I've been developing Android apps since 2011, and Android development is getting worse. The support I have to deal with goes back to Android 4.4 which is like 4-5 years ago. And the phones in the market here in Asia are still mostly on 6.0. I am no longer getting excited for Android releases anymore.
Preetam, founder / lead dev here: Yeah, yeah, I know. We really need to move our asses over to Nougat already, but its a PITA when we port upwards and there are major changes in the internal framework APIs, forcing us to thoroughly test the whole system again...but we'll get there!
Yeah, I'm trying to think how a lot of these are going to work, myself.
When I built a low-cost signage platform, a lot of the devices we deployed to were Android 4.4/5.0 (yes, even in 2020+), which doesn't have auto on/off that Nougat introduced in Android 7.0.
Probably some poor sap's job is to Teamviewer in and install a third-party app to control the shutdown and startup.
Hmm, Fushcia builds a whole new kernel in a different paradigm and then a userspace upon that. Android was built upon an existing and mature kernel. It doesn’t surprise me that Fushcia takes longer.
What's not to understand? They don't think Honeycomb is ready for general consumption, and they'd rather wait until Ice Cream (when the tablet and phone versions of Android converge) to release. If you want to hack away at Honeycomb for tablets, you just have to contact them and they'll provide you the full source code.
They've done this to a lesser extent in the past with almost every major version of Android (where the Open Sourcing of it comes after devices already ship). Does it suck that it's taking longer for 3.0? Sure it does. Do they have a valid reason to do so? You bet they do. Avoiding almost certain fiascos of companies trying to shoe-horn Honeycomb onto phones is a definite concern.
"A few months back" is like 1/3rd the lifetime of the project. Also you're comparing a development pre-1.0 release with a 4.x release of another project. On most phones in the target price range, the latter isn't even going to run.
This sound like a worthy project even though it likes extremely hard to maintain.
I am curious how the Android underneath is upgraded and how often it happens
I like how they point out that they are rushing the ice cream sandwitch.
The fact is that android is on a 6 month release circle.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history, the latest phone version bump was on 6 December 2010, and for tablets the initial release was on 22 February 2011. If you ask me, it's not rushing, they're late.
It was being downvoted because it simply wasn't factual. Android was not closed "from 2.x to 4". Honeycomb (3.x) was first released on devices in February 2011 and its source was opened in November 2011. 9 months is not a "really long time".
I recently switched to Android from iOS, and actually don't find this to be too big of a deal now that mobile OSs have matured somewhat. I was excited to finally be able to upgrade to Nougat a couple of months ago, but there were precisely zero user-facing differences, apart from a few inconsequential aesthetic tweaks. I can see that it is more of a problem for developers, who can't use new APIs without drastically limiting their audience.
It generally takes them a while. If you're impatient you can try out the beta from play store - it's at b15 which is very close to the release version and it's working good for me on couple devices. Much better than the older versions that's for sure.
Google could be on the verge of sending out an entirely new build of Android for the next-generation smartphones and tablets sooner than later and previously, a number of reports have pointed towards the build’s existence, or that it is in development. Now, per reports, Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie has apparently made its first benchmark appearance with some positive results.
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