Google Takes Another Shot At Making Android Great On Low-Budget Smartphones (phonedog.com)

At its developer conference, Google unveiled Android Go, a project wherein Google will offer a version of Android that runs swiftly on budget, low-specced smartphones. With the new strategy, Google hopes to further improve the low-budget smartphone ecosystem in developing markets. Android Go will be focused around building a version of Android for phones with less memory, with the System UI and kernel able to run with as little as 512MB of memory. Apps will be optimized for low bandwidth and memory, with a version of Play Store designed for those markets that will highlight these apps. From a report: Another feature of Android Go will be data management. Android Go will let you easily see your data usage, and thanks to carrier integration, it'll also let you top-up with more data right on your device.

Comments

Re:Great more fragmentation.

[TWX]

Seems to me that the best approach would be to get a bunch of Galaxy S3 phones and other older phones, and use those as the development platforms for mainline Android. Once whatever new reference version is developed on those, then you start looking at newer/faster phones for possible changes needed for the newer chipsets.

I don't know if it's still this way, but for a long time the business model was to based low-end stuff on yesteryear's high-end stuff, with the possibility of minor or moderate revisions. Intel's own 486 chip was produced until 2007 and eventually saw speeds of 150MHz, and clone producers like Cyrix also continued to produce 486-compatible chips long past their normal conventional PC application. I expect that CPUs and chipsets in older high-end smartphones continue to see mild revision and production for what become mid-grade and eventually low-end phones, after all, if these chips weren't still used then money spent developing them in the first place wasn't spent effectively.

It's fine for the rich consumer to spend money on the eight core phone with 4GB RAM and 128GB storage, but developers should always focus on the single core model with 512MB RAM and 32MB storage. After all, that which runs acceptably on the low-end model should be screaming fast on the high-end one.