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When I buy a laptop I install whatever is the latest version of Ubuntu on it and am done. When I buy an access point I install whatever is the latest version of

When I buy a laptop I install whatever is the latest version of Ubuntu on it and am done. When I buy an access point I install whatever is the latest version of OpenWrt on it and am done. I've tried to do the same thing with phones using LineageOS but it's hopeless. Devices are often half broken and are never guaranteed to continue being supported because of this kernel mess. It seems there's slow progress being made which is nice. I was hoping Android One phones would at least guarantee monthly security updates but it's still up to the manufacturer if that happens or not.

umanwizard 8y ago
When I buy a phone I install whatever is the latest version of iOS on it and am done ;)
- mixedCase 8y ago
  It's all about tradeoffs, Android phones getting updates usually means the phone gets faster as opposed to ever closer to unusably slow.
  - mitchty 8y ago
    > It's all about tradeoffs, Android phones getting updates usually means the phone gets faster as opposed to ever closer to unusably slow. You say this like it is unique to android, iOS 12 was basically the same. And I can say from friends experiences, its not always true for all android phones.
  - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
    Anecdotally, iOS 11 made my iPhone 6 run slower than iOS 10, but iOS 12 made it run faster than iOS 10. (This is in line with other reports and benchmarks you'll find if you go looking.) There's an awful lot of snark about iOS slowing down with each successive version, but I'm not at all convinced it's universally true. (Again, anecdotally, I'd say iOS 7 and 9–11 were guilty of that.) At any rate, the big issue I tend to hear about Android phones getting updates is "my Android phone isn't getting updates." My iPhone 6 shipped in 2014, and iOS 12 actually ran on 2013's iPhone 5s. How many Android phones that shipped before 2016 are getting Android P? Are there Android phones that shipped in 2016 that aren't?
    - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
      > Here's an awful lot of snark about iOS slowing down with each successive version, but I'm not at all convinced it's universally true. (Again, anecdotally, I'd say iOS 7 and 9–11 were guilty of that.) It's not universally true. It's mostly true, with a couple of outliers (namely iOS 9 and iOS 11). Most of time, major iOS upgrades slow down older hardware. I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with this, if not for the fact that iOS downgrades are literally impossible (outside a small window of time). Install an update and discover your phone is too slow? Either learn to live with it or buy a new phone.
      - Mononokay 8y ago
        > I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with this, if not for the fact that iOS downgrades are literally impossible (outside a small window of time). Install an update and discover your phone is too slow? Either learn to live with it or buy a new phone. Or you could just restore from a backup, possible at any time.
        Wowfunhappy 8y ago
        Nope, you can't restore to an iOS version that isn't being actively signed by Apple's servers. Restoring a backup just puts back user data, it doesn't change your iOS version.
        Mononokay 8y ago
        That's a complete lie, but okay. https://medium.com/metodixtech/ios-how-to-downgrade-and-save-shsh-blobs-a11158c3c970 https://medium.com/metodixtech/ios-how-to-downgrade-and-save...
        Wowfunhappy 8y ago
        In the first sentence of the article you linked: > You can downgrade (If you don’t have Shsh blobs saved) only until Apple is still signing the old software. Saving SHSH blobs needs to be done in advance, while the iOS version you want to install is still being signed by Apple. With blobs, you used to be able to use a replay attack to force a restore. This doesn't work anymore due to the addition of NONCE, except in very limited and not particularly useful circumstances (you can move to an unsigned iOS version IF you're already Jailbroken AND if SEP is compatible). If you know a way around this system, please do share. The Jailbreak community will love you for it. :) Apple does everything in their power to make downgrading iOS impossible outside of a narrow window. I suspect this is also why we haven't seen any actual, definitive speed tests between different iOS versions. The discussion always devolves into "this feels slower" or "I remember my phone used to be like this," because no one can actually install an older version to test with.
