Article refrains from drawing conclusions, instead presenting the data. Android is doing better at moving users to newer versions, but the overwhelming majority of users don’t have the current Android OS version nor the previous version, combined.
Article refrains from drawing conclusions, instead presenting the data. Android is doing better at moving users to newer versions, but the overwhelming majority of users don’t have the current Android OS version nor the previous version, combined.
Yeah, unlike Windows this isn’t a user choice. It comes down to manufacturer support. I don’t know what you do to make this better, especially in the context of newer Android updates being lighter on major user-facing features.
I’m also unclear on the exact technical details but there’s probably a reason that lineageos and the other free androids out there are not easily installable but have to be customised to each device.
I’m pretty sure that reason is mostly manufacturers being dicks about this. So it could probably be fixed by mandating some kind of interoperability. OTOH the governments are probably happy that not more people are using degoogled devices
Whose mandate? Are you going to make a law saying you can’t customize Google’s base Android?
It’s an open source OS, manufacturers offer crappy support because they want customizations and proprietary software but don’t want to have to spend a bunch of engineering time to keep pace with Google’s reference spec. Samsung does, but that’s because they’re the literal largest phone manufacturer on the planet.
But Google can’t be out there saying you don’t get to use Android code if you don’t offer timely support for a decade. There’s a reason years of security updates are now a declared selling point, the only force to drive it is market pressure. At most you could regulate that you HAVE to support swapping OSs on phones, but you can’t just target that at Android and not Apple, and Apple would buy themselves a nuke to fight against that one.
Yep the idea would be to mandate better support for third party operating systems. I do get that that’s unrealistic both because that law would have to be very very complicated to write and also because Google and apple would fight tooth and nail to stop it.
Doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be cool.
I read it as a law that the bootloader has to be unlockable so that the phone can be serviced by the end user past the manufacturers end of support