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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.
This puts to rest the final argument that Firefox OS supporters had to justify its existence: that Android phones were too expensive in third world nations.
Of course, that argument was quite weak to begin with. Low-cost used Android phones are already plentiful in such regions, and already widely used. And now new Android phones will be available and affordable, too.
Since Android phones can already run HTML/JS/CSS web apps, they should be able to run Firefox OS apps, too. Although in practice, there aren't really any Firefox OS apps worth using elsewhere.
Mozilla, it's time to shut down the Firefox OS project. Firefox OS has already gotten some of the most scathing reviews of all time, and it's seeing pretty much no adoption at all.
The worst thing about Firefox OS is that it has taken resources away from improving Firefox, the only product from Mozilla that really sees any use (although its market share is dropping, too). If Firefox OS was cancelled, the money and people involved could be moved over to working on Firefox instead. They could strip out Pocket, Hello, Australis, and all of the other completely unwanted changes that have been made lately. After that is done, and Firefox's UI is usable again, they could tackle some of the decade-old bugs and performance problems that have yet to be fixed.
It's a real shame that Firefox OS wasn't cancelled sooner. It was clear from the onset that it was a failed project. The resources wasted on it could have been put to much better use elsewhere.
Edit: They still promise the above in their "Timing for Software Updates" section in the following link: https://support.google.com/and...
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.
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I recently watched a documentary on TV about an extended family living a remote existence somewhere in Africa. One of the men had a mobile phone and he was saying it was a day trip to walk to the nearest town to get it charged and he did it about once a week.
Yeah, try that with a smart phone.