  - pdimitar 8y ago
    People love to latch onto the outlier cases when an iPhone gets slower or half-broken after an update. For the last 5-6 years however, everyone I asked told me that their iPhone and iPad either gets a bit smoother or stays the same after a new iOS. So please don't imply iOS updates brings iDevices "ever closer to unusably slow" because that's very non-factual.
    - cronix 8y ago
      > For the last 5-6 years however, everyone I asked told me that their iPhone and iPad either gets a bit smoother or stays the same after a new iOS. Except those who Apple was "helping" "preserve battery life" by purposefully slowing the clock speeds on updates without telling them? I've often wondered how many people went out and actually purchased an entirely new phone due to this unannounced "help" vs slapping a (relatively cheap) new battery in it?
      - pdimitar 8y ago
        It's a basic electronics knowledge that there's a danger in physically damaging a chip if you continuously feed it less voltage than it needs. What Apple did is to prefer to have people's devices run slower compared to breaking them. What they did wrong was keeping quiet about it. I ain't ever disputing that, it was a really bad decision to hide it. The reasoning to do it however has solid foundations in physical reality. Even I that I know nothing of electronics went out of my way to read about it and asked several electronical engineer acquaintances of mine and they all said Apple did the right thing by slowing down the devices.
        cronix 8y ago
        I was just bringing it up to dispute your claim > So please don't imply iOS updates brings iDevices "ever closer to unusably slow" because that's very non-factual. Because THAT was non-factual. They have done it, and for some it was "unusably slow." Whether the reasons were electrically sound wasn't in dispute.
        8y ago
  - varjag 8y ago
    No, Android phones usually means not getting the updates in time, or at all. Speaking as someone who participated in 2008 Android Developer Challenge and had Android phones since, and until the last year.
- pedrocr 8y ago
  You do nothing of the sort. You're buying a specific combination of hardware and software that may or may not get upgrades and security fixes over time, just like any Android phone. Apple just has a much better track record at doing that than any Android vendor. On the other hand when I buy a laptop or an access point I just do minimal checking of supported hardware in case there's something that's very exotic and then I get to install whatever software I want for however long I want to keep the hardware in service. For the HN crowd this should be worrying. Mobile is the #1 hardware platform by unit volume and there's no way we can actually target these devices sensibly.
  - pdimitar 8y ago
    > You do nothing of the sort. You're buying a specific combination of hardware and software that may or may not get upgrades and security fixes over time Bringing in strictly theoretical supposition which is directly at odds with what's historically been a very solid track record from Apple isn't doing your argument any favours. Unless I misunderstood you.
    - kibibu 8y ago
      My ancient iPhone 4 did everything that I needed it to, but I had to abandon it because Apple did too.
      - pdimitar 8y ago
        I challenge you to name me one Android device that is officially supported for 4 or more years. ;) iPhone 4 is 8 years old so not sure I see your point.
        josteink 8y ago
        > I challenge you to name me one Android device that is officially supported for 4 or more years This thread started with a comment about mobile phones in general being locked down to a specific kernel/os/software-combo, and that the upgrade paths is at the mercy of the vendor (unlike PCs). Both Apple and Android phones are locked down. Who does it in the most convenient way is irellevant to the argument made.
nextos 8y ago
There's a compromise solution to achieve something equivalent. And I say so after having tried many possibilities. Buy a Pixel or any other phone that supports AOSP (Sony does too, with some caveats) and install plain AOSP. It's not perfect as you need a bit of infrastructure to compile it yourself and keep OTA updates. But it's the most practical secure and privacy-respecting option, I think.
