8 ms·

There's no such thing as Android, only Android-compatible

58 points by FluidDjango 15y ago

ChrisLTD 15y ago
It was annoying enough that my computers eventually became too slow to run the newest versions of Windows/Ubuntu/Mac OS. I can't imagine the the frustration Android users must feel to be denied updates not because of obsolete hardware but because of handset and carrier neglect. Google should step in and assure that all Android (tm) hardware can be updated to vanilla releases of the operating system without the need to be a technology wizard.
- bane 15y ago
  In some ways it reminds me of the very early days of PCs. An early consumer really needed to know their stuff when buying a PC back then. Here's some common scenarios from back in those days: - Buy a Tandy? Sorry, weird video card and sound controller meant limited software selection. - PC Jr? Similar. But entirely different from the Tandy hardware. Even had a different kind of VGA and oddball joystick ports! - 5.25" drive when the software is only in 3.5"? - How about double sided disks? - Double density? - Oddball keyboard connector on your AT&T brand 8088? - No Parallel port? No printer. - No PS/2 port, but the needed trackball peripheral needs it? - Weird IBM MCA slots? Can't get a sound card. - Wrong UART chip? Stuck at 2400bps. - Hercules graphics card? good luck with that. All of these things were on systems that were "PC Compatible", and were advertised as such, but made owning and operating these things a serious pain. It was a loose "compatibility". If you had just the right hardware mix and match, and just the right drivers loaded in the just the right parts of memory, you could get 85% of the software to work. Later software sent users through extensive setup processes with questions like: "What DMA assignment?", "Hercules graphics?", "CGA, EGA? or VGA (not PC Jr. Compatible?", "EMS?" etc. etc. It's not quite that bad with Android, it seems about 95% of the software I try on my devices works fine. But it's still kind of a pain, and useful to keep the old days in mind.
  - talmand 15y ago
    Ah, the good old days. Me thinks the kids these days are spoiled by all this "plug and play" nonsense and video game consoles that don't require any configuration on the user's part. Some people seem to expect perfection out of the gate and aren't willing to give things time to settle down. Not everyone can or wants to be Apple. Plus too many ignore the fact that, in the US at least, cell carriers are fully willing to do things for their benefit to the detriment of their customers.
  - ConstantineXVI 15y ago
    Just like the old days, graphics are the big sticking point. Most current shipping devices have some mix of the following: - Resolution: * HVGA (mostly only low-end phones now) * WVGA ("standard") * FWGVGA (early Motorola) * qHD (most high-end phones) * WSVGA (7" tablets) * 720 (Rezound, Galaxy Nexus, more soon) * WXGA (10" tablets) - Graphics * Adreno (Qualcomm) * GeForce (nVidia Tegra) * ARM Mali (SGSII, less the T-Mobile USA variant) * PowerVR (everyone else)
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  Maybe virtualization will help? http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/android-virtualization-its-time/15588 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/android-virtualization-its-... I also know that Cortex A15 has hardware virtualization, so that might make things easier, too.
  - wmf 15y ago
    Enjoy the overhead of running a new version of Android on top of the old version.
    - nextparadigms 15y ago
      I was thinking more in terms of virtual universal drivers, than virtualizing the whole OS.
- masklinn 15y ago
  > Google should step in and assure that all Android (tm) hardware can be updated to vanilla releases of the operating system without the need to be a technology wizard. Except that's not the case, because all Android-powered hardware require drivers which are not part of Android itself, and are bundled by integrators. That's one of the reasons why efforts like Cyanogenmod have "supported devices" and there's a different file to download for each device. In fact, Apple's the same thing: each device has its own firmware because hardware differences mean they don't bundle the same drivers, even if 95% of the firmware is the same across the device without the last 5% it just can not work.
  - ChrisLTD 15y ago
    Google could change the licensing terms to require free distribution of the drivers.
    - masklinn 15y ago
      Google is a lot of things, but one thing they're not is stupid: drivers control may not even be in the hands of the device builders, and is likely tied to agreements with manufacturers and parts providers. This requirement would make support for any version of Android containing it dive into the ground.
      - ChrisLTD 15y ago
        I'm not sure why this would be a doomsday scenario. PC parts manufacturers gladly let you download drivers from their websites for use on any computer with a variety of operating systems. In the end, don't parts manufacturers need Android more than vice versa?
        masklinn 15y ago
        > In the end, don't parts manufacturers need Android more than vice versa? No, as far as parts go Android phones are run-of-the-mill smartphones (as are pretty much all others), it does not matter what OS they run the parts are the same. Parts manufacturers only need smartphones being built, and that won't stop, Android or not.
recoiledsnake 15y ago
> In other cases that upgrade will require significant engineering investments—time and money—on the part of the handset maker and the carrier. They might decide to spend the money and deliver the update, six months later. Or they might decide that the investment isn't worth it. It's a double whammy. The OEMs need to spend the money for the update and the customer will be disincentivized to buy the newest hardware. Not supplying ICS for the Galaxy S will help the sales of S II and the Galaxy Nexus.
