Yes, it’s been a long road, but Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich has achieved a major milestone. Just over half a year since it’s been released, Google’s latest Android version has crossed the all-important 7% installed base barrier. This is a major achievement for Android, so Google has reason to celebrate. I’m proud to be part of the 7.1%.
that’s great.
I think iOS 5 reached 7% in a matter of minutes, the day it went out
Yes, and once Apple all _their_ devices have to update right away it will reach 95% in a matter of days.
You won’t even be asked, it will be awesome.
can you explain better?
I think the point of this whole article is that although there are a number of different hardware configurations and manufacturers, new versions are still taking hold at a decent pace. It means that developers don’t have to worry about supporting older versions too long.
Ios obviously doesn’t have the problem, so referring to its statistics for upgrade times, is sort of stupid. Unless, that is you were just trying to point out that ios doesn’t have that problem. It wasn’t very clear from your post. However the reply you received didn’t make sense either. Given the choice, devices should be updated to newer versions almost automatically.
I wonder if the headline was meant to be sarcastic?
Never the less, of course IOS will be upgraded faster. Unfortunately android has a lot of middlemen mucking around in the upgrade process.
And add to that, the fact that there are devices that are technically incapable of having Android 4. Like Nexus One.
My Desire has been using a custom ICS ROM for a while now; hardware acceleration et al.
The limitation is artificial.
edit: referring to the Nexus One. The point still stands that some devices are incapable.
Edited 2012-06-03 08:28 UTC
Which ROM? Is the camera software still buggered?
From what I understand, its not incapable, it just uses a unique chipset that isn’t used by anything that is getting an official ics update. there are ICS roms out there for it. So its difficult, but being worked on by some folks.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1366897
Incapable – as in internal partitioning needs fixing for it to run. Thus OTA upgrade is impossible, a “sealed” high speed and high quality uSD is also required.
> Given the choice, devices should be updated to newer versions almost automatically.
Except when they don’t quite work with the next version, like old iPod touches with iOS 4.
When you connect an iPhone to your computer iTunes will notify of a new version and ask if you want it. Now that the iPhone can update wirelessly it will again not do it without asking first.
If that’s what you were getting at.
Nope. That is incorrect.
iOS achieved 95% only after the Absinthe 2.0 jailbreak was out! ;-P
Really? Do you have hard figures?
There’s no reason to Jailbreak for me anymore. In the UK all iPhones can be legally unlocked (depending on carrier rules, but at worst, end of contract). My 3G was factory unlocked as soon as it was allowed (the rules changed in the UK, so that carriers will now unlock whilst on contract), and 3GS and 4 were all factory unlocked free by O2 with in the first week of owning and whilst still on contract. I jailbroke the 3G to get video recording (cycorder). That’s no longer an issue. I jailbroke the 4 to get the improved notifications, no longer an issue in iOS 5. I’d rather change OS now than mess about with Jailbreaks. Half the interesting stuff in the Cydia store never seemed to work on iOS 4 (the Terminal app being the one that stuck in my memory.)
I think you’re confusing SIM unlocking with jailbreaking (rooting) the phone. Some countries are forcing phones to be unlocked so that consumers have the choice of provider. Jailbreaking is different – it allows the execution of arbitrary programs on the phone.
(Unless this jargon is totally messed up on IOS… *shrug*)
A fair few of my non-technical friends use android phones. There is one thing that surprised me coming from my custom rom bubble.. The big question that they ask is.. why do I need to upgrade. These are users who have come from feature phones to smart phones which they use for emails, sms and phone calls.. so they don’t get why they need to upgrade to get new features when the features they need work “just fine” as they are…
I suspect there are tens of thousands of users around the world that fall into this category.. they see the update icon come up on their phone and never actually apply it because they just don’t see a need.
I wonder how many ICS user we would have if all those users simply accepted the update?
Personally I think it’s being a good citizen to keep your devices updated. In theory it should mean that you get security updates in a timely fashion…
I think you are right on the nail here.