- pedrocr 8y ago
  As far as I know those have the exact same issues with their kernels. The problem isn't the Android side of things, that's workable with Android One phones too. The problem is what is described in the article, the kernels at best get some patches but are never upgraded to new versions. Imagine if your Linux laptop was restricted to the specific kernel version the particular vendor had decided to ship initially.
  - liotier 8y ago
    > Imagine if your Linux laptop was restricted to the specific kernel version the particular vendor had decided to ship initially In older times, kernel patches for exotic hardware often tied the user to a specific version - of course a very stale one... Let's not go there again !
- metildaa 8y ago
  The shoddy build quality, plus lack of microSD & heaphone jack means I will never buy a Pixel or other Google branded hardware. My friends seem to get a year or so before the SoC desolders from the motherboard, causing the device to bootloop, or the battery fails, or one of a million other things. Among us, there are a few dozen Pixels that are unusable due to their hardware defects. Meanwhile, both of my old Galaxy S4's is going strong, and ditto for all but one of my LGs (one had its charge controller start smoking, LG repaired it).
  - tremon 8y ago
    Same here. Galaxy Note II, still going strong. I bought a new battery for it a year ago, expecting the old one to go out soon, but I still get more than three days battery life from it.
jumpywizard 8y ago
Android Inc should probably have gone with a micro kernel, instead of going for Linux' monolithic approach. Would have made things much easier to manage in regard to separation of concerns.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  Maybe that's why they're building Fuchsia.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- ori_b 8y ago
  Wouldn't really help -- the biggest result would be that vendors would have less of a reason to release things under the GPL.
  - bri3d 8y ago
    It could help, depending on one's goals - one of the most notorious issues (or features, depending on who you ask) with the Linux development process is ruthless interface refactoring which requires device drivers and board support packages to be in mainline or to become stale almost instantly. A smaller surface area with a stable HAL would separate the proprietary / often bad board support code from the kernel itself and allow core changes to progress without requiring software-adverse hardware manufacturers to keep up. Whether or not this is a good thing is certainly debatable, but I'm not convinced the Linux "get to mainline or get wrecked" approach has stood the test of time well.
  - naasking 8y ago
    That's a non-issue because a microkernel system call interface is stable. Drivers will simply continue to work in perpetuity. That seems like a huge help to me.
    - ori_b 8y ago
throwaway9d0291 8y ago
Thanks to Treble, this shouldn't be a problem for phones launched with Pie. It should now be possible to build a single system partition then flash it to any Treble device. There are builds like this working on many devices right now: https://forum.xda-developers.com/project-treble/trebleenabled-device-development https://forum.xda-developers.com/project-treble/trebleenable...
- izacus 8y ago
  Caveat applies though - the hardware layer won't update in this case (which includes the kernel version), so you'll have original (old, maybe buggy or insecure) drivers even though the platform is updated. It's a huge improvement (a lot of bugs are in platform layer, including the media/stagefright stuff), but not yet perfect.
unixhero 8y ago
But you wouldn't download a car.
rawoke083600 8y ago
Side-hijack: Your fav OpenWRT router ?
- pedrocr 8y ago
  I use mostly TP-Link stuff. The Archer C7 has been a good work horse lately. You will need something with more CPU power if you have Gigabit internet service. For everything else it seems more than capable.
- milankragujevic 8y ago
  Anything not RAMIPS/MT76x8. If you want WiFi. I currently use a TL-MR3420 V5, which is 64/8 MB + MT7628 CPU, but WiFi is still broken. I'm gonna compile the latest revision of mt76 driver, today there was some talk on Github that it MAY fix SOME issues with SOME configs of WiFi routers... :/

