7 ms·

OEMs (and probably carriers) really need to get their stuff together. It really sucks that here we are talking about M when very few devices have seen an L rele

by knd775 11y ago

OEMs (and probably carriers) really need to get their stuff together. It really sucks that here we are talking about M when very few devices have seen an L release.

sp332 11y ago
The new UI style and notifications means all the skins have to be revamped. That takes a lot of investment, and the only other benefit users are likely to notice is slightly better battery life. Lollipop has better security, but unfortunately that's still not a big selling point. Hopefully cell phone makers have had enough time to update their skins to look good with (or pave over) Material design, and we'll see more updates for M than we did for L.
- zanny 11y ago
  Or they could, you know, just ship stock Android and make everyone happier by not shoving awful carrier skins down everyones throat nobody even likes. Cough, Touchwiz.
  - fidotron 11y ago
    Lollipop is bad enough that Touchwiz, on devices like the Note 4, is a massive improvement over stock Android.
    - nilkn 11y ago
      That's the first time I've ever seen that claimed. In what way does Touchwiz improve on Lollipop? On my Note device, I've done everything I can to hide Touchwiz and go back to stock Lollipop because of how much better it is.
      - ypcx 11y ago
        I tried both and I was all about going back to iPhone, until I tried Cyanogenmod, which puts (a lot of) the sense back into Android. It uses the Google launcher (without the Google Now page integrated on swipe left), but it removes the insanely annoying design decisions by Samsung, e.g. displaying a confirmation dialog when you increase the sound volume over a certain threshold even with your Phone locked in your pocket and you bombing it on your bike downhill. Or the "cannot use camera" and "sorry, dimming your screen" on 5% battery threshold. I don't know what they are smoking at Samsung, but it's not good.
        wvenable 11y ago
        > displaying a confirmation dialog when you increase the sound volume over a certain threshold Don't blame Samsung for that, my Nexus 7 did that as well. And in Netflix the dialog appeared behind the active window so you couldn't see it or hit the button.
      - inversionOf 11y ago
        Critics of Android embraced a meme that Lollipop was Android's Vista, substantiated by users anecdotal claims about poor battery life from a given upgrade, or the changes to notification levels, etc. So you still see the echos of that. I've never seen someone go so over the top to claim that it justified vendor skins, though, so this is a new pinnacle. To everyone else it was an incremental update.
        tdkl 11y ago
        Yeah, the ritual of rebooting the device every two days because of the memory leaks and camera crashes were quite an incremental update over stable Kitkat.
        inversionOf 11y ago
        Even ignoring the placebo effect, and a contingent of people carrying forth a message between advocating the amazing world of task killers, what in the world would a skin have to do with that? TouchWiz and others are literally layered over stock Android, so if there was a fundamental issue it would have the same issue. The notion that the skins are somehow superior is nonsensical, despite the comical, ignorance-induced downvotes I've predictably received.
        nilkn 11y ago
        This is more of a comparison of Lollipop vs. Lollipop + TouchWiz rather than Lollipop vs. KitKat.
    - georgemcbay 11y ago
      Speaking as an Android user/developer: Lollipop's first release was a bit of a mess in terms of bugs (it has since gotten a lot better, at least on devices that have kept up with releases, like Nexus devices), but I'd still run a stock 5.0 release as a daily-use phone OS over any Touchwiz release ever. I can't begin to describe how terrible I find the Touchwiz interface relative to stock.
  - pachydermic 11y ago
    Then they would have basically no way to compete with one another other than marketing and specs. Touchwiz and all those other gimmicks really do sell phones. That's just speaking from anecdotal evidence, but I assume big corps have done their homework on this one. Remember that the types of people reading this comment are not your average consumer. We might hate it, we might know it's not as good as stock android... but we're a very small segment of the market (especially for Android). You probably don't see a ton of nutritionists/personal trainers eating at McDonalds, either. The downside of having an open platform is that OEMs will add crap to differentiate themselves - just look at the weird media bs that comes pre-installed on tons of windows laptops.
    - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
