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That's up to the hardware vendors and service providers. It's not entirely in the Android team's hands.

by cheald 16y ago

rbanffy 16y ago
How do we pressure them? Phone makers have spent a very long time building a selling phones to telcos. The result is they spent most of their history catering to interests completely opposite to those of their users. I want an unlocked, upgradable phone. Just that. I don't need "social" interfaces or any fancy stuff if that will cause updates to be delayed.
- gte910h 16y ago
  Handset makers actually want to make you buy another phone. It's completely not in their interest to upgrade your device, they want you to buy another. That's why I don't get how google thinks their hands off scheme has a snowball's chance in hell of taking off. Handset vendors aren't going to just start supporting the latest version of Android out of the goodness of their hearts. Now if they can get the specs of the required system down to about 1/2 the cost of what it currently is, then that's less of a problem: We can buy new phones without worrying about them being upgradable. But in the current ecosystem, with the current costs of phones, and the current unwillingness of google to put their money on the line getting manufactuers to update their builds, Android plain loses to iPhone, which is very very sad for everyone.
gte910h 16y ago
Bullshit. There are any number of ways Google can fix this issue: Subsidized engineers to write drivers for them Free/Cheap consulting team to write drivers and package releases for them Supporting open source projects for porting firmware forward for the phones They can create a HUGE code and VHDL library for phone development which can be used by anyone building a phone, thereby increasing the ability to release interfaces that fit with the new Android releases Then can take on the vendor specific builds (a la a build farm). And most importantly: Re merging Android with the Linux kernel, and pushing heavily for phone vendors to merge their source in as well. Those are just technically oriented ways they can do it. From a business standpoint: They can make an "Instant Upgrade" seal they put on phones that will have upgrades available X days after the vanilla Google release is out there. I know many people would look for this. They can add a marketing division around android which gives a top tier to android phones which support a reasonable update timeline. They can add future proof specs for the next 3 versions of Android, and anyone with at least those steps can run it out of the box They can step up the GPL enforcement, making sure people are releasing all the drivers for all the phones as they're created, then take those source code drops and vanilla android, release a vanilla android build for all phones (or all phones that don't release an updated version in X days). Google is providing pisspoor integration support for vendors, and the vendors certainly have no interest in updating handsets. If google doesn't fix this, Apple wins.

That's up to the hardware vendors and service providers. It's not entirely in the Android team's hands.

by cheald 16y ago

That's up to the hardware vendors and service providers. It's not entirely in the Android team's hands.

How do we pressure them? Phone makers have spent a very long time building a selling phones to telcos. The result is they spent most of their history catering to interests completely opposite to those of their users. I want an unlocked, upgradable phone. Just that. I don't need "social" interfaces or any fancy stuff if that will cause updates to be delayed.

gte910h 16y ago
Handset makers actually want to make you buy another phone. It's completely not in their interest to upgrade your device, they want you to buy another. That's why I don't get how google thinks their hands off scheme has a snowball's chance in hell of taking off. Handset vendors aren't going to just start supporting the latest version of Android out of the goodness of their hearts. Now if they can get the specs of the required system down to about 1/2 the cost of what it currently is, then that's less of a problem: We can buy new phones without worrying about them being upgradable. But in the current ecosystem, with the current costs of phones, and the current unwillingness of google to put their money on the line getting manufactuers to update their builds, Android plain loses to iPhone, which is very very sad for everyone.

gte910h 16y ago

Bullshit. There are any number of ways Google can fix this issue: Subsidized engineers to write drivers for them Free/Cheap consulting team to write drivers and package releases for them Supporting open source projects for porting firmware forward for the phones They can create a HUGE code and VHDL library for phone development which can be used by anyone building a phone, thereby increasing the ability to release interfaces that fit with the new Android releases Then can take on the vendor specific builds (a la a build farm). And most importantly: Re merging Android with the Linux kernel, and pushing heavily for phone vendors to merge their source in as well. Those are just technically oriented ways they can do it. From a business standpoint: They can make an "Instant Upgrade" seal they put on phones that will have upgrades available X days after the vanilla Google release is out there. I know many people would look for this. They can add a marketing division around android which gives a top tier to android phones which support a reasonable update timeline. They can add future proof specs for the next 3 versions of Android, and anyone with at least those steps can run it out of the box They can step up the GPL enforcement, making sure people are releasing all the drivers for all the phones as they're created, then take those source code drops and vanilla android, release a vanilla android build for all phones (or all phones that don't release an updated version in X days). Google is providing pisspoor integration support for vendors, and the vendors certainly have no interest in updating handsets. If google doesn't fix this, Apple wins.