- ChrisLTD 15y ago
  It seems like the perfect opportunity for a hardware vendor to separate themselves from the crowd. "Buy our hardware and be assured software updates for 2 years."
  - evilduck 15y ago
    So, buy from Apple? From my own experience with this, I bought a Samsung Moment a couple weeks after it launched and was abandoned with about 17 months left on my contract (with some severe bugs that were never resolved while I had it). I did get an official update to 2.1, but it was very late and that was the last update it ever received while I owned it. Sure, I wasn't an eligible purchaser for their next immediate phone release, but their utterly terrible support of my product ensured that I'll never be a future customer of Samsung, for any of their product divisions and severely tarnished my impression of Android in general. All Android manufacturers do equally bad jobs at supporting their products with only a couple of products as exceptions (even "big release" phones like the original Motorola Droid got abandoned before their earliest contracts ended, late buyers are really screwed), so I'm not too keen on rolling the dice on any future Android products either.
    - evilduck 15y ago
      Dug up this link: http://theunderstatement.com/post/11982112928/android-orphans-visualizing-a-sad-history-of-support http://theunderstatement.com/post/11982112928/android-orphan... It doesn't contain any new-ish phones, but for phones it does have on the list that were released less than 24 months ago (which would still be under contract right now), none of them will be getting updated to ICS via their manufacturer. The majority stopped receiving updates less than 12 months from their initial release.
nextparadigms 15y ago
I don't want updates "indefinitely". I think 2 years of updates, which is the usual lifetime of a phone, or updating to 2 major new versions (5.0 and 6.0 for 4.0/ICS phones) is reasonable. I don't mind if they raise the price a little, but they'll have to heavily promote this "feature", otherwise customers won't know why their phone is more expensive than the competition who isn't offering these updates.
- eigenvector 15y ago
  It would be a lot easier for handset vendors to upgrade all of their devices from the last 2 years if they didn't release a new phone with slightly different hardware every month. LG alone is upgrading 11 devices to ICS - that's over twice as many devices as _all_ of the iPhones ever released, and Apple has been selling iPhones since 2007. Baring actual hardware limitations (e.g. the lack of NAND space on the Nexus One), most of the work in porting a ROM is the device drivers. Vendors are really shooting themselves in the foot by releasing a dozen different hardware configurations in a single year.
- fpgeek 15y ago
  I don't know if you realize this, but the Galaxy S meets your criteria. The Galaxy S was released with Eclair (2.1) and got two major upgrades: Froyo (2.2) and Gingerbread (2.3). I'm not sure what this means for your definition of reasonable support, but I thought it was worth noting.
ec429 15y ago
"MS-DOS—the original "weak OS." Every version of the software is retailored and rebranded by its manufacturer. Even some software has to be rewritten to conform to different machines and their varied specs." Interesting definition of 'original'... unless my history is very wrong, *NIX was around first. Retailored and rebranded by vendors? Check. Rewritten for different hardware? Check. Android is like Unix, which is no surprise really, since technologically that's what it is. What freed Unix from the fragmentary mess of vendors? It was cheap commodity hardware, combined with GNU. As long as smartphone makers try to differentiate their products, incompatible versions of the OS will proliferate - and as long as Android remains schizophrenic about whether it's really open or not, and as long as Google tries to prevent forking, forks will happen. The best defence against forking is not to try to defend against forking. (Further reading: esr on bazaars)
- mahmud 15y ago
  Unix was only rebranded in the early 80s at the exact time DOS was released. However, Unix's unintended "re-branding" was at its birth: due to its portability & availability in source, every installation was almost a "port".
37prime 15y ago
A lot of people expecting about 3-year life cycle of a smartphone now. They'd buy one under contract and upgrade to a new on within 18-24 months. The old smartphone then given to a family member. It is a lot more common than the tech crowd. So having manufacturers updating the phone for at least 3 years would really help a lot.
sjs382 15y ago
Seems I got lucky in that I'm using one of the older phones that has always had some community development inertia behind it. In fact, I installed Android 4.0 last night and now I'm running a phone thats almost exactly 2 years old. I love my HTC Incredible.
jshen 15y ago
by far my biggest complaint about my droid x2 is that I have no idea if or when it will get ICS. When google announces updates to android, rather than getting excited, I get pissed off. My phone is less than 6 months old, and was a top of the line phone. I have no idea if I'll ever get ICS. Isn't that absurd?
teyc 15y ago
The lack of upgrades is not necessarily a problem for most people. This is why there has been little commercial interest in providing a constant stream of upgrades. Take Windows XP for example. People are still installing this even though they are no longer supported by MS.