Some makers don’t give two hoots about aftercare. No security patches at all or what’s worse a security patch that has made the phone unstable. (HTC, I’m looking at you).
As much as Google etc might like everyone to be running ICS a good proportion of the H/W out there simply can’t handle it.
I see ‘ICS fanboism’ amongst Android users that is far worse than iOS envy in the Apple camp. Some have volunteered to root my phone so that I can join the club. Despite my actually hating HTC with a venom for making Apps like Twatter and FaceBlock part of the OS and thus can’t be removed, I’ve gone back to the unpatched version of 2.3 that came with the phone. The many hundreds of posts in various fouls about people having real issues with ICS has made my mind up for me.
The bottom line is that for my needs, (phone, texts, looking up train times/location and a bit of browsing) the phone does what it says on the tin.
Then I have enough funds put together I’ll be buying new phone and keeping the Sensation for use when I’m abroad on business. I am currently undecided about staying with Android or going back to an iPhone.
All I want is for the damm thing to work.
I suspect that I’m not alone there.
Spot on. A lot of users don’t even upgrade their apps, nevermind their OS. Only people into tech are interested in the newest update unless it has a feature that everyone has been clamoring for or it has been marketed to death.
Eh, True to an extent. But, sometimes updates make a huge difference in usability. comparing my cm9 captivate to a samsung 2.2 image is just ridiculous. When I showed my non tech friend that hadn’t updated, he obviously wanted to. When the difference between the usability is great, people will want to upgrade. When their is a great visibile difference in performance, people will want to upgrade when they learn of it.
This is the same reason why each version of MS Office looks different, so you know its different, without having to be one of those rare people that notice a new feature or improvement.
But comparing the CM9 to Samsung is also comparing CM to Samsung. With Samsung’s own ROM comes a bunch of useless Samsung bloat, whereas CM comes with some neat functionality. And one of the reasons why Samsung take their sweet goddamn time in getting updates to their OS is because they need to port their useless bloat to the newer Android versions.
Having said that, Chrome needs ICS, which makes the upgrade worth it. By far the best browser for any mobile OS I’ve seen.
Yes obviously comparing CM9 to Samsungs touchwized 2.2 is comparing CM9 to samsung’s touchwized 2.2. In other news, water is wet. The point is not who created software that improves a phone, but that people want software that improves hardware.
You totally don’t get it.
The vast majority of the cool and competitive features in Android are not available in earlier versions so if only a small percentage of users upgrade it means developers need to write to some ancient version to support the bulk of the user base.
Meanwhile, in the iOS world, a developer just writes to the latest version, knowing that most of devices in the wild will be on that version.
…and when Apple screw up an update, as they did with iOS 4 for older iDevices, users of perfectly working hardware have to install the knowingly broken update on their phone or PMP in order to use the latest software.
At some point in their lifetime, all OSs reach a level of maturity where updates do not matter so much anymore, as happened to Windows around the XP SP2 days. This cannot happen soon enough to iOS and Android.
Edited 2012-06-04 06:51 UTC
Also, I don’t think that you need ICS to get “The vast majority of the cool and competitive features in Android”. As far as I can tell, for Gingerbread users, ICS is more of a big overall UI refinement (and a large resource hog) than a groundbreaking feature-rich release.
Edited 2012-06-04 07:01 UTC
I didn’t follow it too closely (not much point to wonder about upgrade before CM is even available), is it really a hog?
Android tended to be more smooth with new releases… (especially on slowish hardware)
If we are to believe Sony’s blog post and the people who periodically complain about a large battery life hit on XDA, then yes. The latter can come from a variety of other causes, though (bad CPU governor, kernel functionality that’s not enabled yet, etc…).
http://developer.sonymobile.com/wp/2012/03/30/learn-about-the-techn…
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1445821
Myself, I can deal with a few dozens of MB of RAM less, but those who want to run heavy software would probably want to wait until Google have optimized the thing more.
And not just non-technical people.
I started using computers in the 1970’s, have written operating systems and built more machines from scratch than I care to admit (including building a processor from SSI logic – not something I’d try again, by the way).
