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Comment by JadeNB | Hacker News Reader

Yet another reason to be thrilled, as an Android user, that my ability to upgrade is held hostage to my phone vendor's willingness to package it. Google has so much weight to throw around, and seems to recognise the problem with fragmentation; why do they only ever take such half-hearted steps to combat it?

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They announced Project Treble back in Google IO to combat fragmentation. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here-comes...

I want to believe, but I'm worried that it won't work any better than their past efforts to address fragmentation. eg Android Update Alliance (2011). I'm sure there were other failed promises, but I can't recall offhand.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/06/what-happened-to-the...

That alliance sounds like just the motivation/PR part. Treble is the "remove the actual technical hurdle that made it hard" part. That makes me more hopeful.

I'm more hopeful as well. I'm just wary that vendors may find a way to screw it up.

Choose a phone that can be unlocked/rooted and a custom/pure Android that can be installed. At least you have that option for Android; unlike iOS.

Unlockable bootloader and carrier unlockable -- if you are paying full price for a phone, these are non-negotiable. Otherwise what are you really buying?

Won't help if the hardware manufacture does not support the newer hardware even google itself has had to stop updating a few devices because of no hardware support by qualcomm or Nvidia. Though google is trying to change with it latest version of Android.

> Won't help if the hardware manufacture does not support the newer hardware even google itself has had to stop updating a few devices because of no hardware support by qualcomm or Nvidia.

To be fair, at that point my complaint about Google and phone manufacturers is kind of irrelevant ….

> Though google is trying to change with it latest version of Android.

How can software change hardware support? (That sounds snarky, but I'm serious.)

Apple does the same thing. You won't find much in iTunes that will run on iOS 5 or lower.

The iPad First Gen was released at the same time as the version of Android that is mentioned in the article as losing access to Android Market. The current top comment in this post is about the iPad First Gen being basically useless for anything except the built-in apps because nothing in the App Store can be installed to it.

That's not Apple doing this, that's the developers. Almost no company thinks it makes financial sense to support old OSes when 97% of users are using iOS 9 and above.

Apple certainly plays a part, when their sdks stop building for older versions, and developers have to choose between supporting older versions or newer versions; or maybe make a separate app for old os? The first time they did this, they also didn't make it easy for users on older oses to reinstall the last version that supported their os.

Google can't win. They have the system be as open as possible, and the carriers shit it up and goldbrick on updates.

They start taking some of that control back for the greater good, and the free software crowd crucifies them.

Pick one.

This notion ignores the reality: That nothing about Android is actually open, because Google controls all the OEMs through confidential agreements. They've already taken all sorts of control, for the purposes of branding, monopoly expansion, etc. (They not only require over 20 apps be installed by OEMs, but dictate which are default and which appear on the homescreen and where.)

The only reason the Android update situation is as bad as it is: Google doesn't want the expense or responsibility for maintaining or testing hardware support.

> Pick one.

I pick that there is no contradiction in my having a preference, even if different groups of people have different preferences. (EDIT: To be fair, I guess you didn't say that this is contradictory, only that "Google can't win"; so let me amend my response to: I pick that I have no responsibility to help, or even allow, Google to win.)

At least you acknowledge you want something unreasonable.

> At least you acknowledge you want something unreasonable.

I don't acknowledge that it is unreasonable, only that it is not universal (and that, perhaps, what I want is not in Google's best interests, or more accurately that I don't care whether it is). Just to be clear, what I want is that Google use some of its power to bring phone manufacturers into line vis a vis Android fragmentation.

That this is not totally unprecedented is demonstrated by Apple's doing so (with iOS rather than Android, obviously), to, if I recall correctly, mostly applause from users. I agree that this necessarily involves some trade-off in openness, but, again, that is by no means an unprecedented trade-off; it is one to which, again, Apple has vehemently committed without sparking a total user revolt.

Whether Apple's doing something should be any evidence of its reasonableness, I think that there is some case to be made about why my desire is obviously unreasonable.

(See also juliand's post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14599189 elsethread, which is one of many pieces of evidence that Google itself finds my position reasonable, even if, as you say, it is not clear that they 'win' by taking this position.)

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