      I suspect this is temporary. A lot of the big OEMs from just a couple years ago are massively losing money on Android. HTC, Sony, LG, etc all reported signficant losses. I imagine the market will tigheten up with one or two premium OEMs (Moto, Samsung) and some bottom feeders selling super budget phones. When things finally tighten up there will less incentive to make these difficult to maintain Android custom distros and more incentive to get closer to the stock as a way to make updating easier. Google may also put in a full theming engine to help this along. Marshmallow has a basic theme engine form what I've read, so that's a start. I think Google knows that the status quo with Android is unsustainable and will need to migrate to a more tightly controlled business model. Samsung's flirting with Tizen hasn't paid off and they're more or less stuck with Google dictating policy now. The monthly security updates thing sounds promising as well. Its time Android got serious about security and updates.
  - eddieroger 11y ago
    If people didn't mind Touchwiz, Samsung wouldn't sell nearly as many phones as they do. Not that they like it, but they clearly don't mind it.
BlackJack 11y ago
A good rule of thumb is that 25% of Android devices will have the OS within 1 year of release and 50% within 2 years of release. Based on https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html though, L is behind the pace :(
- patrickaljord 11y ago
  Android L was released on October 15th so it could still make it to 25%. Also note that 5.0 was pretty buggy so that didn't help...
- izacus 11y ago
  Those stats you're linking are extremely misleading and don't really reflect demographic of actual app users. Pretty much all our apps across the board have higher Lollipop and KitKat usage. Which makes sense - what you linked is aggregate number of all users on the Play store across the world. Users that actually actively engage in their phones and western markets are noticably more up to date. Ignore newer API versions at your own peril.
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    > [..] demographic of actual app users [..] Users that actually actively engage in their phones and western markets are noticably more up to date. Your post seem predicated on assumptions which aren't supported: - That people with "better engagement" are more profitable to app developers (which might be the reverse of true if you aren't on a freemium modal). - That non-Westerners don't buy apps at all or that we simply shouldn't care. .
    - izacus 11y ago
      No, no, I did not want to imply any of that. Just that: - For pretty much any of our apps the actual breakdown of Android versions is nothing like what the Play store shows. - The amount of new Androids is significantly higher (we actually have an app with 57% 5.x and 80% on 4.4 or newer - Samsung updates have been significant for it) and varies greatly - The users with newer devices and newer Android versions are usually more engaged, use apps more and also advertise them more which makes for a good network effect. - We have noticed a major shift to apps with Material design, arrogant Apple marketing aside, there's alot of users on Android that DO care about design, UX and those tend to have rather newish phones. Depending on your app you should of course also care for people on worse phones. If you're providing a public service app (e.g. showing public transport schedules), you should probably target as low as 2.3 (even though, perhaps actually building 2 APKs for that usecase makes sense). If you're building a modern 3D game, you should probably target API 19+ since users with older devices probably won't be able to run it anyway. But in any case, DO YOUR RESEARCH, because the numbers vary greatly across demographics, app categories and regions.
e40 11y ago
I think the release lag for OEMs is far longer than Google thought it would be. Also, this lag is the reason they won't get rid of the Nexus program. Without it, they would not have a test bed for Android.
- soylentcola 11y ago
  Yeah, I imagine they figured that as long as they kept pushing out updated OS versions, essentially for free, the OEMs would have an easy way to keep offering updates without having to build any of the underlying "stuff" from scratch. But I think it ends up more like enterprise IT where OS updates get put off and only done when absolutely necessary. To OEMs who only really care about selling hardware, it's just more testing, deployment, and support cost (not to mention porting their customizations). I realize I'm not in the majority (outside of tech circles) but I really do like Android and the main criteria for choosing a device are specs, build quality, and likelihood of timely updates. My current phone is a Moto X and it's the first non-Nexus I've had in a while. And I only got that because I broke my Nexus 5 and we were still a way off from a refresh. The Moto seemed like a less extravagant (in terms of price and screen size) version of the Nexus 6. But if Lenovo undoes the good things Google did for Moto, I'll be back to the Nexus line regardless for my next phone. I got rid of the carrier as a middleman by avoiding carrier-branded and subsidized handsets but the OEM still plays a huge part as long as proprietary code is needed to port newer versions of the OS to a given device.

