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That's exactly what Google has been doing for the past years. It took some time but now : -Google Apps are entirely decoupled from the OS. They are preinsta

That's exactly what Google has been doing for the past years. It took some time but now : -Google Apps are entirely decoupled from the OS. They are preinstalled and live in the system partition but are updated by the PlayStore. That way pretty much everyone (minus some apps that don't support 2.x) always has the latest version of these apps. -Google Play Services embeds many features that are considered OS level : security, job batching, location, chromecast, ... It is updated every 6 weeks. Not to mention that from a third party dev perspective, Google provides compatibility libraries that allows to manage apps that run on a dozen of APIs levels, with either backports or 'gracious fallbacks'. There are some features that can't be decoupled from an OS update though, and so far it does not look like it is going to change. I am curious to see how the OEMs are going to handle Android L. The 4.x updates were very smooth from an user point of view with only added features here and there. L is revamping many things, which might confuse some users.

gizmo686 12y ago
That is still far away from just a device specific kernel (although it does cover most everything a user would care about). I recently looked into porting cyanogenmod to my tablet (Dell Venue 7). It has an interesting scheme that seems more in line with what tomjen wants. There is an unlocked bootloader that allows you to flash the "/system" partition. Within a days worth of porting, I was able to Intel's fork of Android and successfully flash the system partition. [1] What is interesting in their setup is that the root parition (and bootloader) live in a separate part of the storage, and I did not find a way of writing to them (I think that requires a key). This still isn't creating just a device specific kernel, but the root filesystem is pretty low-level stuff that even most tinkerers wouldn't care about updating, and you can work around it (run an updated version from /system) if you want to. [1] Unfourtuantly, Intel's changes appeared to not have propigated back to cyanogenmod yet, so I abandoned trying to port it to avoid duplicating a lot of effort.

gizmo686 12y ago

That is still far away from just a device specific kernel (although it does cover most everything a user would care about). I recently looked into porting cyanogenmod to my tablet (Dell Venue 7). It has an interesting scheme that seems more in line with what tomjen wants. There is an unlocked bootloader that allows you to flash the "/system" partition. Within a days worth of porting, I was able to Intel's fork of Android and successfully flash the system partition. [1] What is interesting in their setup is that the root parition (and bootloader) live in a separate part of the storage, and I did not find a way of writing to them (I think that requires a key). This still isn't creating just a device specific kernel, but the root filesystem is pretty low-level stuff that even most tinkerers wouldn't care about updating, and you can work around it (run an updated version from /system) if you want to. [1] Unfourtuantly, Intel's changes appeared to not have propigated back to cyanogenmod yet, so I abandoned trying to port it to avoid duplicating a lot of effort.