But I’ve happily ignored the Maemo Update icon on my Nokia N900 for several months now.
My phone works well. It does exactly what I need. It never had the breakout success that would attract script kiddies and other lowlife. And, Nokia has much less motivation to assist if an upgrade buggers the device now that they are Microsoft’s BFF.
Soooo. Why would I want to mess with an upgrade, exactly?
More like millions, I’d guess …and probably hundreds. Possibly few billion, relatively soon (there are 5+ billion mobile subscribers, large part of them supposedly in the process of migration to the so called “smartphones”, over the next few years)
The fact that ICS has taken almost eight months to barely make it above the 7% mark is an extreme shame. Seven months after ICS there were still new phones being announced with GINGERBREAD!?!?! Mind you, I’m not talking about phones released in May-2012. I’m talking about phones ANNOUNCED in May-2012 which will ship in the next two or three months… with Gingerbread.
I’m not touching Apple’s walled garden with a 10-foot pole and after trying out Windows 8 Release Preview, I’m 100% sure I don’t want anything to do with Windows Phone. RIM’s comeback can’t happen soon enough! In the meantime, my phone still waits for its Ice Cream Sandwich update and my tablet has ICS, because I had to buy a new tablet shipping with it out of the box.
Yes, you are right. I’m an Android user and lover myself, but 7% is just pathetic.
Of course it’s a joke. Duh.
Its tough to tell with you sometimes. What with the red girl scouts painting unicorns red and what not.
Nice, it looks like ICS usage almost doubles each month now.
However, the main problem in the Android world is not that many people run old OS versions. The main problem is that many people run old hardware, that wont get much better no matter how much the OS is upgraded.
From a software perspective you can write apps that looks and feels like ICS on Android 2.1 and later using the google support packages and libraries like actionbar sherlock. If you are willing to sacrifice some action bar features you could make that 1.6 and later.
Further more, from a developer perspective it is not so interesting how many people that run iCS, the more interesting figure is how many people run Honeycomb or ICS, as they together would constitute what we can call modern Android, where you don’t meed to use all the compatibility libs I mentioned above, and then we cover 9.8% of the user base.
No offense, but since not even Google cares about upgrading their Nexus line in time (the Nexus S started getting ICS, then the upgrade got pulled because it was problematic, then it finally got ICS months after the Galaxy Nexus), why should OEMs care?
Now, walking the fine line that seperates constructive criticism from trolling, i ‘ll dare to say that the unstable ABI inherited from Linux is hurting Android. Everytime a major version arrives, drivers for the chip have to be rewritten. Two solutions would be for Google to define a kernel driver model and keep it stable for as long as possible, or limit Android certification (OEMs need it to get the proprietary Play and Maps apps) to a specific handfull of chips (this should also help development). Either way, Google has some decisions to make to reduce version fragmentation, fast. The trick of steering the conversation to UI fragmentation (from version fragmentation) every time someone asks won’t work for Google execs much longer.
Sure, people don’t care about upgrades, but once they learn it’s the reason new apps (like Chrome) don’t show up in their Google Play, they will get angry and buy a WP8
Can you actually back up that statement? The kernel developers might not guarantee API stability, but nor do they habitually break stability in every release – and certainly not to the point where drivers must regularly be re-written.
People who WHINE *YES WHINE* about upgrades, and how long they take/took need to visit (and read) the developer sites where they are working on getting custom ICS ROMS (like Cyanogenmod) up and running on various hardware. Each and every phone is unique, and presents it’s own challenges when porting over a new version of the OS. Things that worked just fine on one model phone might take a MONTH of meticulous debugging to find the root of a problem on another. There is a LOT of work that goes into an upgrade…either the official upgrades, or the custom ones created by the community of developers out there.
