cliq) were really quite functional.
Dear Lucian (article author): Not everyone in the world is rich. That does not mean there is a "critical problem" that Google needs to address.
Yes. It would be great if Android kept major version trees alive and patched, like we do with the Linux kernel, and if all the manufacturers built their their complete phone stack from Puppet scripts, so they could get an Android update, rebuild against it, retest against real hardware and reissue the complete O/S for scant money in a few days.
They don't. If you want to make this happen it won't come from Google. It will come from us, the consumers walking into [insert generic carrier name] and asking which phone manufacturer got the greatest number of updates, after launch, for their top end phone. If the number is 3 refuse to buy from them.
When the stores know that is a selling point, they'll push back. Right now the people in that store and the manufacturer benefit most by selling you a new phone as soon as the old one is paid off. Until we change that evolutionary pressure, they will remain correctly adapted to our behaviour.
Yes, it is Google's fault. My Nexus 7 2013 got 5.0 OTA three months after it's release. That's the *Google branded* device. And it was buggy.
5.1 came much faster - took a few weeks, and it's much better.
When iOS 8 was released, it was available on our iPad Air the next day.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
After a career of working on Linux OS development, from embedded to cloud I decided to give Android a try. I recently started at a company where my task was to bring up Android on a new hardware platform. One of the first things I learned is that the hardware manufacture has to get their source code for Android from their SoC provided. If you go with AOSP they refuse to support you in any way if you have issues with their drivers. They do incredible hacks to get their hardware working. As someone who has submitted patches to the mainline Linux kernel I die a little inside every time I see what they do to it. Their own section for thier own hardware. No integration into the mainline kernel and I won't even begin to speak of the code quality. Google themselves force you to use an Androidized kernel with specific patches from them. There is a project to mainline these but Google has been resistant to working with the mainline kernel guys in changing things. One of the things I really don't understand is why Google had to throw everything out thats standard in every Linux distro and do their own thing. Android throws out the entire Linux filesystem heirarchy and uses its own thing which is undocumented and a huge mess. They have their own init manager, logger, use busybox AND toolbox for some reason. The source tree itself is managed by a tool called repo which manages about 100 git repositories, each a project which is a part of Android. The SoC vendors often make small changes to things like bluedroid. Like the kernel changes they have no intention of ever upstreaming any of this to the open source projects or Google. This collection of projects are built with Androids own Make build system, where they heavily hack up Make. If Google wants Android users to all be up to date they need to take a standard distro like Fedora or Debian and make it run its own window manager which is Android and its GUI. They need to get vendors to focus on upstreaming their changes and maintaining high quality code. Ideally Android should be a Linux distro you run on your phone with full package manager with updates from Google. Google has the power to do this. No one else can because it will cause Google's CTS tool to fail verifying which won't allow you to ship with Google Play.