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Maybe they haven't been to any Android forums recently? Users are massively excited about new Android releases, often going to great lengths to attempt to obta

Maybe they haven't been to any Android forums recently? Users are massively excited about new Android releases, often going to great lengths to attempt to obtain it before their carrier releases the update, and even attempting to port it to older phones. The problem is the carriers and manufacturers, not the users' wants. They aren't updating enough. And I can totally understand the pain for them, having to QA all those new versions and release them.

brianbreslin 11y ago
android forums represent such a tiny fraction of a percentage of overall android users though. I wish it was disintermediated from the carriers. I bought a generic android phone from BLU last year for $99 and wanted to update on my own to latest version of android, and it was such a pain to figure out how (I gave up).
LoSboccacc 11y ago
Enthusiasts is a subset of users - a small one at that. Still I agree the problem is devices are not getting update and it's not a problem of want as the article hints, but of can't, at least at the user level: Of course carriers and manufacturers hate having to support devices instead of selling new ones!
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  It's not like manufacturers don't want the strong brand recognition of being well supported and giving their owners the latest stuff. That helps them sell future phones as well, by gaining market share. The problem that Google apologists/Android fanboys forget... is that deploying an Android update is a HUGE cost to manufacturers for customization, testing, and deployment. Google ships endless new versions without any respect to this, and leaves most of the work, and the cost, on manufacturers, who already had thin margins to begin with. Especially on entry level phones, hardware costs have been a race to the bottom. These people are afraid to point out that Google has created an OS that's hard to update universally, requires a custom deployment for each and every hardware model, and is shipped without working hardware support for most of the hardware using it or even a modicum of stability even on their own reference platforms.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    while there are many phones around, there aren't hundred thousands different soc to support. if the linux kernel driver model wouldn't be so hostile to driver backward compatibility, it'd be trivial for soc provider to have a single device driver delivered with the soc and cut the certification costs by orders of magnitude. this is something google could fix, btw, creating something like FUSE but for wireless chipset integration and keeping that backward compatible.
    - DanielDent 11y ago
      Users do not benefit from binary blob drivers. They are insecure, make it hard to fix problems, and add artificial constraints to hardware. Manufacturers can get their drivers merged into the mainline kernel and they won't have a driver backward compatibility issue to worry about. They choose not to for business reasons (market segmentation/artificial hardware limits via drivers) or because they are being cheap. And because much of the market doesn't know enough to care, it mostly works for them. In the long run I think it limits the IoT ecosystem from progressing and it's a practice which must stop. If your hardware is not fully supported by the mainline kernel, it may as well not exist.
      - LoSboccacc 11y ago
        Yeah the usual trite copyasta, meanwhile in windows and osx land proprietary drivers works for decades unchanged making the whole argument a leftist pipe dream. The argument isn't bad per se, it's just that reality disagrees.
egypturnash 11y ago
I am going to go out on a limb here and hazard a guess that the number of people willing to hang out on Android forums and hassle with rooting the phone to install a new version of the OS is vanishingly small compared to the number of people who couldn't tell you who made their phone, much less what version of the OS it runs. That said the fact that a new Android release has to pass through two other sets of hands before it can get to an end user sure ain't helping.
wvenable 11y ago
I used to be one of those people but I've really stopped caring. There just isn't enough of a difference between all these releases to matter anymore. Is it going to make your device faster or easier to use? Probably not. Android apps have to run on almost every very version anyway so even that isn't an issue.
- st3v3r 11y ago
  Yeah, but because of that, it increases time to market for Android apps.
  - wvenable 11y ago
    As an end-user that doesn't affect me (it does, but it's pretty indirect). The Android ecosystem doesn't seem very healthy to me; it works merely out of sheer effort by everyone involved.
- rtpg 11y ago
  Yeah, I used to be much more excited because Android was playing catch-up on quality for a while. Remember the jump from 2.3 to 4? Just a much smoother experience overall. What a fun time. Now it's mostly backend stuff as Play Services regroups much more of the user visible stuff. Boring is good too though, just not as exciting
Osiris 11y ago
