Android 9- Pie?

[Guest]

9 minutes ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

The real problem was Apple's approach to implementing it.

 

I know why they did it but their secrecy in doing so made it extremely shady. 

 

I know they didn't want to make the phone draw more power than the battery can supply, reducing the risk of a random shutdown. That's fine but please have some form of communication because I'm sure some people just thought their phones got slower and went out and bought a whole new iPhone, not knowing that they could've just replaced the battery 

What people seem to forget is that Apple have tweaked the power management of their iPhones so many times, that it was probably just another behind-the-scences feature for them to implement. However that large a change should have been included in the patch notes. The severity of the problem is a bot hazy really - if your phone was shutting down with the feature enabled or running quite slow - then before the update chances are you didn't have much battery life and something would have seemed to have been wrong before. Definitely the media likes to make a whoo-ha about these things and report many of the extreme cases.

 

They should definitely go back to adding a more detailed patch notes to prevent these things - for major features at the very least. That can prevent this from happening in the future. Just a little note is all that necessary. 

[Linus_torvalds]

1 hour ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

And that's because it's true. Unless you own a Pixel or an Android One device, you'll be waiting for months in order for the new Android version to reach your phone 

Or if you are not dumb like apple fanboys you can go to xda developers and install whatever newest android OS is available for your model.

I am running Android 8.1 Oreo on my nexus 5 and soon i'll be upgrading to Android 9.0 Pie

[Doobeedoo]

Yeah, sadly Android update lifespan is so bad, so more fragmentation and delays for some. 

[D13H4RD]

34 minutes ago, KnoT said:

Redmi Note 5 with Treble 

Close enough 

[D13H4RD]

36 minutes ago, mate_mate91 said:

Or if you are not dumb like apple fanboys you can go to xda developers and install whatever newest android OS is available for your model.

I am running Android 8.1 Oreo on my nexus 5 and soon i'll be upgrading to Android 9.0 Pie

XDA is great but it is not the proper solution. 

 

I shouldn't have to flash new software to make up for the sheer incompetence of Android OEMs. 

 

Not to mention it requires an unlocked bootloader. And OEMs like Huawei don't allow you to do so anymore. I'll probably just buy an Android One or a Pixel. 

 

I liked Android better when you could endlessly tinker with it. XDA was haven for my old HTC One M7 and my Moto Z but lately, it seems that the newer phones don't want to play ball. 

 

Also, I don't understand your beef with Apple fanboys. Yes, fanboys are dumb but why stoop to their level? 

[3 Lions]

My Sony Xperia XZ Premium will be getting this soon then

[D13H4RD]

3 minutes ago, LinusTechTipsFanFromDarlo said:

My Sony Xperia XZ Premium will be getting this soon then

Sony's been pretty darn solid on updates as of late 

[suicidalfranco]

3 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

It’s also a feature that you can literally turn off and entirely reverse yourself with two screws, a few adhesive pull tabs, and a replacement battery or you can go through Apple for $30......

by that logic, anyone can get P or the latest android version any time, and you can do it entirely yourself with xda, a few minutes to read, and a rom downloaded from that same thread.

[MyName13]

Can someone explain me why android has so many updates while we use desktop OSs for over a decade?Why can't everyone receive at least security updates?Those should depend only on the Android and not on manufacturers.Also why do chipset and phone manufacturers have to approve an OS update?I keep posting the same questions every time but never get satisfactory answers.

[Morgan Everett]

1 hour ago, LinusTechTipsFanFromDarlo said:

My Sony Xperia XZ Premium will be getting this soon then

I hope so, but I’ve not heard anything. I may be moving over to an iPhone soon anyway.

 

[Linus_torvalds]

3 hours ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

Also, I don't understand your beef with Apple fanboys. Yes, fanboys are dumb but why stoop to their level? 

You are right! Thank you!

[Trixanity]

2 hours ago, MyName13 said:

Can someone explain me why android has so many updates while we use desktop OSs for over a decade?Why can't everyone receive at least security updates?Those should depend only on the Android and not on manufacturers.Also why do chipset and phone manufacturers have to approve an OS update?I keep posting the same questions every time but never get satisfactory answers.

Because Android is not a singular entity.

Each and every device has unique software to one degree or another. 

 

Until recently, every time you wanted to update a device you'd have to update multiple layers that are maintained by multiple companies. So first you have the hardware and that's the likes of Qualcomm, Mediatek, Broadcom etc and they need to update their packages for the new version of Android, making sure it works and same goes for security updates (if there's vulnerabilities in the hardware they are the ones who need to fix it). In turn the phone manufacturer needs to make sure that these work with their phone. While doing that they need to work with Google to make sure any changes to Android work with their device. When that's done they need to rework their own code to make sure it works with whatever changes to vendor packages and the updates to Android whether it's only security patches or a big update. 