umanwizard 8y ago

When I buy a phone I install whatever is the latest version of iOS on it and am done ;)

mixedCase 8y ago
It's all about tradeoffs, Android phones getting updates usually means the phone gets faster as opposed to ever closer to unusably slow.
- mitchty 8y ago
  > It's all about tradeoffs, Android phones getting updates usually means the phone gets faster as opposed to ever closer to unusably slow. You say this like it is unique to android, iOS 12 was basically the same. And I can say from friends experiences, its not always true for all android phones.
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  Anecdotally, iOS 11 made my iPhone 6 run slower than iOS 10, but iOS 12 made it run faster than iOS 10. (This is in line with other reports and benchmarks you'll find if you go looking.) There's an awful lot of snark about iOS slowing down with each successive version, but I'm not at all convinced it's universally true. (Again, anecdotally, I'd say iOS 7 and 9–11 were guilty of that.) At any rate, the big issue I tend to hear about Android phones getting updates is "my Android phone isn't getting updates." My iPhone 6 shipped in 2014, and iOS 12 actually ran on 2013's iPhone 5s. How many Android phones that shipped before 2016 are getting Android P? Are there Android phones that shipped in 2016 that aren't?
  - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
    > Here's an awful lot of snark about iOS slowing down with each successive version, but I'm not at all convinced it's universally true. (Again, anecdotally, I'd say iOS 7 and 9–11 were guilty of that.) It's not universally true. It's mostly true, with a couple of outliers (namely iOS 9 and iOS 11). Most of time, major iOS upgrades slow down older hardware. I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with this, if not for the fact that iOS downgrades are literally impossible (outside a small window of time). Install an update and discover your phone is too slow? Either learn to live with it or buy a new phone.
    - Mononokay 8y ago
      > I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with this, if not for the fact that iOS downgrades are literally impossible (outside a small window of time). Install an update and discover your phone is too slow? Either learn to live with it or buy a new phone. Or you could just restore from a backup, possible at any time.
      - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
        Nope, you can't restore to an iOS version that isn't being actively signed by Apple's servers. Restoring a backup just puts back user data, it doesn't change your iOS version.
        Mononokay 8y ago
        That's a complete lie, but okay. https://medium.com/metodixtech/ios-how-to-downgrade-and-save-shsh-blobs-a11158c3c970 https://medium.com/metodixtech/ios-how-to-downgrade-and-save...
        Wowfunhappy 8y ago
        In the first sentence of the article you linked: > You can downgrade (If you don’t have Shsh blobs saved) only until Apple is still signing the old software. Saving SHSH blobs needs to be done in advance, while the iOS version you want to install is still being signed by Apple. With blobs, you used to be able to use a replay attack to force a restore. This doesn't work anymore due to the addition of NONCE, except in very limited and not particularly useful circumstances (you can move to an unsigned iOS version IF you're already Jailbroken AND if SEP is compatible). If you know a way around this system, please do share. The Jailbreak community will love you for it. :) Apple does everything in their power to make downgrading iOS impossible outside of a narrow window. I suspect this is also why we haven't seen any actual, definitive speed tests between different iOS versions. The discussion always devolves into "this feels slower" or "I remember my phone used to be like this," because no one can actually install an older version to test with.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  People love to latch onto the outlier cases when an iPhone gets slower or half-broken after an update. For the last 5-6 years however, everyone I asked told me that their iPhone and iPad either gets a bit smoother or stays the same after a new iOS. So please don't imply iOS updates brings iDevices "ever closer to unusably slow" because that's very non-factual.
  - cronix 8y ago
    > For the last 5-6 years however, everyone I asked told me that their iPhone and iPad either gets a bit smoother or stays the same after a new iOS. Except those who Apple was "helping" "preserve battery life" by purposefully slowing the clock speeds on updates without telling them? I've often wondered how many people went out and actually purchased an entirely new phone due to this unannounced "help" vs slapping a (relatively cheap) new battery in it?
    - pdimitar 8y ago
      It's a basic electronics knowledge that there's a danger in physically damaging a chip if you continuously feed it less voltage than it needs. What Apple did is to prefer to have people's devices run slower compared to breaking them. What they did wrong was keeping quiet about it. I ain't ever disputing that, it was a really bad decision to hide it. The reasoning to do it however has solid foundations in physical reality. Even I that I know nothing of electronics went out of my way to read about it and asked several electronical engineer acquaintances of mine and they all said Apple did the right thing by slowing down the devices.
      - cronix 8y ago
        I was just bringing it up to dispute your claim > So please don't imply iOS updates brings iDevices "ever closer to unusably slow" because that's very non-factual. Because THAT was non-factual. They have done it, and for some it was "unusably slow." Whether the reasons were electrically sound wasn't in dispute.
        8y ago
- varjag 8y ago
  No, Android phones usually means not getting the updates in time, or at all. Speaking as someone who participated in 2008 Android Developer Challenge and had Android phones since, and until the last year.
pedrocr 8y ago
You do nothing of the sort. You're buying a specific combination of hardware and software that may or may not get upgrades and security fixes over time, just like any Android phone. Apple just has a much better track record at doing that than any Android vendor. On the other hand when I buy a laptop or an access point I just do minimal checking of supported hardware in case there's something that's very exotic and then I get to install whatever software I want for however long I want to keep the hardware in service. For the HN crowd this should be worrying. Mobile is the #1 hardware platform by unit volume and there's no way we can actually target these devices sensibly.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  > You do nothing of the sort. You're buying a specific combination of hardware and software that may or may not get upgrades and security fixes over time Bringing in strictly theoretical supposition which is directly at odds with what's historically been a very solid track record from Apple isn't doing your argument any favours. Unless I misunderstood you.
  - kibibu 8y ago
    My ancient iPhone 4 did everything that I needed it to, but I had to abandon it because Apple did too.
    - pdimitar 8y ago
      I challenge you to name me one Android device that is officially supported for 4 or more years. ;) iPhone 4 is 8 years old so not sure I see your point.
      - josteink 8y ago
        > I challenge you to name me one Android device that is officially supported for 4 or more years This thread started with a comment about mobile phones in general being locked down to a specific kernel/os/software-combo, and that the upgrade paths is at the mercy of the vendor (unlike PCs). Both Apple and Android phones are locked down. Who does it in the most convenient way is irellevant to the argument made.

