Google Targets Low-Cost Android One Phone At African Markets

jfruh writes: In order to meet its goal of bringing Android to five billion users, Google needs to get smartphones into the hands of people in the developing world. The company's Android One program aims to do just that. Already active in India, the program is now bringing an $88 smartphone to West Africa. “The software on Android One devices automatically updates to the latest version of Android and will get the Android M release after release. The goal is to provide a consistent and uncompromising smartphone experience, for everyone,” Google VP of product management, Caesar Sengupta, said.

Comments

Updates are Late

[bhagwad]

I bought an Android One phone to get regular updates. It took more than 6 months for Google to roll it out to my device. I was expecting an update within 2 weeks of the announcement at Google I/O. They've changed the wording on their website, but at the time it was:

"Android One devices receive the latest version of Android directly from Google. When a new update is released, it can take up to two weeks to reach your device.

So Google broke their promise big time. I wouldn't advise anyone to get an Android One phone.

Re:Updates are Late

[bhagwad]

Edit: They still promise the above in their "Timing for Software Updates" section in the following link: https://support.google.com/and...

Re:Updates are Late

[swillden]

I bought an Android One phone to get regular updates. It took more than 6 months for Google to roll it out to my device. I was expecting an update within 2 weeks of the announcement at Google I/O.

(I'm an Android engineer.)

The announcement at Google I/O isn't the release. As of today, Android M still has not been released. i think the third and final(?) preview went out early this week, but it's still a preview, not a release.

This is a pretty common misunderstanding of the Android release process. The announcement of a new version and its features comes when the feature set is demonstrably finalized, long before it's actually done and debugged. That means that our code is "feature complete", meaning we can demonstrate all of the features, but in many cases there are still a lot of bugs to fix. In some cases the bugs are of the form "three of the four use cases for this feature aren't implemented yet." (I actually did that this year; I'm responsible for the hardware-backed crypto and when preview1 went out I had completely broken asymmetric crypto. Hardware-backed AES and HMAC worked, but RSA and EC did not. And that was just the big stuff; there were lots of minor features that were broken, too. It's all working now.)

The reason for announcing features and publishing APIs well before the actual release is to give all of the partners and app developers plenty of time to start getting ready for the release.

Unless you're a glutton for punishment, you really don't want the version released at I/O. I know... I've been running M on my Nexus 6 since about February and it has been rather bad at times. Bad, as in the phone app crashing continually, or Google Play Services not running (which takes out pretty much all of the Google apps, plus some), etc. At a couple of points I almost had to abandon Marshmallow and go back to Lollipop because my phone didn't work. It's getting close these days, but it's still not done. I haven't personally run into any problems for a while.

If you really *do* want Marshmallow now, you can always unlock your device and install the third preview. I don't recommend it, but I don't recommend against it, either. Like I said, it's actually working pretty well on my device. But don't be shocked if you find stuff that doesn't work. That's why it's a preview.

So Google broke their promise big time.

Nope, you just misunderstood the promise :-)

The promise is within two weeks of release, not two weeks of first public alpha. And you are happy about that, really you are.