This is a big problem and could seriously hurt the brand. It felt great to upgrade my original iPhone to the latest OS. Google needs to push companies to allow people to upgrade Android.
It isn't so much that the manufacturers don't "allow" people to, it's that they need to update their drivers to support the new versions. (For instance, for a long time the custom Android 2.1 ROM for the Sprint HTC Hero did not support the camera). Carriers are also pretty terrible at approving upgrades.
What may help is Google changing their licensing agreements to require that manufacturers using 'Google experience' phones/Android brand allow Google to maintain sole control of software updates. Google can release an SDK a few months before a new distribution is pushed out, allowing enough time for manufacturers to update drivers.
> It isn't so much that the manufacturers don't "allow" people to, it's that they need to update their drivers to support the new versions. (For instance, for a long time the custom Android 2.1 ROM for the Sprint HTC Hero did not support the camera). Carriers are also pretty terrible at approving upgrades.
This reminds me of a sort of retort to linux on the desktop not being so great, that "Linux is the kernel, it has nothing to do with GNOME usability issues".
The details don't matter to the end user, what matters is brand Foo doing what they expect brand Foo to do. The real question is, are they expecting their Google Android phone to behave a certain way, or are they expecting their Motorola Droid to behave a certain way?
On the other hand, I resented that I was basically forced to pay up and upgrade in order to continue getting updated versions for applications I had already purchased, as well as buy new apps. I held out until an easy jailbreak was released for 3.1.2.
I agree that Apples reasoning for charging for the Touch updates sounds shady, but you're comparing a touch (NOT a phone) to a nexus one which is a phone. If you compare it to the iPhone the updates are included.
Did you really buy a Nexus ONE to replace your touch and don't use the phone portion of the Nexus?
Of course not. But my choice to buy the N1 is influenced by both my experience with the Touch and my girlfriend's phones, first an iPhone 3G, and now 3GS.
It's not that big of a problem. My Droid updated itself to 2.01 and will soon update to 2.1. The phones can be updated. Maybe this is just a problem for the older, or cheaper phones running Android.
It shouldn't matter if you buy a "cheap" $50-$100 phone with a 2 year contract. Google is building a brand and it needs to keep people excited about their product. Buying a new phone that is 3 or 4 revs behind will certainly dishearten people.
If you buy a cheap phone ($50 is just enough to buy a garbage cell phone in the states) then you shouldn't be upset that the carrier isn't supporting incremental updates to the phone's operating system. It might not be cost effective. Most people I know that look for cell phones on the super-cheap do not know the difference between Android 1.6 and 2.0. They probably couldn't tell you the difference between 98 and XP.
Edit: In short, I'm saying that if you cannot tell the difference and are a low-end cell phone consumer, then you can just as well do without voice search on your $50 phone. Beyond that, the good phones update themselves.
A big mainstream consumer market isn't going to be so forgiving. Can't really expect them to carefully research which handset is likely to get quick software updates or hack on a custom ROM. My bigger concern is the disparity in hardware. The slower Qualcom based Android phones are still going to be shipping brand new throughout 2010 while the higher end is likely to ascend into multi-core 1Ghz+ CPUs with 4-5x as much RAM as the low end models. I'm not sure how a developer can target all those devices successfully over the next few years.
For those that do (e.g. 3D games), you simply state that it requires a snapdragon or whatever CPU. Customers will soon be more familiar with their phones specs, as they are with their computers.
As long as customers understand that their low-end phone won't be able to run the sexiest games out there, I don't see too much of a problem.
The developers just need to figure out how many people have the highest-end phones (and what they'll pay for games that utilize them).
"As long as customers understand that their low-end phone won't be able to run the sexiest games out there, I don't see too much of a problem."
INT. WHITE ROOM
We see two men -- (pudgy but adorable comedian, wearing a robot costume) and (douchey hipsterish guy) -- standing side by side.
DOUCHEY HIPSTER
Hi, I'm an iPhone.
ADORABLE COMEDIAN
And I'm an Android.
DOUCHEY HIPSTER
Hey, Android, have you played this great new game?
You can fill in the rest of the script from here, and perhaps in so doing you'll realize how quickly this could become a major marketing problem for Android...
That already exists with the iPhone today, where the 3GS often runs CPU-intensive apps much better than the earlier models. Segmentation is unavoidable as long as hardware is improving.
"3GS or better required" is much more understandable than "1Ghz Snapdragon or better required", since the package the customer buys says "3GS" prominently - it's even in the name of the device. In fact, customers already are faced with the decision of "3G" vs "3GS" when they buy an iPhone.
What this suggests is that the solution for Android will be to have some easily-understandable number or naming scheme to roughly classify the power of the phone, so apps don't have to list compatible phones en masse. For desktop software, most people basically used the required and recommended CPU speed as such a number. Even though it didn't really capture the full nuances of whether an app required more RAM or more CPU, it was a good enough rough metric.
I'm not so confident that it is that much of a problem. Customers seem to know that a Core 2 beats a Pentium 4.
Once 'can this device support x game' becomes enough of a question, users will start paying attention.
And most "normals" are way way happier gaming with their Xbox, PlayStation, or Wii than with their PC, in part because of that very reason. Some user start paying attention, lots of others leave.
I disagree and think it is, potentially, a big problem for android. For example I was all set to buy a (yet to be released) Xperia X10 series phone, but I'm holding back for fear of being stuck with a 1.X phone while the rest of the android world moves on to 2.X.
