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Then I guess you will be without a phone. I am pretty sure Apple is one of the best companies in terms of supporting their old devices. My friend has a two year

by usaphp 10y ago

Then I guess you will be without a phone. I am pretty sure Apple is one of the best companies in terms of supporting their old devices. My friend has a two year old android device and its pretty much unusable at this point. Iphone 4 was released 6+ years ago.

c22 10y ago
I have a couple android devices older than that running aosp without a sweat. Even the nexus one is surprisingly functional on CyanogenMod.
- scarface74 10y ago
  So do you really think AOSP/CyanogenMod support on some phones is a better user experience than OTA updates by the actual OS provider? Every iPhone introduce since 2011 is still supported with OS updates.
tooFastFuckYou 10y ago
Android is a fraud. Google's failure to design an OS with a proper hardware-abstraction layer and driver model has made it so, along with its failure to free us from vendor and telco tyranny as it was supposed to. Instead of installing the new version of Android on the day of release, users wait months, years, or forever for vendors to dribble out their hacked, proprietary version of Android separate for EVERY DEVICE, one at a time. That is pathetic.
- victorhooi 10y ago
  Err, right - and does Apple provide this "abstraction layer" you speak of? I'd hazard a guess and say no. Or is it simply that their's is a closed ecosystem, with only 1 or 2 devices released a year, and they won't let you run their software on anything else? The fact that Android runs on several hundred different phones from manufacturers around the globe, or that home hackers have managed to get it to run on the most obscure of devices is testament to its flexibility. So I'm not really sure where your argument is coming from. Apple is a walled-garden, with a proprietary OS that literally will only run on their device. Even their SDK doesn't include an actual emulator for the platform - it's just a simulation. I don't have any deep knowledge of phones - but I suspect it's not as simple as "Let's make VMWare for phones". Things like the cellular radio probably require low-level hardware access, the mobile tradeoffs (portability, battery life etc.) probably aren't conductive to virtualising everything, many parts of the silicon probably require binary blobs simply due to how the industry is etc
- imtringued 10y ago
  That problem is mostly because ARM SoCs don't even have the concept of a standardised bootloader or dynamic device discovery like x86 chipsets which means every SoC needs it's own custom bootloader and it's own custom kernel where the available devices must be hardcoded. See basically any single board ARM computer which suffer from the exact same problem. This is why the community forms around the specific device rather than the architecture in general. ARM's openness ironically makes it unsuitable as an open software plaftorm whereas on x86 you just put your iso on a flash drive and it works pretty much everywhere. BIOS/UEFI might be bloated but at the very least it actually achieved what it set out to do, meanwhile we are still waiting for the ARM SoC manufacturers to adopt a standard. Source: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/bring-back-the-bios/ https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/bring-back-the-bios/
0xmohit 10y ago
> My friend has a two year old android device I've used Android devices but don't recall receiving OS upgrades except for one minor update in every case. OEMs seem to suggest that if you want an OS upgrade, buy a new device.

by usaphp 10y ago

c22 10y ago

I have a couple android devices older than that running aosp without a sweat. Even the nexus one is surprisingly functional on CyanogenMod.

scarface74 10y ago
So do you really think AOSP/CyanogenMod support on some phones is a better user experience than OTA updates by the actual OS provider? Every iPhone introduce since 2011 is still supported with OS updates.

tooFastFuckYou 10y ago

Android is a fraud. Google's failure to design an OS with a proper hardware-abstraction layer and driver model has made it so, along with its failure to free us from vendor and telco tyranny as it was supposed to. Instead of installing the new version of Android on the day of release, users wait months, years, or forever for vendors to dribble out their hacked, proprietary version of Android separate for EVERY DEVICE, one at a time. That is pathetic.

victorhooi 10y ago
Err, right - and does Apple provide this "abstraction layer" you speak of? I'd hazard a guess and say no. Or is it simply that their's is a closed ecosystem, with only 1 or 2 devices released a year, and they won't let you run their software on anything else? The fact that Android runs on several hundred different phones from manufacturers around the globe, or that home hackers have managed to get it to run on the most obscure of devices is testament to its flexibility. So I'm not really sure where your argument is coming from. Apple is a walled-garden, with a proprietary OS that literally will only run on their device. Even their SDK doesn't include an actual emulator for the platform - it's just a simulation. I don't have any deep knowledge of phones - but I suspect it's not as simple as "Let's make VMWare for phones". Things like the cellular radio probably require low-level hardware access, the mobile tradeoffs (portability, battery life etc.) probably aren't conductive to virtualising everything, many parts of the silicon probably require binary blobs simply due to how the industry is etc
imtringued 10y ago
That problem is mostly because ARM SoCs don't even have the concept of a standardised bootloader or dynamic device discovery like x86 chipsets which means every SoC needs it's own custom bootloader and it's own custom kernel where the available devices must be hardcoded. See basically any single board ARM computer which suffer from the exact same problem. This is why the community forms around the specific device rather than the architecture in general. ARM's openness ironically makes it unsuitable as an open software plaftorm whereas on x86 you just put your iso on a flash drive and it works pretty much everywhere. BIOS/UEFI might be bloated but at the very least it actually achieved what it set out to do, meanwhile we are still waiting for the ARM SoC manufacturers to adopt a standard. Source: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/bring-back-the-bios/ https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/bring-back-the-bios/

0xmohit 10y ago

> My friend has a two year old android device I've used Android devices but don't recall receiving OS upgrades except for one minor update in every case. OEMs seem to suggest that if you want an OS upgrade, buy a new device.