I'm on Republic Wireless, so there's only three phone models. They did a 4.4 to 5.1 upgrade fairly recently on every model. There were a lot of people begging for the upgrade, but there was also a very vocal group of people complaining about the upgrade, either the process of doing the upgrade, or the fact that so much in the UI changed that they were comfortable with. A lot of people were asking to be able to downgrade because they didn't want to re-learn how to use their phones. Statistically, I don't know what percentage of people want upgrades vs don't, but anecdotally, I feel that most non-technical users don't want upgrades because they've learned how to use the phone and they're comfortable with it.
- BatFastard 11y ago
  Love Republic Wireless! The moto phones are great too, and cheap.
gleenn 11y ago
I used to get super excited. I've calmed down a lot based on how many bugs there are that I experience on my Nexus 6p. I love this phone, I love Android, but I finally get understand part of the reason carriers drag their feet and reimplement stuff: they expect higher quality than Google delivers. Careful word choice there: expect, not actually deliver. I enjoy the new shiny, but there are some glari g bugs.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- cableshaft 11y ago
  Google's OS having bugs is not really why carriers drag their feet to upgrade, that's just a coincidence. It takes money and time to upgrade all their carrier-specific "value-added"(i.e. shit) software on top of the new operating system, and they hesitate to do it, because they've already got it working, and taking no action is much easier and cheaper than upgrading. Besides there isn't enough customers yelling about it anyway (the ones who really care only buy the phones with known fast OS upgrade cycles, like Nexus).
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
> Users are massively excited about new Android releases and these people are usually out of touch enthusiast-types who are happy with half-baked releases that require a lot of tweaking, rooting, and replacement launchers and such to be usable. The 5.0 release a year ago was just a nightmare. It was slow and introduced a significant memory leak that I find impossible to believe that Google didn't know about at launch. But Google likes to cheer on its product and have Nexus yearly launches. Tying your physical product to your software one seems a questionable strategy at best, and a boneheaded decision at worst. I'd be happy with a new version every two years with significant refinement done in the meantime. I have a Nexus and I fear every major update. It just breaks my phone and causes me stress until a .1 or .2 update finally fixes the issues Google introduced. If we're in a position where even Nexus owners are scared of updates, then there's something fundamentally wrong here. Worse, this morally empowers OEMs to say, "Well, google releases unfinished code, so we'll going to skip this update for a while." Honestly, the phone OEMs that went from 4.x to 5.1, skipping 5.0, were on the right side of history here. Every other Google update is half-baked and everyone knows it. I don't think Google is giving itself enough time to iron out the issues. Slowing down this train is the only solution here that makes sense, imo. Meanwhile my ipad is bulletproof. Sure it gets minor issues now and again, but Apple's QA level is leaps above Android. Lastly, the mobile revolution, at least in terms of phones, has long matured. Every update is just another denial about how close we are to the innovation grave here. There's just nothing compelling that requires frequent updates. Its time to move into a refinement period, the same way MS took NT4/2000 and made XP/2003 or Apple took a 3-4 year innovation break between Tiger/Leopard and Lion/Mountain Lion.
- wangii 11y ago
  To down voters, why down voted this comment? I find it honest and not offensive.
- tdkl 11y ago
  This is exactly the reason why I don't want a Nexus anymore, getting updates slowly is a feature, instead of playing a beta tester for Googles "ship it" culture. I switched to iOS on iPhone 5S last year after Lollipop being a shitshow, but iOS 9 has shown me that Apple isn't anything better, because they have to sell new hardware, so gimping older devices on purpose is the name of the game. I don't care about version numbers, if the OS is a stutter show after an update. All those iOS update bragging would be interesting if Apple would allow downgrades to previous major versions of iOS until next one gets released. Now a rule of the thumb is find the device/software you like right now and decide about updating it only after research of feedback.
puddintane 11y ago
In reality I feel as though users are more concerned about a stable, well-refined, secure product versus having the latest trends. This is becoming more and more important to me as I have ranged from the updating on nightly builds to only updating when I see real performance benefit - and even then I wait till I see more users from my model and service provider commenting on how much the change benefits them. *edit - of course application updating is an entirely different process and I allow this to update ASAP due to unlimited data plans but updating core os features has become more and more towards the above versus the application update idea.
st3v3r 11y ago
Android forums aren't the majority of users, though. And if the majority of users did care enough about updates, they'd be pushing for them.

brianbreslin 11y ago

android forums represent such a tiny fraction of a percentage of overall android users though. I wish it was disintermediated from the carriers. I bought a generic android phone from BLU last year for $99 and wanted to update on my own to latest version of android, and it was such a pain to figure out how (I gave up).