And comparing Android to iOS and Apple’s updates isn’t exactly fair, either. Apple has to support a whopping 3 phones, the 3gs, the 4, and the 4s. Android has to work on THOUSANDS of phones, each with it’s own chipsets, GPUs, radios and other hardware that may or may not be unique to that ONE model. Add to that the fact that most phones are jumping TWO OS versions, from 2.3.4 to 4.0.4! There are MAJOR changes under the hood!
And for those of you WHINING about the Nexus updates…yes, it’s unfortunate that they had to pull the upgrade, but I, personally, would rather have an upgrade that is TRULY an upgrade, NOT one that is half-baked and causes more problems than it solves! What is the point in applying an “upgrade” if that upgrade borks your phone???
I was running Samsungs Android 4.0.3 on Galaxy S2, but “upgraded” to CM7, which is 2.3.7. This is working much better now. I will install CM9 when there is some kind of release of it instead of nightly builds.
People who WHINE *YES WHINE* about upgrades, and how long they take/took need to visit (and read) the developer sites where they are working on getting custom ICS ROMS (like Cyanogenmod) up and running on various hardware. Each and every phone is unique, and presents it’s own challenges when porting over a new version of the OS. Things that worked just fine on one model phone might take a MONTH of meticulous debugging to find the root of a problem on another. There is a LOT of work that goes into an upgrade…either the official upgrades, or the custom ones created by the community of developers out there.
OK, first of all, let me say I own an Android, I want to see Android succeed etc
Also, sorry pal, but Microsoft has more-than-a-handfull devices to support with WP7 too, but all of them get upgraded generally smoothly (considerably more smoothly than Android for sure). Why? Because MS standardized the chips (CPU, GPU), radios, GPSes etc that OEMs can use. Sure, they did the mistake of limiting choice too much IMO (particularly when it comes to CPUs and GPUs), but the point is that limiting the supported chips to a select subset you know you can support, instead of letting OEMs use whatever they stumble upon, is a good thing. Google could use their Android certification procedures to enforce this.
Oh, and the reason we WHINE about Android upgrades is because we want things that work, and we want our 1GHz dual core phone we bought some months ago to be able to run all the latest apps, which means having the latest version. We are not whining just for the sake of whining (as you imply in your post), we are whining for a reason.
People who say “do you know how hard it is to upgrade all Android phones with all those different CPUs and GPUs” are like the Unix weenies of yesteryear who said “do you know how hard it is to make a program that runs in all Unixes”. Fact is, people want things to work. They don’t care why things don’t work. If you don’t give them what they want, they will go and buy Windows / Windows Phone. Get over it.
PS: And no, we don’t want custom ROMs. We want official ROMs in time that work, like Windows Phone.
Edited 2012-06-05 08:31 UTC
Which explains why Windows Phone is doing so well in the mobile market. Face it, the game is iOS vs. Android.
Which explains why Windows Phone is doing so well in the mobile market. Face it, the game is iOS vs. Android
Smart people are waiting for WP8 (I do, when the contract of my Optimus 2X expires). WP7 for example doesn’t have support for the latest dual core CPUs, WP8 with it’s NT kernel will.
Instead of converting this into yet another fanboy pissfest, can we just focus on the fact Windows Phone manages updates well, which means smooth updates on a multi-vendor OS are prossible? Hence, Android users are right to WHINE for not getting updates on their phones (and not having access to the latest apps). In other words, let’s admit there is a problem first, and maybe we can shame Google into fixing it (see previous post)
Edited 2012-06-05 10:13 UTC
It does not take a fanboy pissfest to realize that all WP7 phones are, by design, extremely similar in looks and features, and that as such there could effectively be only one single Windows Phone OEM with two or three phones with the same results.
WP7, the way I see it, mainly competes with iOS, not Android. It doesn’t try to address the issue of multiple form factors and wide pricing ranges like Android, Symbian, or increasingly s40 and Meltemi do.
Now, Windows 8 and WP8 could be more interesting, since Microsoft are now attempting to get their OS on a wider range of hardware by imposing firmware standardization on ARM OEMs. If it turns to work, then hopefully Android and other ARM OSs will also benefit from it in the long run.
Edited 2012-06-05 17:34 UTC