58 points by FluidDjango 15y ago

It was annoying enough that my computers eventually became too slow to run the newest versions of Windows/Ubuntu/Mac OS. I can't imagine the the frustration Android users must feel to be denied updates not because of obsolete hardware but because of handset and carrier neglect. Google should step in and assure that all Android (tm) hardware can be updated to vanilla releases of the operating system without the need to be a technology wizard.

bane 15y ago
In some ways it reminds me of the very early days of PCs. An early consumer really needed to know their stuff when buying a PC back then. Here's some common scenarios from back in those days: - Buy a Tandy? Sorry, weird video card and sound controller meant limited software selection. - PC Jr? Similar. But entirely different from the Tandy hardware. Even had a different kind of VGA and oddball joystick ports! - 5.25" drive when the software is only in 3.5"? - How about double sided disks? - Double density? - Oddball keyboard connector on your AT&T brand 8088? - No Parallel port? No printer. - No PS/2 port, but the needed trackball peripheral needs it? - Weird IBM MCA slots? Can't get a sound card. - Wrong UART chip? Stuck at 2400bps. - Hercules graphics card? good luck with that. All of these things were on systems that were "PC Compatible", and were advertised as such, but made owning and operating these things a serious pain. It was a loose "compatibility". If you had just the right hardware mix and match, and just the right drivers loaded in the just the right parts of memory, you could get 85% of the software to work. Later software sent users through extensive setup processes with questions like: "What DMA assignment?", "Hercules graphics?", "CGA, EGA? or VGA (not PC Jr. Compatible?", "EMS?" etc. etc. It's not quite that bad with Android, it seems about 95% of the software I try on my devices works fine. But it's still kind of a pain, and useful to keep the old days in mind.
- talmand 15y ago
  Ah, the good old days. Me thinks the kids these days are spoiled by all this "plug and play" nonsense and video game consoles that don't require any configuration on the user's part. Some people seem to expect perfection out of the gate and aren't willing to give things time to settle down. Not everyone can or wants to be Apple. Plus too many ignore the fact that, in the US at least, cell carriers are fully willing to do things for their benefit to the detriment of their customers.
- ConstantineXVI 15y ago
  Just like the old days, graphics are the big sticking point. Most current shipping devices have some mix of the following: - Resolution: * HVGA (mostly only low-end phones now) * WVGA ("standard") * FWGVGA (early Motorola) * qHD (most high-end phones) * WSVGA (7" tablets) * 720 (Rezound, Galaxy Nexus, more soon) * WXGA (10" tablets) - Graphics * Adreno (Qualcomm) * GeForce (nVidia Tegra) * ARM Mali (SGSII, less the T-Mobile USA variant) * PowerVR (everyone else)
nextparadigms 15y ago
Maybe virtualization will help? http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/android-virtualization-its-time/15588 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/android-virtualization-its-... I also know that Cortex A15 has hardware virtualization, so that might make things easier, too.
- wmf 15y ago
  Enjoy the overhead of running a new version of Android on top of the old version.
  - nextparadigms 15y ago
    I was thinking more in terms of virtual universal drivers, than virtualizing the whole OS.
masklinn 15y ago
> Google should step in and assure that all Android (tm) hardware can be updated to vanilla releases of the operating system without the need to be a technology wizard. Except that's not the case, because all Android-powered hardware require drivers which are not part of Android itself, and are bundled by integrators. That's one of the reasons why efforts like Cyanogenmod have "supported devices" and there's a different file to download for each device. In fact, Apple's the same thing: each device has its own firmware because hardware differences mean they don't bundle the same drivers, even if 95% of the firmware is the same across the device without the last 5% it just can not work.
- ChrisLTD 15y ago
  Google could change the licensing terms to require free distribution of the drivers.
  - masklinn 15y ago
    Google is a lot of things, but one thing they're not is stupid: drivers control may not even be in the hands of the device builders, and is likely tied to agreements with manufacturers and parts providers. This requirement would make support for any version of Android containing it dive into the ground.
    - ChrisLTD 15y ago
      I'm not sure why this would be a doomsday scenario. PC parts manufacturers gladly let you download drivers from their websites for use on any computer with a variety of operating systems. In the end, don't parts manufacturers need Android more than vice versa?
      - masklinn 15y ago
        > In the end, don't parts manufacturers need Android more than vice versa? No, as far as parts go Android phones are run-of-the-mill smartphones (as are pretty much all others), it does not matter what OS they run the parts are the same. Parts manufacturers only need smartphones being built, and that won't stop, Android or not.

recoiledsnake 15y ago

> In other cases that upgrade will require significant engineering investments—time and money—on the part of the handset maker and the carrier. They might decide to spend the money and deliver the update, six months later. Or they might decide that the investment isn't worth it. It's a double whammy. The OEMs need to spend the money for the update and the customer will be disincentivized to buy the newest hardware. Not supplying ICS for the Galaxy S will help the sales of S II and the Galaxy Nexus.