by knd775 11y ago

OEMs (and probably carriers) really need to get their stuff together. It really sucks that here we are talking about M when very few devices have seen an L release.

sp332 11y ago

The new UI style and notifications means all the skins have to be revamped. That takes a lot of investment, and the only other benefit users are likely to notice is slightly better battery life. Lollipop has better security, but unfortunately that's still not a big selling point. Hopefully cell phone makers have had enough time to update their skins to look good with (or pave over) Material design, and we'll see more updates for M than we did for L.

zanny 11y ago
Or they could, you know, just ship stock Android and make everyone happier by not shoving awful carrier skins down everyones throat nobody even likes. Cough, Touchwiz.
- fidotron 11y ago
  Lollipop is bad enough that Touchwiz, on devices like the Note 4, is a massive improvement over stock Android.
  - nilkn 11y ago
    That's the first time I've ever seen that claimed. In what way does Touchwiz improve on Lollipop? On my Note device, I've done everything I can to hide Touchwiz and go back to stock Lollipop because of how much better it is.
    - ypcx 11y ago
      I tried both and I was all about going back to iPhone, until I tried Cyanogenmod, which puts (a lot of) the sense back into Android. It uses the Google launcher (without the Google Now page integrated on swipe left), but it removes the insanely annoying design decisions by Samsung, e.g. displaying a confirmation dialog when you increase the sound volume over a certain threshold even with your Phone locked in your pocket and you bombing it on your bike downhill. Or the "cannot use camera" and "sorry, dimming your screen" on 5% battery threshold. I don't know what they are smoking at Samsung, but it's not good.
      - wvenable 11y ago
        > displaying a confirmation dialog when you increase the sound volume over a certain threshold Don't blame Samsung for that, my Nexus 7 did that as well. And in Netflix the dialog appeared behind the active window so you couldn't see it or hit the button.
    - inversionOf 11y ago
      Critics of Android embraced a meme that Lollipop was Android's Vista, substantiated by users anecdotal claims about poor battery life from a given upgrade, or the changes to notification levels, etc. So you still see the echos of that. I've never seen someone go so over the top to claim that it justified vendor skins, though, so this is a new pinnacle. To everyone else it was an incremental update.
      - tdkl 11y ago
        Yeah, the ritual of rebooting the device every two days because of the memory leaks and camera crashes were quite an incremental update over stable Kitkat.
        inversionOf 11y ago
        Even ignoring the placebo effect, and a contingent of people carrying forth a message between advocating the amazing world of task killers, what in the world would a skin have to do with that? TouchWiz and others are literally layered over stock Android, so if there was a fundamental issue it would have the same issue. The notion that the skins are somehow superior is nonsensical, despite the comical, ignorance-induced downvotes I've predictably received.
        nilkn 11y ago
        This is more of a comparison of Lollipop vs. Lollipop + TouchWiz rather than Lollipop vs. KitKat.
  - georgemcbay 11y ago
    Speaking as an Android user/developer: Lollipop's first release was a bit of a mess in terms of bugs (it has since gotten a lot better, at least on devices that have kept up with releases, like Nexus devices), but I'd still run a stock 5.0 release as a daily-use phone OS over any Touchwiz release ever. I can't begin to describe how terrible I find the Touchwiz interface relative to stock.
- pachydermic 11y ago
  Then they would have basically no way to compete with one another other than marketing and specs. Touchwiz and all those other gimmicks really do sell phones. That's just speaking from anecdotal evidence, but I assume big corps have done their homework on this one. Remember that the types of people reading this comment are not your average consumer. We might hate it, we might know it's not as good as stock android... but we're a very small segment of the market (especially for Android). You probably don't see a ton of nutritionists/personal trainers eating at McDonalds, either. The downside of having an open platform is that OEMs will add crap to differentiate themselves - just look at the weird media bs that comes pre-installed on tons of windows laptops.
  - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
    I suspect this is temporary. A lot of the big OEMs from just a couple years ago are massively losing money on Android. HTC, Sony, LG, etc all reported signficant losses. I imagine the market will tigheten up with one or two premium OEMs (Moto, Samsung) and some bottom feeders selling super budget phones. When things finally tighten up there will less incentive to make these difficult to maintain Android custom distros and more incentive to get closer to the stock as a way to make updating easier. Google may also put in a full theming engine to help this along. Marshmallow has a basic theme engine form what I've read, so that's a start. I think Google knows that the status quo with Android is unsustainable and will need to migrate to a more tightly controlled business model. Samsung's flirting with Tizen hasn't paid off and they're more or less stuck with Google dictating policy now. The monthly security updates thing sounds promising as well. Its time Android got serious about security and updates.
- eddieroger 11y ago
  If people didn't mind Touchwiz, Samsung wouldn't sell nearly as many phones as they do. Not that they like it, but they clearly don't mind it.

