Balky carriers and slow OEMs step aside: Google is defragging Android

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/balky-carriers-and-slow-oems-step-aside-google-is-defragging-android/

By Ron Amadeo
Ars Technica
Sept 2 2013

Android 4.3 was released to Nexus devices a little over a month ago, but, 
as is usual with Android updates, it's taking much longer to roll out the 
general public. Right now, a little over six percent of Android users have 
the latest version. And if you pay attention to the various Android forums 
out there, you may have noticed something: no one cares.

4.3's headline features are a new camera UI, restricted user profiles, and 
support for new versions of Bluetooth and OpenGL ES. Other than the 
camera, these are all extremely dull, low-level enhancements. It's not 
that Google is out of ideas, or the Android team is slowing down. Google 
has purposefully made every effort to make Android OS updates as boring as 
possible.

Why make boring updates? Because getting Samsung and the other OEMs to 
actually update their devices to the latest version of Android is 
extremely difficult. By the time the OEMs get the new version, port their 
skins over, ship a build to carriers, and the carriers finally push out 
the OTA update, many months pass. If the device isn't popular enough, this 
process doesn't happen at all. Updating a phone is a massive project 
involving several companies, none of which seem to be very committed to 
the process or in much of a hurry to get it done.

Since it's really hard to push out an Android update, Google's solution is 
to sidestep the process completely. The company stopped putting all the 
good stuff in Android updates. It's not that good stuff isn't coming out 
at all, the exciting features are just not being included as part of a big 
Android release.

This year's Google I/O was a show of force for this new delivery concept. 
No new Android version was at the show, yet Google announced Google 
Hangouts, Google Play Games, cloud saving of game and app data, a complete 
redesign of Google Play Music and Google Maps, a new version of the Google 
Maps API, and new location and activity recognition APIs. Post I/O, we've 
seen seemingly OS-level features added like the Android Device Manager, a 
remote wipe and device tracking system, without needing to touch the base 
OS.

[...]



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