ChrisLTD 15y ago
It seems like the perfect opportunity for a hardware vendor to separate themselves from the crowd. "Buy our hardware and be assured software updates for 2 years."
- evilduck 15y ago
  So, buy from Apple? From my own experience with this, I bought a Samsung Moment a couple weeks after it launched and was abandoned with about 17 months left on my contract (with some severe bugs that were never resolved while I had it). I did get an official update to 2.1, but it was very late and that was the last update it ever received while I owned it. Sure, I wasn't an eligible purchaser for their next immediate phone release, but their utterly terrible support of my product ensured that I'll never be a future customer of Samsung, for any of their product divisions and severely tarnished my impression of Android in general. All Android manufacturers do equally bad jobs at supporting their products with only a couple of products as exceptions (even "big release" phones like the original Motorola Droid got abandoned before their earliest contracts ended, late buyers are really screwed), so I'm not too keen on rolling the dice on any future Android products either.
  - evilduck 15y ago
    Dug up this link: http://theunderstatement.com/post/11982112928/android-orphans-visualizing-a-sad-history-of-support http://theunderstatement.com/post/11982112928/android-orphan... It doesn't contain any new-ish phones, but for phones it does have on the list that were released less than 24 months ago (which would still be under contract right now), none of them will be getting updated to ICS via their manufacturer. The majority stopped receiving updates less than 12 months from their initial release.

nextparadigms 15y ago

I don't want updates "indefinitely". I think 2 years of updates, which is the usual lifetime of a phone, or updating to 2 major new versions (5.0 and 6.0 for 4.0/ICS phones) is reasonable. I don't mind if they raise the price a little, but they'll have to heavily promote this "feature", otherwise customers won't know why their phone is more expensive than the competition who isn't offering these updates.

eigenvector 15y ago
It would be a lot easier for handset vendors to upgrade all of their devices from the last 2 years if they didn't release a new phone with slightly different hardware every month. LG alone is upgrading 11 devices to ICS - that's over twice as many devices as _all_ of the iPhones ever released, and Apple has been selling iPhones since 2007. Baring actual hardware limitations (e.g. the lack of NAND space on the Nexus One), most of the work in porting a ROM is the device drivers. Vendors are really shooting themselves in the foot by releasing a dozen different hardware configurations in a single year.
fpgeek 15y ago
I don't know if you realize this, but the Galaxy S meets your criteria. The Galaxy S was released with Eclair (2.1) and got two major upgrades: Froyo (2.2) and Gingerbread (2.3). I'm not sure what this means for your definition of reasonable support, but I thought it was worth noting.

ec429 15y ago

"MS-DOS—the original "weak OS." Every version of the software is retailored and rebranded by its manufacturer. Even some software has to be rewritten to conform to different machines and their varied specs." Interesting definition of 'original'... unless my history is very wrong, *NIX was around first. Retailored and rebranded by vendors? Check. Rewritten for different hardware? Check. Android is like Unix, which is no surprise really, since technologically that's what it is. What freed Unix from the fragmentary mess of vendors? It was cheap commodity hardware, combined with GNU. As long as smartphone makers try to differentiate their products, incompatible versions of the OS will proliferate - and as long as Android remains schizophrenic about whether it's really open or not, and as long as Google tries to prevent forking, forks will happen. The best defence against forking is not to try to defend against forking. (Further reading: esr on bazaars)

mahmud 15y ago
Unix was only rebranded in the early 80s at the exact time DOS was released. However, Unix's unintended "re-branding" was at its birth: due to its portability & availability in source, every installation was almost a "port".

37prime 15y ago

A lot of people expecting about 3-year life cycle of a smartphone now. They'd buy one under contract and upgrade to a new on within 18-24 months. The old smartphone then given to a family member. It is a lot more common than the tech crowd. So having manufacturers updating the phone for at least 3 years would really help a lot.

sjs382 15y ago

Seems I got lucky in that I'm using one of the older phones that has always had some community development inertia behind it. In fact, I installed Android 4.0 last night and now I'm running a phone thats almost exactly 2 years old. I love my HTC Incredible.

jshen 15y ago

by far my biggest complaint about my droid x2 is that I have no idea if or when it will get ICS. When google announces updates to android, rather than getting excited, I get pissed off. My phone is less than 6 months old, and was a top of the line phone. I have no idea if I'll ever get ICS. Isn't that absurd?

teyc 15y ago

The lack of upgrades is not necessarily a problem for most people. This is why there has been little commercial interest in providing a constant stream of upgrades. Take Windows XP for example. People are still installing this even though they are no longer supported by MS.