4 ms·
Much harder for an OS than an app. Phone makers have their own custom set of drivers for driving their unique hardware and these often have to be changed in su
by georgemcbay 14y ago
Much harder for an OS than an app. Phone makers have their own custom set of drivers for driving their unique hardware and these often have to be changed in subsequent releases to deal with changes to the hardware abstraction layer. And even for releases that don't change the exposed hardware abstraction layer it can be really difficult to know if each phone maker's drivers will deal properly with subtle changes to the underlying OS.
This is not an impossible problem to mostly-solve, but it is orders of magnitude harder than what Chrome browser has to deal with.
- ajross 14y agoExactly. I mean, Chrome itself (being an app) is pushing updates on android at a cadence now that almost matches what they are doing on the desktop. Doing hardware integration is a lot harder than writing an app. I wish more app developers recognized this. (That said: I do think Google could have done a much better job at separating out the true kernel/HAL/BSP layer stuff, which needs to be done per-device, from the framework layers that are largely device-independent. There's no reason to force a full hardware test just to push an fix for the Intents framework or whatever).
- DigitalJack 14y agoI can't even run chrome on my android (2.3). I've resorted to Firefox which is actually pretty nice.
- cpeterso 14y agoFirefox for Android supports Froyo (2.2) up the latest Jelly Bean (4.2). Chrome for Android only supports ICS (4.0).
- brian_cloutier 14y agoPerformance is part of the Chrome brand and supporting 2.3 would only serve to weaken that brand. It would also require a monumental engineering effort.
- tmzt 14y agoCan you be more specific? There is no reason for Chrome to use the platform WebView on any Android version supporting loading native libraries. Are there OpenGL limitations or something else blocking Chrome from running on 2.3?
- nitrogen 14y agoMicrosoft manages decently (note that as a Linux user I just gagged a little bit ;-)) with the WHQL concept.
- ryanmolden 14y agoI also have heard carriers generally do not allow it (i.e. software makers pushing updates without the carriers permission). I have heard the reason is basically support costs. If they have not had time to test and vet your update against all the models running on their network, and you brick a phone (or a million), those customers are calling the carriers and they are probably pissed. They wouldn't know how to contact Google even if the thought of doing so wasn't so laughable.