Supposedly the carriers are real pains as well. I've heard horror stories of months-long approvals processes on Verizon and AT&T ROMs.
It's a game I wish they'd get out of entirely. There's no such thing as a useful carrier overlay.
It's a game I wish they'd get out of entirely. There's no such thing as a useful carrier overlay.
Six months and counting, waiting for Verizon to approve the Nougat update on my HTC One M9. It has literally hit everyone else:
[0]http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/12/09/unlocked-htc-one-m9-...
[1]http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/02/23/android-7-0-nougat-o...
[2]http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/03/21/t-mobile-variant-htc...
[3]http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/04/12/htc-one-m9-sprint-ge...
[4]http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/05/16/atts-htc-one-m9-upda...
I've talked to people about how Verizon is trying to use its network as an advantage for advertising with supercookies and such on one end and Yahoo!/Aol on the other end but it seems to alarm nobody.
P.S. also, was Cingular a joke about AT&T? I think I missed what the joke is...
1. Cramming https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/t-mobile-gives-u...
2. They had a "free for life" 200MB? data plan for the Nexus 7 tablet kept billing me every month. It was a monthly ritual for about six months. Call, explain, get adjusted.
Honestly, what are they doing, and why does it take them multiple months to do it?
This problem is made worse on Verizon and Sprint which use CDMA 3G networks, as opposed to the worldwide GSM standard.
Also this could be a result of marketing as well. You can get the latest Android on a new device, or you can wait an indeterminate amount of time (a few months to never) to get a free update on your old device.
I imagine carrier responses would look a lot different then.
What's in it for them?
I buy my phone. It's mine. I can put it on any network I like.
That only applies to phone bought from carriers.
Most people buy them in electronic shops where they buy tvs and laptops and stuff (since that allows you to get the best deal any carrier can offer, and not just be restricted to one).
More people are just buying whatever phone and sticking a simcard in it but there is still a huge number who live by what their carrier gives them.
Interestingly enough I see that as the wrong way around.
Going to a carrier specific-store is also guaranteed to offered me inferior choice both in phones and subscriptions. What's in it for me as a customer?
My electronic store is giving me the phone and carrier which provides me with the best deal. I have no reason to give a carrier, a transparent transport network, any sort of loyalty.
I don't have a "my carrier" which I care about. I do however have a "my phone", and I care about that deeply.
Why? The whole point of GSM is that carrier and phone can (and should) be entirely disconnected, decoupled and only connected through the means of whatever SIM the user puts in his phone.
The notion that a carrier needs to be involved in the making of a phone makes about as much sense as if my ISP needed to test and "approve" what Ethernet hardware I use at home.
It's frankly none of their business.
> This problem is made worse on Verizon and Sprint which use CDMA
So don't use them, just like you wouldn't use an ISP which doesn't speak IP.
Also, plenty ISPs actually do sell branded wireless routers with branded firmware, so it's not uncommon practice in other neighboring industries.
Google needs to fix their upgrade story. Even if the North American customers continued to run old vulnerable versions forever, updating everyone else's systems would be a tremendous improvement. (It would also make it difficult for the US carriers to continue those particular business shenanigans.)
Prior to the iPhone changing how phones were sold-- carriers meddled with everything so they could get their hands in media playback, app sales, feature upgrades etc. I don't think much has changed in this where anyone gives them an inch (which is nearly everyone but Apple).
Note: I worked for T-Mobile for four years prior and a little after the originals iphone came out.
There is absolutely no reason for carriers to need to do anything at all, else it would not make sense that I can change the SIM card out and voila I’m on a new carrier. The manufacturer is the one doing the testing, and the carrier simply provides the infrastructure.
I feel US perhaps has a different experience, because of their ridiculous CDMA infrastructure. Is it Verizon or what, where it’s not a SIM card but the phone itself that’s setup to a specific carrier?
In particular when Nokia tried to introduce SIP support.
