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"device makers can choose to deliver a new Android Update" ... "can choose". Preferably they shouldn't be able to choose. Google should be in charge of updates

• sigmar 9y ago
  Agreed. Updating the phone being easier won't solve the problem. The problem is a mismatch in incentives. Manufacturers don't have an incentive to update older devices because (1) they don't want to put any resources into last year's phone and (2) they want their customers to upgrade to their newly released phone.
  • usrusr 9y ago
    Still waiting for a phone brand to bite the bullet and offer paid updates. Because it's either that or no updates. I know what I would prefer.
    • 0xFFC 9y ago
      Good idea. It fits now more than ever. I have said this before. Right now SoC's are passed the threshold performance wise. For e.g if you are not into playing high end games your phone cpu is enough for 5 year if you only doing web browsing watching movies and reading mails.
    • voltagex_ 9y ago
      It still won't solve the "Qualcomm won't update the BSP" issue, though.
      • swiley 9y ago
        This right here! Closed SOC BSPs that are tied to android are the real problem! If google had stuck with the standard Linux APIs or added appropriate new one when they needed them and where more strict about open software we wouldn't be in this mess.
        • vetinari 9y ago
          Not true. Witness the routers or another embedded devices, that are using standard Linux and yet are never updated. Or worse, coming with obsolete kernel right at the release day.
      • Larrikin 9y ago
        What is this issue?
        • voltagex_ 9y ago
          https://www.xda-developers.com/in-depth-capitulation-of-why-msm8974-devices-are-excluded-from-nougat/ https://www.xda-developers.com/in-depth-capitulation-of-why-...
    • jsz0 9y ago
      The take rate on paid software updates probably wouldn't be good enough for that to be a realistic option.
  • mtgx 9y ago
    And Google doesn't really have a real incentive to fix the situation either. It's not really a "we need to fix this by next year or people will stop buying Android phones!" type of situation. They still make money on ads on Android, whether they are secure or not. At least if you could adblock mobile ads to stop malvertising, as some already do on the desktop, Google may have had a bigger incentive to fix it. But they removed that incentive a long time ago when they decided adblockers aren't allowed in the store.
    • smichel17 9y ago
      You can still get them on your phone, though. DNS66 on f-droid.
  • hehheh 9y ago
    And (1) is in part because they deliberately put in extraordinary effort to customize and break Android, increasing the costs of merging from upstream.
  • jldugger 9y ago
    You know, one part of the Apple ecosystem dynamic I find interesting is the used market. Some people I know upgrade yearly, and because the used market for a 1 year old iPhone is pretty strong, they can sell their old one to recoup some of the cost. It's still a spendy endeavor, but a used iphone 6 goes for like $180 bucks, which isn't bad for a phone released nearly 3 years ago. I'll let others do the math on depriciation rates, as the point is that Apple supports their phones. Hell, iPhone 5's got an iOS update last month, and that phone was released in 2012. If you buy an iPhone, you know that a) it will be supported for a good long while, and b) as a result, its resale value will be high. Apple's trick is to realize that high resale values help sales, not harm it. It likely helps that they get a good slice of profit on app sales, but it's not clear to me that cheaper handsets would lead to proportionally more app sales. And it helps that no manufacturer can swoop in and release a cheaper iOS device to challenge the market for used iPhones. So it might not be enough to persuade rando Android handset manufacturers to support devices, but this might explain why the Nexus lineup was replaced with Pixels.
    • Someone 9y ago
      "Apple's trick is to realize that high resale values help sales" I think that's only an extra. Their real trick is that they realized that, as long as each new generation of phone is a lot better than the previous one, they don't need to design mid-end phones, but can instead sell last year's phones as this year's mid-end phones. Apart from the "don't need to design" part, that means they don't need to market those mid-end phones as much, as millions of people already walk around advertising them. Also, customers who buy such a phone do not look like mid-end device buyers; they look like premium device buyers who bought a new phone last year.
  • dragonwriter 9y ago
    Removing the burden of updates for OEMs makes it practical for an OEM to differentiate on update support. If any of them does that, it creates competitive pressure on others; and if users care enough to purchase based on support commitments, some OEM will have a strong incentive to be the first to differentiate that way.