BlackJack 11y ago

A good rule of thumb is that 25% of Android devices will have the OS within 1 year of release and 50% within 2 years of release. Based on https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html though, L is behind the pace :(

patrickaljord 11y ago
Android L was released on October 15th so it could still make it to 25%. Also note that 5.0 was pretty buggy so that didn't help...
izacus 11y ago
Those stats you're linking are extremely misleading and don't really reflect demographic of actual app users. Pretty much all our apps across the board have higher Lollipop and KitKat usage. Which makes sense - what you linked is aggregate number of all users on the Play store across the world. Users that actually actively engage in their phones and western markets are noticably more up to date. Ignore newer API versions at your own peril.
- Someone1234 11y ago
  > [..] demographic of actual app users [..] Users that actually actively engage in their phones and western markets are noticably more up to date. Your post seem predicated on assumptions which aren't supported: - That people with "better engagement" are more profitable to app developers (which might be the reverse of true if you aren't on a freemium modal). - That non-Westerners don't buy apps at all or that we simply shouldn't care. .
  - izacus 11y ago
    No, no, I did not want to imply any of that. Just that: - For pretty much any of our apps the actual breakdown of Android versions is nothing like what the Play store shows. - The amount of new Androids is significantly higher (we actually have an app with 57% 5.x and 80% on 4.4 or newer - Samsung updates have been significant for it) and varies greatly - The users with newer devices and newer Android versions are usually more engaged, use apps more and also advertise them more which makes for a good network effect. - We have noticed a major shift to apps with Material design, arrogant Apple marketing aside, there's alot of users on Android that DO care about design, UX and those tend to have rather newish phones. Depending on your app you should of course also care for people on worse phones. If you're providing a public service app (e.g. showing public transport schedules), you should probably target as low as 2.3 (even though, perhaps actually building 2 APKs for that usecase makes sense). If you're building a modern 3D game, you should probably target API 19+ since users with older devices probably won't be able to run it anyway. But in any case, DO YOUR RESEARCH, because the numbers vary greatly across demographics, app categories and regions.

e40 11y ago

I think the release lag for OEMs is far longer than Google thought it would be. Also, this lag is the reason they won't get rid of the Nexus program. Without it, they would not have a test bed for Android.

soylentcola 11y ago
Yeah, I imagine they figured that as long as they kept pushing out updated OS versions, essentially for free, the OEMs would have an easy way to keep offering updates without having to build any of the underlying "stuff" from scratch. But I think it ends up more like enterprise IT where OS updates get put off and only done when absolutely necessary. To OEMs who only really care about selling hardware, it's just more testing, deployment, and support cost (not to mention porting their customizations). I realize I'm not in the majority (outside of tech circles) but I really do like Android and the main criteria for choosing a device are specs, build quality, and likelihood of timely updates. My current phone is a Moto X and it's the first non-Nexus I've had in a while. And I only got that because I broke my Nexus 5 and we were still a way off from a refresh. The Moto seemed like a less extravagant (in terms of price and screen size) version of the Nexus 6. But if Lenovo undoes the good things Google did for Moto, I'll be back to the Nexus line regardless for my next phone. I got rid of the carrier as a middleman by avoiding carrier-branded and subsidized handsets but the OEM still plays a huge part as long as proprietary code is needed to port newer versions of the OS to a given device.