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Comment by cft | Hacker News Reader

Too bad Android does not have any visible plans to implement WebSocket (which is now RFC 6455). Perhaps the development of HTML5 apps on Android has lower priority for Google than for Apple, to force the development effort into native, which they can curate and control. This hypothesis is also corroborated by comparing HTML5 performance in Android and in iOS (Android is usually 300-500% slower).

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Opera Mobile supports Web Sockets and runs on almost any Android device.

http://caniuse.com/#feat=websockets

chrome for android supports websockets.

Only on 4.0: it represents less than 1.5% of all Androids now. iOS had Websockets since 4.1, for over 1.5 years. Unless Chrome gets back-ported to Android 2.2 and 2.3 it will take a very long time.

I thought 4.0 was supposed to stop that? iOS 5.1 runs on every iOS device released in the last 3 years. When can we expect all Android devices released in the past 2-3 years running the latest OS?

when the carriers and handset manufacturers pull their collective thumbs out of their asses.

Is that what had to happen for Apple to do it? I thought Android was on the same carriers?

god dammit, why does everything have to be an apple/android battle? can we not complain about the deficiencies of android without some smug apple fanboys chiming in? yes, apple is better at pushing out software updates than android is. that's not relevant to a discussion on where we can and can't use websockets. now go away.

Just trying to lay the blame where it belongs, on Google and the Android ecosystem. You'd have your websockets if Google did the right thing and enforced updates. Has nothing at all to do with the carriers .

Google could also stop releasing new versions of Android as code drops. Sony is trying to do the right thing and update a large part of their inventory but their ICS ROMs are currently still in beta because they only got access to ICS source in November.

http://developer.sonymobile.com/wp/2011/12/07/ice-cream-sand...

yes, but i was addressing your claim that android has no plan to support websockets. obviously they can't make all the old versions websocket compatible, but they do have a clear path forward to supporting them.

Except that Mobile Safari still crashes if you have a proxy server enabled and try to open a WebSocket:

https://github.com/LearnBoost/socket.io/issues/193

Pretty annoying.

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