  • kevincox 9y ago
    If consumers actually cared about this the manufactuers would. However aproximately no one actually checks support cycle as a feature of the phone. I do, and unfortunately that leaves me (and my family because I have convinced them) with Nexus, Pixel or iOS devieces. I can't find another device with any sort of update promise at all. Until a significat number of poeple start to care about, and demand a well defined update policy this will not change. We need to create the incentive for the manufacturers.
    • majewsky 9y ago
      Find something that's supported by LineageOS (or similar). That won't give you warranty, but it will give you updates beyond what the original vendor offers (or Google (or Qualcomm)).
• halflings 9y ago
  That's just not how businesses work. Companies that sell Android phones want to have control over their platform, and above everything "differentiate" themselves from other android-selling companies. Also note that each company has different hardware, custom drivers, etc. ; those are often not compatible with new updates and they need to do additional work to make things work correctly, work which they might just refuse to do. No hardware company is going to refuse to update Android "just because". With this modular base, they have no reason to not update.
  • neogodless 9y ago
    This made me realize just how weird the phone business is. Because it's not how "businesses" work at all! It's just how smart phone manufacturers currently work. Imagine if Microsoft couldn't publish security updates without going through Dell, HP, AND your ISP, and you start to realize how crazy the situation currently is.
    • JetSpiegel 9y ago
      Well, Google could have just pulled an Apple and don't licence Android for manufacturers that allowed this. Can't tout "bigger install base than Apple" with that, though.
    • dragonwriter 9y ago
      The actual weird thing is the PC market, which is pretty much the only place where a third-party software manufacturer is not treated as a subordinate supplier by the hardware manufacturer of the device the software runs on. And it's mostly a side effect of the missteps that IBM made in the 1980s because they didn't understand the market dynamics, which is why they aren't in that market, commodity manufacturers are, and Microsoft was the big winner, not any of the hardware players.
  • danieldk 9y ago
    With this modular base, they have no reason to not update. They do. It is not only a technical problem. If it was, they would be happy to roll out security updates for existing Android versions (without rebasing to later releases). A large part of it planned obsolescence. Device makers and carriers want users to buy a new device every two years, to make money and tie them to a contract longer. A newer OS version plus security updates is a big selling point. Secondly, vendors and carriers just don't want to put in the development time and testing. Since most users will buy the hardware anyway, why waste money? The only real solution to this problem is that Google would require minimum support terms in order to license Google Play Services. Or a change in consumer mindset.
• oblio 9y ago
  Google probably feels that they're not yet in a position where they force this. My money's on this being an intermediary step towards what you're asking. Something like: 1-2 years from now Google will change the agreements with the manufacturers (probably when their current agreements expire). Under the new agreements, Google will publish a new version of the base, and manufacturers will have N months to update. After N months Google will just push the new updates even if the manufacturers do nothing about it.
• stronglikedan 9y ago
  I believe that would be too much of a headache for Google to manage. E.g., having to deal with vendor push back. The liability ultimately lies closest to the end user, and for the device itself, this is the device manufacturer. Let them deal with the headache of forcing their customers to update. Of course, I could be wrong, but that is just my humble opinion.
• dev_tty01 9y ago
  This is missing the point I think. Google does not want to push updates because that requires them to do the massive job of verification and validation necessary to push new features to so many hardware variants.
  • problems 9y ago
    Microsoft does it. Every Linux distros does it. Assuming they can maintain compatibility with existing drivers it should be fully possible for them to just update a few relevant OS components, especially for security updates. Feature updates may pose a bigger problem, but aren't really a major issue in my view. Leave that for manufacturers if need be.
    • vetinari 9y ago
      Microsoft mobile system runs on exactly one SoC. Even for that, the different brands of devices had different rollout dates.
      • problems 9y ago
        I'm talking about their desktop OS, Windows.
        • vetinari 9y ago
          Desktop OS has UEFI or BIOS available for boot and platform services, together with enumerable busses, so you can find out what hardware you have available. Such things are luxury in the mobile world, you need to know what hardware you have in advance, otherwise wrong poke and something will hang.
          • deleted 9y ago
            [deleted]
          • problems 9y ago
            It's entirely possible to present a solid ABI that would allow vendor specific boot and hardware access. I can see no reason those can't be abstracted out.