People are incorrectly complaining about google when they should really be complaining about the OEMs. You can blame google for that business model but generally they aren't deciding when Android phones get updates.
With Android, it's not so much that Google does it out of choice but because they have no control of most of the phones and there were (still are?) huge numbers of phones which don't even have access to OS updates or get them very late. Google was forced to pull a lot of functionality out of the OS level to be able to keep people up to date.
Agreed, placing all the blame on Google is not fair. Besides Google, carriers, and manufactures, there's one more party involved that no one seems to talk about, users. Google only promises to update their software for 18 months. If you're going to milk years and years out of your smartphone, don't you have some responsibly to update outdated apps with updated ones from the Google Play store?
I have an old Galaxy S3 that Samsung no longer updates, yet these bugs don't effect me because I've replaced the built in browser with Chrome, which still receives regular security updates. What's stopping users of old phones from installing Chrome or Firefox?
It kind of is Google's fault. Most people associate any version of Android with Google. Manufactures that don't update their phones causes harm to both the manufacture's image and Google image.
Personally, I place all the blame on Google for not making the upgrades possible from their side. It should be easy to upgrade the core operating system as easy as updating Windows, OSX, and Linux.
It's the oems fault in this case. And they have no excuse. Google has modified the architecture of Android to make it possible for oems to update as quickly as possible, as well as all of the previous efforts to enable updating user-facing features without updating the OS. But it's all still a kludge compared to iOS.
The bottom line is I don't think this is solvable with technology. Google should have gotten much tougher with OEMs once Android got widely accepted.
I'm not suggesting that it's Google's fault (well other than forcing OEMs to shove Google stuff down my throat). It's a general complaint about the android ecosystem as a whole. Even Windows 98 got more regular security updates than most android phones.
I dunno, blaming Google for phones not being updated (Other than their branded phones or course), is a bit like blaming Linus Torvalds when routers still use a 2.6.x kernel version. When something is open and able for anyone to do with as they please, it's only natural that the devices it lives on can't be controlled the same.
Most of the people who complain about stuff like this are those who run custom, degoogled Android ROMs and think they are entitled to Google's work forever.
Blaming Google for not updating your non-Nexus Android phone is like blaming Linus Torvalds for not updating your cisco router from your ISP just because it uses linux.
Android is based on AOSP, which Google does not control because of the license, not sure why especially on HN, people do not seem to understand or want to understand how open source licensing work.
That's not to say Google has no responsibility in this. Google's OS has a terrible security-update policy. Being able to buy a new computing device from a store that will receive no security updates is terrible, and is fairly common in Android devices.
Now, there are valid technical reasons that Google can't be as good as Microsoft at pushing out updates to every device running their OS, but still, it's hard to say that Google has made fixing this problem a priority. Even their own 1st-party devices have a pathetic 2-year upgrade window from launch, which, I'll remind you, still means somebody can buy last year's device on a store shelf and stop getting security updates before the device is even out of warranty.
This is incorrect. People are often complaining about the OEMs, when you really should be blaming Google. Google designed the way the OS handles updates, and it also sets the terms that OEMs have to agree to in order to sell Android devices with Google Play Services included.
Google controls the entire table here. But they want you to blame all of the different OEMs rather than looking at the real culprit in the middle of all of them.
I consider google with android to be a similar position to the linux kernel on my servers. I don't expect any of the kernel team to produce a patch for my 2.6.18 kernel I am running on a RHEL 5 system, I expect Red Hat to do that.
Why doesn't Samsung / LG / HTC manage Long Term support for Android versions, back port the patches and roll them out? Alternatively why don't they all pool together and manage an LTS version for customers.
It seems crazy that the company that has a relationship with the customer doesn't have to support the customer, and everyone instead blames google who wrote the code. The android vendors could back port, create alternative patches or simply make the device able to be updated to a more recent version.
Well, its hard to feel any sympathy for Google here. Google forces their android partners to include Google's own apps and keep them updated. They could also have made Android security updates mandatory. MS still got the blame when Windows systems got exploited using bugs that were fixed ages ago. Its unfair, but that's just the nature of the beast...
Google was forced to do it, because contrary to iOS, Android updates only take place when one buys a new phone, for all pratical purposes, even if Google pretends we have lots of nice OEMs doing updates.
The negativity is that Google has the legal means to enforce updates like in any other OS, and which they do as means to access key Android services, and yet decided not to do it.
And people ignore that Google could easily put some clauses on their contracts to force OEMs to upgrade, just like they have clauses obliging them to use Google Play Services if they want to use the store.
It is all a mater of what Google is willing to put on their Android contracts. No excuse.
I don't like this argument, because Android is not developed openly and the kernel itself is a fork which lags behind the mainstream Linux development until Google implements the changes, which users see when they throw away their phone because Samsung/HTC/Xiaomi/Ulefone/Whatever doesn't want to update the phone or Verizon/ATT/Telenor/T-Mobile, etc., doesn't want to push the update because they branded the phone so that means its theirs but not their responsibility.
This excuse completely ignores the fact that through the MADA contract, Google controls all of the manufacturers and defines whether or not they are allowed to sell Android phones, effectively. And that the OS is designed, by Google, to require the manufacturer to distribute the update, rather than, as with... pretty much all other OSes, the software developer being responsible for updating their own software.
Google would like you to blame the manufacturer, but you need to realize the fact that you even can blame the manufacturer is a design flaw in the OS which Google designed.
What they forget is that to put Android on a phone, practically you need Google's permission.
If Google cared, they could have made it part of the terms and conditions that it has to have security updates for five years.
They obviously don't
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