nextos 8y ago

There's a compromise solution to achieve something equivalent. And I say so after having tried many possibilities. Buy a Pixel or any other phone that supports AOSP (Sony does too, with some caveats) and install plain AOSP. It's not perfect as you need a bit of infrastructure to compile it yourself and keep OTA updates. But it's the most practical secure and privacy-respecting option, I think.

pedrocr 8y ago
As far as I know those have the exact same issues with their kernels. The problem isn't the Android side of things, that's workable with Android One phones too. The problem is what is described in the article, the kernels at best get some patches but are never upgraded to new versions. Imagine if your Linux laptop was restricted to the specific kernel version the particular vendor had decided to ship initially.
- liotier 8y ago
  > Imagine if your Linux laptop was restricted to the specific kernel version the particular vendor had decided to ship initially In older times, kernel patches for exotic hardware often tied the user to a specific version - of course a very stale one... Let's not go there again !
metildaa 8y ago
The shoddy build quality, plus lack of microSD & heaphone jack means I will never buy a Pixel or other Google branded hardware. My friends seem to get a year or so before the SoC desolders from the motherboard, causing the device to bootloop, or the battery fails, or one of a million other things. Among us, there are a few dozen Pixels that are unusable due to their hardware defects. Meanwhile, both of my old Galaxy S4's is going strong, and ditto for all but one of my LGs (one had its charge controller start smoking, LG repaired it).
- tremon 8y ago
  Same here. Galaxy Note II, still going strong. I bought a new battery for it a year ago, expecting the old one to go out soon, but I still get more than three days battery life from it.

jumpywizard 8y ago

Android Inc should probably have gone with a micro kernel, instead of going for Linux' monolithic approach. Would have made things much easier to manage in regard to separation of concerns.

Apocryphon 8y ago
Maybe that's why they're building Fuchsia.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
ori_b 8y ago
Wouldn't really help -- the biggest result would be that vendors would have less of a reason to release things under the GPL.
- bri3d 8y ago
  It could help, depending on one's goals - one of the most notorious issues (or features, depending on who you ask) with the Linux development process is ruthless interface refactoring which requires device drivers and board support packages to be in mainline or to become stale almost instantly. A smaller surface area with a stable HAL would separate the proprietary / often bad board support code from the kernel itself and allow core changes to progress without requiring software-adverse hardware manufacturers to keep up. Whether or not this is a good thing is certainly debatable, but I'm not convinced the Linux "get to mainline or get wrecked" approach has stood the test of time well.
- naasking 8y ago
  That's a non-issue because a microkernel system call interface is stable. Drivers will simply continue to work in perpetuity. That seems like a huge help to me.
  - ori_b 8y ago

throwaway9d0291 8y ago

Thanks to Treble, this shouldn't be a problem for phones launched with Pie. It should now be possible to build a single system partition then flash it to any Treble device. There are builds like this working on many devices right now: https://forum.xda-developers.com/project-treble/trebleenabled-device-development https://forum.xda-developers.com/project-treble/trebleenable...

izacus 8y ago
Caveat applies though - the hardware layer won't update in this case (which includes the kernel version), so you'll have original (old, maybe buggy or insecure) drivers even though the platform is updated. It's a huge improvement (a lot of bugs are in platform layer, including the media/stagefright stuff), but not yet perfect.

unixhero 8y ago

But you wouldn't download a car.

rawoke083600 8y ago

Side-hijack: Your fav OpenWRT router ?

pedrocr 8y ago
I use mostly TP-Link stuff. The Archer C7 has been a good work horse lately. You will need something with more CPU power if you have Gigabit internet service. For everything else it seems more than capable.
milankragujevic 8y ago
Anything not RAMIPS/MT76x8. If you want WiFi. I currently use a TL-MR3420 V5, which is 64/8 MB + MT7628 CPU, but WiFi is still broken. I'm gonna compile the latest revision of mt76 driver, today there was some talk on Github that it MAY fix SOME issues with SOME configs of WiFi routers... :/