LoSboccacc 11y ago

Enthusiasts is a subset of users - a small one at that. Still I agree the problem is devices are not getting update and it's not a problem of want as the article hints, but of can't, at least at the user level: Of course carriers and manufacturers hate having to support devices instead of selling new ones!

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
It's not like manufacturers don't want the strong brand recognition of being well supported and giving their owners the latest stuff. That helps them sell future phones as well, by gaining market share. The problem that Google apologists/Android fanboys forget... is that deploying an Android update is a HUGE cost to manufacturers for customization, testing, and deployment. Google ships endless new versions without any respect to this, and leaves most of the work, and the cost, on manufacturers, who already had thin margins to begin with. Especially on entry level phones, hardware costs have been a race to the bottom. These people are afraid to point out that Google has created an OS that's hard to update universally, requires a custom deployment for each and every hardware model, and is shipped without working hardware support for most of the hardware using it or even a modicum of stability even on their own reference platforms.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  while there are many phones around, there aren't hundred thousands different soc to support. if the linux kernel driver model wouldn't be so hostile to driver backward compatibility, it'd be trivial for soc provider to have a single device driver delivered with the soc and cut the certification costs by orders of magnitude. this is something google could fix, btw, creating something like FUSE but for wireless chipset integration and keeping that backward compatible.
  - DanielDent 11y ago
    Users do not benefit from binary blob drivers. They are insecure, make it hard to fix problems, and add artificial constraints to hardware. Manufacturers can get their drivers merged into the mainline kernel and they won't have a driver backward compatibility issue to worry about. They choose not to for business reasons (market segmentation/artificial hardware limits via drivers) or because they are being cheap. And because much of the market doesn't know enough to care, it mostly works for them. In the long run I think it limits the IoT ecosystem from progressing and it's a practice which must stop. If your hardware is not fully supported by the mainline kernel, it may as well not exist.
    - LoSboccacc 11y ago
      Yeah the usual trite copyasta, meanwhile in windows and osx land proprietary drivers works for decades unchanged making the whole argument a leftist pipe dream. The argument isn't bad per se, it's just that reality disagrees.

egypturnash 11y ago

I am going to go out on a limb here and hazard a guess that the number of people willing to hang out on Android forums and hassle with rooting the phone to install a new version of the OS is vanishingly small compared to the number of people who couldn't tell you who made their phone, much less what version of the OS it runs. That said the fact that a new Android release has to pass through two other sets of hands before it can get to an end user sure ain't helping.

wvenable 11y ago

I used to be one of those people but I've really stopped caring. There just isn't enough of a difference between all these releases to matter anymore. Is it going to make your device faster or easier to use? Probably not. Android apps have to run on almost every very version anyway so even that isn't an issue.

st3v3r 11y ago
Yeah, but because of that, it increases time to market for Android apps.
- wvenable 11y ago
  As an end-user that doesn't affect me (it does, but it's pretty indirect). The Android ecosystem doesn't seem very healthy to me; it works merely out of sheer effort by everyone involved.
rtpg 11y ago
Yeah, I used to be much more excited because Android was playing catch-up on quality for a while. Remember the jump from 2.3 to 4? Just a much smoother experience overall. What a fun time. Now it's mostly backend stuff as Play Services regroups much more of the user visible stuff. Boring is good too though, just not as exciting

Osiris 11y ago

I'm on Republic Wireless, so there's only three phone models. They did a 4.4 to 5.1 upgrade fairly recently on every model. There were a lot of people begging for the upgrade, but there was also a very vocal group of people complaining about the upgrade, either the process of doing the upgrade, or the fact that so much in the UI changed that they were comfortable with. A lot of people were asking to be able to downgrade because they didn't want to re-learn how to use their phones. Statistically, I don't know what percentage of people want upgrades vs don't, but anecdotally, I feel that most non-technical users don't want upgrades because they've learned how to use the phone and they're comfortable with it.