Both Nokia and Sony Ericsson were doing OTA firmware updates at that point, for "featurephones" no less.
iPhone didn't get that ability until iOS5, in 2011.
It was done via the desktop application to manage the phone.
However one would ususally only get bug fixes on the Series 30 and 40.
On Symbian towards the end of it, there were some OS updates still, but usually only once.
And Nokia was not alone, my Sony Ericsson C702 were capable of being getting new firmware OTA as well.
Keep in mind that this was back with the original iPhone that needed to be wired to a computer with iTunes installed.
Frankly the iPhone introduction feels more of a rollback than a upgrade from non-American point of view.
Belle already had lots of features that took Android and iPhone years to catch up with.
they had Maemo, they had Symbian. But they were afraid that focusing on Maemo would lead to Symbian dying before they could get Maemo to the same level.
And then boardroom meddling was added, and they went much the same way as HP...
I'm pretty sure I got an actual update at least once.
You would walk in, and find a wall of phones, alongside a list of carrier plans.
Then you could pretty much mix and match plan and phone to find some price you were comfortable with.
Come the iPhone's "worldwide" launch however Apple sat down and insisted that only one carrier would get the iPhone, and defined in detail the kinds of plans that said carrier could offer.
The iPhone brought a bit of the outside world to the US telco market. This was only a matter of time, as the market becomes more globalized there is increasing competition in the consumer market, and carrier bound phones are less flexible and more expensive in the long run. Everybody knows this.
(I believe that even the US broadband market sooner or later will transformed in much the same way. For a long time it looked like Google was about to do it, but with that seemingly stalled for the time being we might have to wait a few more years.)
It is not reasonable to describe the iPhone as changing how phones were sold outside of a select few countries. Therefore we should not accept that explanation as to why Android phones do not receieve updates either. Those markets are small on a global scale, especially for Android which clearly dominates the lower end of the market, which is predominantly deregulated.
The carrier can still, of course, test the new firmware all they like - they just shouldn't be able to interfere with its release.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/17/13306776/apple-iphone-7-...
Moreover, in some European countries it is normal to buy a phone and a subscription separately. In some countries bundling is even illegal. I have never had a carrier-branded phone since I switched to smartphones, including my Android excursion (Nexus 4, Moto X 2013, Moto G, Moto X 2014) and some Windows Phones that I played with (Lumia 710/920/640). They all worked on multiple carriers.
Everyone should stop perpetuating the carrier testing myth. For this we have the GSM standards and in many parts of the world a large number of phones are not carrier-branded.
I guess not. I guess instead they rely on the GSM specification to allow seamless independence between the phone and the carrier for 99.999% of the phones out there (if not more).
So why do they need to "test" the remaining 0.001% when they have a update in user-facing functionality the carrier will never see or interoperate against?
No carrier in Europe does this.
Does your ISP control what OS updates you can download? No. And why should they?
That carriers needs to do testing is a lie perpetuated to allow for customer-hostile business-practices. Stop repeating it.
It happens with Apple OS updates too, Apple just have sufficient market clout to tell networks they must complete the testing in the week between the gold master release and the public release.
GSM isn't some magic specification. It's entirely possible for a crappy radio firmware to cause significant disruption to a network it connects to (indeed, I've seen a pre-release firmware from a mid-tier Android manufacturer that managed to cause a reboot in every cell tower it connected to from one of the UK's networks). That's an extreme example, but carriers frequently do testing on that basis, and it often holds up the European releases of Android software updates.
>That carriers needs to do testing is a lie perpetuated to allow for customer-hostile business-practices. Stop repeating it.
Other than your opinion, what evidence do you have that this is a lie?
This kind of bullshit only happens in the US where carriers are free to bullshit as they like due to absolutely lacking regulation.
In Europe we know better, we do better.
I'd rather say the burden of evidence is on the other side of the argument: prove to me why do you need to do testing as a carrier.
And yet you make absurd claims without evidence yourself. So because you're confused as to the reason, that makes them a liar.. Nice.