4 ms·
Or... google could crack down and force the carriers to make their "customizations" add-ons which would be installed after an os update and could be removed if
by tomschlick 14y ago
Or... google could crack down and force the carriers to make their "customizations" add-ons which would be installed after an os update and could be removed if they were incompatible / the user didn't want them. This way every user could have the latest and greatest from google while still allowing the carrier to add their craptastic customizations on top of the standard OS.
- wmf 14y agoI think the UI customizations are less of a problem than drivers.
- georgemcbay 14y agoYeah, this. If it were just about the OS customization Google could release a PC/Mac tool which would flash the latest build of Android onto any phone with an unlocked bootloader (which is most of them these days). The user could choose to continue with the phone manufacture's default build or get the latest "pure" Android. Where this idea falls apart quickly is drivers for custom hardware. There's just no way Google could take on the driver development for every phone (both because it is just too much work and also because lots of phones have proprietary drivers running against hardware that isn't publicly documented).
- fpgeek 14y agoAbsolutely. From what I understand, one of the big reasons ICS updates have been so much more difficult than Gingerbread ones is that the driver interfaces changed for a lot more things in that jump (exacerbated by the tablet-only Honeycomb in between).