BatFastard 11y ago
Love Republic Wireless! The moto phones are great too, and cheap.

gleenn 11y ago

I used to get super excited. I've calmed down a lot based on how many bugs there are that I experience on my Nexus 6p. I love this phone, I love Android, but I finally get understand part of the reason carriers drag their feet and reimplement stuff: they expect higher quality than Google delivers. Careful word choice there: expect, not actually deliver. I enjoy the new shiny, but there are some glari g bugs.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
cableshaft 11y ago
Google's OS having bugs is not really why carriers drag their feet to upgrade, that's just a coincidence. It takes money and time to upgrade all their carrier-specific "value-added"(i.e. shit) software on top of the new operating system, and they hesitate to do it, because they've already got it working, and taking no action is much easier and cheaper than upgrading. Besides there isn't enough customers yelling about it anyway (the ones who really care only buy the phones with known fast OS upgrade cycles, like Nexus).

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

> Users are massively excited about new Android releases and these people are usually out of touch enthusiast-types who are happy with half-baked releases that require a lot of tweaking, rooting, and replacement launchers and such to be usable. The 5.0 release a year ago was just a nightmare. It was slow and introduced a significant memory leak that I find impossible to believe that Google didn't know about at launch. But Google likes to cheer on its product and have Nexus yearly launches. Tying your physical product to your software one seems a questionable strategy at best, and a boneheaded decision at worst. I'd be happy with a new version every two years with significant refinement done in the meantime. I have a Nexus and I fear every major update. It just breaks my phone and causes me stress until a .1 or .2 update finally fixes the issues Google introduced. If we're in a position where even Nexus owners are scared of updates, then there's something fundamentally wrong here. Worse, this morally empowers OEMs to say, "Well, google releases unfinished code, so we'll going to skip this update for a while." Honestly, the phone OEMs that went from 4.x to 5.1, skipping 5.0, were on the right side of history here. Every other Google update is half-baked and everyone knows it. I don't think Google is giving itself enough time to iron out the issues. Slowing down this train is the only solution here that makes sense, imo. Meanwhile my ipad is bulletproof. Sure it gets minor issues now and again, but Apple's QA level is leaps above Android. Lastly, the mobile revolution, at least in terms of phones, has long matured. Every update is just another denial about how close we are to the innovation grave here. There's just nothing compelling that requires frequent updates. Its time to move into a refinement period, the same way MS took NT4/2000 and made XP/2003 or Apple took a 3-4 year innovation break between Tiger/Leopard and Lion/Mountain Lion.

wangii 11y ago
To down voters, why down voted this comment? I find it honest and not offensive.
tdkl 11y ago
This is exactly the reason why I don't want a Nexus anymore, getting updates slowly is a feature, instead of playing a beta tester for Googles "ship it" culture. I switched to iOS on iPhone 5S last year after Lollipop being a shitshow, but iOS 9 has shown me that Apple isn't anything better, because they have to sell new hardware, so gimping older devices on purpose is the name of the game. I don't care about version numbers, if the OS is a stutter show after an update. All those iOS update bragging would be interesting if Apple would allow downgrades to previous major versions of iOS until next one gets released. Now a rule of the thumb is find the device/software you like right now and decide about updating it only after research of feedback.

puddintane 11y ago

In reality I feel as though users are more concerned about a stable, well-refined, secure product versus having the latest trends. This is becoming more and more important to me as I have ranged from the updating on nightly builds to only updating when I see real performance benefit - and even then I wait till I see more users from my model and service provider commenting on how much the change benefits them. *edit - of course application updating is an entirely different process and I allow this to update ASAP due to unlimited data plans but updating core os features has become more and more towards the above versus the application update idea.

st3v3r 11y ago

Android forums aren't the majority of users, though. And if the majority of users did care enough about updates, they'd be pushing for them.