Being Open Source Is Killing Android

[M76]

Actually it's not open-source that is killing android, it's lazy device manufacturers, who abandon their products as soon as they are no longer being sold. I purchased a high-end phone about halfway into it's shelf-life, and since it was high end I expected to get support for it for at least a few years. In reality updates were few and late even when the phone was still being sold. And since it disappeared from shelves mid last year, there is complete silence on the update front. It's ridiculous that they can simply abandon a $800 phone. But I've learned my lesson, my next phone will definitely not be made by them, even if it offers the best value for the money.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

The problem is not hardware fragmentation.

PC's have orders of magnitude higher fragmentation, and they can all still run the same software, and receive the same patches from Microsoft in a more timely manner.

The problem is that handset manufacturers are not content leaving the base android as it is, and go in and tinker with it. All they should be doing is providing drivers for the handset hardware, and maybe a custom launcher app, if they want to, and leaving everything else as it is.

Then there would be unified code base, and universal updates would work without any intervention.

Google could solve this in one fell swoop by altering the license under which their base Android is provided to handset manufacturers, to stipulate that any shipping phones with the Android operating systems must use unmodified standard code, and must allow Google to push patches directly to the phone or tablet without any intervention from the handset maker or wireless carriers.

The wireless carriers really need to just become dumb wireless ISP's, and get their filthy hands out of trying to control the hardware/software on the devices.

 

[DPI]

The problem is not hardware fragmentation.

PC's have orders of magnitude higher fragmentation, and they can all still run the same software, and receive the same patches from Microsoft in a more timely manner.

Precisely. This is why the whole 'fragmentation' FUDword is just that these days -- FUD. Years ago the contention might've held some water, say 2010-2012 during the early Galaxy 1&2 days where hardware was still a bit sluggish and hadn't really come of age yet. But these days you can be running Android 3-4 versions behind and all the major popular apps still work fine.

It's very simple what happened here if we rise above the street-level noise and "fragmentation" minutiae of comment sections and look at the big picture: Google took Microsoft's Windows playbook and ran it in mobile. Microsoft slept. And in turn Google made Android not only the "Windows of Mobile", but as Paul Thurrott calls Android, "The new Windows", since Windows proper is gradually but steadily swirling the drain by worldwide OS percentages.

The die is cast now. And what some will insist are Android's weaknesses, are actually its multi-tentacled strengths.

 

[NoOther]

The handset makers and carriers are a shit show. They have ALWAYS been a shit show. The number one thing apple did right with the iphone was to be their own manufacturer, and to set terms where the carriers could go fuck themselves.

Google has no way out of this that I can see as the cat is out of the bag, and it isn't going back in.

I seem to remember a time when the same thing was said about IBM-compatible machines...and we all see how Apple dominated that market....oops wait, no it didn't. And Apple is getting dominated by pretty much the same kind of strategy again...

 

[jwcalla]

From a developer's standpoint, Android is a nightmare. It's at the point now where at work, we shifted to a Windows tablet halfway through the development cycle just so we can get the product out the door, and Android will come later. Which OS? Which System Platform? Which gradle? Which NDK? Which Android Studio? Every single major update breaks at least something, and it's not necessarily our fault. One update didn't allow any non owner accounts to run apps. One update broke threading and mutexes. Etc. The list of problems is never ending. When we tested on a Marshmallow device, boom, accessing the file system crashed the app because now you have to ask permission for the user for certain permissions rather than being able to naturally include them. (I actually do agree with that.) Google also removed the ability to acquire the MAC Address for security reasons in a later update, which then caused issues. There is a workaround, but even that's going away in the future. And then, that all is just on the base Android platform. When you actually start getting to other vendors, you have to hope and pray that the vendor allows certain things, as some vendors are more open than others. You can have everything working on the Nexus device, and things will break on the Galaxy. And then, after you get the Galaxy working, you have to do regression testing to make sure the Nexus device still works.

With iOS or Windows, we don't have to worry about any of this. Sure, certain things are more locked down, but if there's a workaround, it pretty much works for all of the devices and not just a select few. Also, the program looks the same on all of the devices, sans the resolution and screen layout. On Android, certain controls can have different appearances on different devices. And for the most part, when an update comes out for iOS or Windows, we never have to worry about the program crashing. Android might be beloved because it's open, but every update seems to close it more and more.

I develop for both platforms (Android and iOS) and you're greatly exaggerating each way. And it's not uncommon for an iOS update to break stuff from my experience.