Generalizing from this if too many vendors start to arbitrarily decide to only run certain versions, then android as a platform could be in jeopardy since developers will have to decided between targeting some lowest common denominator, only developing for a subset of android phones or developing several versions of their app. Once users experience that they can't run certain android apps on their new android phone then they'll lose faith in android as a concept.
If it's not a problem for you, it doesn't mean it's not a problem for anybody else. Especially the more tweaked UI versions (like the Hero) do need work by the manufacturers to be updated. They do have to do that befor you can upgrade, and not all will.
It's actually a big problem. You do not want a 'buyer beware' type of issue to come out when trying to promote your product. At this point, the mobile carriers should be pushing out phones only with the latest release or clearly indicate the version of Android supported by the phone. I'll actually be in the market for a smartphone in a couple of months, and very glad I saw this article. I'm still leaning strongly to Android, but this type of issue could change my mind.
Fair point (for the most part), but the illustration graphic shows a Nexus One... which was indeed released with 2.1 (the latest and greatest). Not terribly material, just silly.
Now, on the substance: the reason why many of the phones lag behind is that the manufacturers and carriers have the ability to customize the system - sometimes to add features (multi-touch appeared in some HTC phones before the Android core), sometimes to junk-ify the phone.
Some of this I predict will fade, as manufacturers/carriers find the value of having the LatestAndGreatest OS will outweigh the perceived benefits of customization. Some of it probably won't, which is the unfortunate but mostly unavoidable consequence of producing an open/open-source platform.
My guess is that over time Google will make a greater effort to distinguish the phones that will be kept up-to-date (because they have few OS customizations) from the ones that just use the Android OS as the basis for their own distro (this is the very fine semantic difference between "Android" and "Android with Google"). How closely consumers will distinguish the two, is of course another matter entirely.
Edit: As an aside, I've been surprised (though perhaps I shouldn't be) how many of my non-tech friends don't even really identify "Android" as a brand - when I tell people we develop for Android, I often get a blank stare - they don't realize that the Droid, Nexus One, etc. have much of anything in common. A branding failure, on the one hand - but also an opportunity to correct some of these other issues.
> Edit: As an aside, I've been surprised (though perhaps I shouldn't be) how many of my non-tech friends don't even really identify "Android" as a brand - when I tell people we develop for Android, I often get a blank stare - they don't realize that the Droid, Nexus One, etc. have much of anything in common. A branding failure, on the one hand - but also an opportunity to correct some of these other issues.
I think that's a big plus for Google. "Android vs iPhone" doesn't make much sense since it's a comparison between a platform and a product line (as you essentially stated earlier), but "Nexus One vs iPhone" is something people can understand, and something which (right now anyway) tends to favor the Nexus One (to those who have used neither).
So I bought my HTC Hero with version 1.5 and HTC has been promising the upgrade "this month" ever sense i bought it 5 months ago. I essentially went with the HTC(which i bought from the US and had it shipped over, by the way) because they were more developer friendly than the rest.
Sense UI is good looking, but i am not sure if its a good enough reason to stick to older platforms. Especially when the APIs on the older platform suck.
Having said that, there are a few enhancements that are integrated with the Sense UI that are not in the mainline release(which makes you wonder why they're not). So its not a complete loss.
The phone definitely has its faults from a design perspective(who's bright idea was it to put the speaker on the back) so for my next purchase I will reconsider where i get my set from.
I don't necessarily see this as an issue -- the HTC G1 shipped with an older version of Android, and naturally, its unsold inventory still has that older version.
It should automatically update (barring the unforeseen) to the most current level of Android OS it can support, as it has done for all the existing Android users as new releases became available.
The only thing I can foresee as a problem is that older hardware may not be able to support the newest Android versions. The HTC G1 doesn't appear to support Android 2.0, which makes sense, as it's MUCH older than the Droid or Nexus One. That causes problems more for the developers than for the end users I suspect, but I think that people are used to the logic with PCs -- I can't play the new game, need to upgrade.
Probably the biggest difference is the software library for Android was fairly small 1.x to 1.5 to 1.6 and backwards compatibility wasn't really a problem. Today there are quite a few 2.0+ only apps out there including many of Google's own first party applications. There's a larger group of apps that kinda work on 1.x but don't seem to be extensively tested on 1.x so crashing/bugs start to become a problem. So if you go buy a new Android phone running 1.5 or 1.6 you will almost certainly run into problems with third party applications.
It's not only old phones. For example the yet to be release Sony-Ericsson X10 series of phones will ship with 1.6 with no word on whether it will ever be upgradeable to 2.x.
Well, there IS some of "this hardware can't support X feature". But another reason some phones haven't been upgraded is that they're running custom Android builds, courtesy of the manufacturer or carrier - so those take longer to get updated.
Somewhat. I know, it is not useful answer. Some things are faster (the browser, for example), but some are way slower (when launching apps, there is an uncomfortable delay, the phone app is also very slow, it can take up to one second to change state on the screen to correspond to the call state).
Why not? The whole goal of Android is ostensibly to have more people accessing the internet on mobile devices that are closely integrated with Google services. It wants to be what Windows was for the PC.
Windows also didn't really have its poor reputation among mainstream consumers until XP's many security/malware problems and Vista's flop.
We've seen this story before with Windows Mobile, and it doesn't end well. People who are bothered by the idea that their phone is running an older OS version should buy a Nexus One. Google has a motivation to ensure their flagship phone stays up-to-date, whereas history has shown that licensee handset manufacturers don't.