Phone manufacturers make changes to Android itself so you can't just pull the source code from AOSP and expect it to work. I suspect many think that Android is a bunch of separate layers but in fact a lot of it is mashed together.

 

With Oreo, Google started separating them more so that the hardware layer is in fact separate and can therefore work with no work required. You'd still need to get updates from hardware manufacturers to patch security holes for theirs specifically but you don't need to wait if you just want to update Android - not anymore.

Phone manufacturer still needs to work with their own code to make it work with updates but they can now start immediately without waiting for their partners.

 

Desktop operating systems are on a similar cadence now so your information is a bit outdated. Apple updates yearly and Microsoft twice a year. I think Ubuntu is twice too.

 

Basically Android is a clusterfuck because of decisions made in the beginning. It wasn't built for what it does today and Google is slowly fixing as much as they can but it's impossible to fix completely without breaking something or pissing someone off.

Phone manufacturers have a lot more control of the OS than they can really handle or maintain. You see fast updates on the devices that have given control back to Google. 

 

It boils down to manufacturers wanting to give you their own software experience and to do that they need to mess with system files and that's why they ultimately have to do the work themselves except it adds delays and they can't handle the responsibility to begin with so it ends up taking months.

 

Tl;dr it depends on phone manufacturers and they can't handle it but they want to anyway so their phone stands out. It's getting better in theory but Google can only do so much.

[MyName13]

20 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

Because Android is not a singular entity.

Each and every device has unique software to one degree or another. 

 

Until recently, every time you wanted to update a device you'd have to update multiple layers that are maintained by multiple companies. So first you have the hardware and that's the likes of Qualcomm, Mediatek, Broadcom etc and they need to update their packages for the new version of Android, making sure it works and same goes for security updates (if there's vulnerabilities in the hardware they are the ones who need to fix it). In turn the phone manufacturer needs to make sure that these work with their phone. While doing that they need to work with Google to make sure any changes to Android work with their device. When that's done they need to rework their own code to make sure it works with whatever changes to vendor packages and the updates to Android whether it's only security patches or a big update. 

Phone manufacturers make changes to Android itself so you can't just pull the source code from AOSP and expect it to work. I suspect many think that Android is a bunch of separate layers but in fact a lot of it is mashed together.

 

With Oreo, Google started separating them more so that the hardware layer is in fact separate and can therefore work with no work required. You'd still need to get updates from hardware manufacturers to patch security holes for theirs specifically but you don't need to wait if you just want to update Android - not anymore.

Phone manufacturer still needs to work with their own code to make it work with updates but they can now start immediately without waiting for their partners.

 

Desktop operating systems are on a similar cadence now so your information is a bit outdated. Apple updates yearly and Microsoft twice a year. I think Ubuntu is twice too.

 

Basically Android is a clusterfuck because of decisions made in the beginning. It wasn't built for what it does today and Google is slowly fixing as much as they can but it's impossible to fix completely without breaking something or pissing someone off.

Phone manufacturers have a lot more control of the OS than they can really handle or maintain. You see fast updates on the devices that have given control back to Google. 

 

It boils down to manufacturers wanting to give you their own software experience and to do that they need to mess with system files and that's why they ultimately have to do the work themselves except it adds delays and they can't handle the responsibility to begin with so it ends up taking months.

 

Tl;dr it depends on phone manufacturers and they can't handle it but they want to anyway so their phone stands out. It's getting better in theory but Google can only do so much.

Basically it's because Android is incredibly poorly designed as it depends on manufacturers too much?

About desktop OSs, those are the same OS, they only receive feature updates which work without hardware manufacturers.

[Trixanity]

33 minutes ago, MyName13 said:

Basically it's because Android is incredibly poorly designed as it depends on manufacturers too much?

About desktop OSs, those are the same OS, they only receive feature updates which work without hardware manufacturers.

Both yes and no. It's designed poorly in many ways but the license and the way Android's been handled business-wise means manufacturers can do with the code as they please. That was the price for Google's dominance. Android One phones are capable of being updated on day one (source: Essential Phone). So it's possible to accomplish it. Phone manufacturers mostly choose not to. 

 

Android is also the same core but like any good open source operating system it can be modified to suite your needs. And post-Oreo can work without hardware manufacturers. Thing is that hardware vulnerabilities can't be fixed by an update to the Android framework so you still have some reliance but it's not required anymore since that layer has been stripped out of the system and given its own partition on the phone.

 

The TL;DR of that is that Android is more like other operating systems in regards to updates now than it was before but phone manufacturers still have control of the software they ship and that adds a significant amount of work. Google keeps adding new things to speed up delivery but they will never be able to push out an update themselves unless they make fundamentals changes and especially limitations to what phone manufacturers can do. 

 

Many would argue it's the likes of Samsung pushing Android forward with many new features that aren't part of Android and some that later gets added to AOSP. So without the open nature of the OS you'd rely on Google's vision alone and whatever they come up with. Just like with Apple and iOS.