Hardware vs software in one ecosystem.
Lately I've started to get irritation from what is going on with Android ecosystem. Don't get me wrong, I love Android OS and ecosystem around it and it's openness in fact I see it as main target for my new business venture IonTraker, however just as user there are a lot of things which I can not stand, like phone makers who don't really bother to update OS for example.
When it all started Google needed to get hardware vendors on board, so they gave a lot of lea way to them and that actually what I think is killing ecosystem today. Think about it, on a daily basis I see new phones coming out from a different hardware vendors, for them it is a race for money. They are supported by big carriers to whom it a business sell us new devices and sooner you update your phone the more money they will make on it. All of them burning a lot of advertisement dollars trying to prove that 13 MP camera is 20 times better than 12.5 MP or that 1.5Ghz processor in their new phone 100 times faster than 1.4Ghz in a phone I bought 3 month ago. You should probably ask how those vendors support OS updates, well simplified version of the answer is that they don't. That created huge fragmentation in Android ecosystem, and it is a headache, I'd even go as far as saying that it is major headache for application developers to support all those outdated OS versions.
On the other side of the spectrum we have Apple with their iPhone which in general supports all updates of OS that hardware of particular version supports, so buying iPhone people could go through several iterations of OS before their device would become too old for new upgrade.
Why am I think that regular OS updates are very important. Unfortunately last year we saw a lot of vulnerabilities like Heartbleed, POODLE, GHOST those which has surfaced and what those revealed was scary. Now if we go back to Android OS how many of those shiny devices which has never updated are vulnerable to new threats, simple answer going to be a lot.
In today's world there is only one truly device with Android OS, well it's actually series of devices, I am talking about Nexus devices, Google doing a great job updating those devices unlike all other manufacturers. One other attempt to bring latest and greatest was Cyanogenmod, I wrote before on how to install Cyanogenmod on Samsung Captivate, which was awesome to get latest at the time Android on 4 years old phone. However Cyanogen's struggle as a company to bring Lollipop to OnePlus One make future updates as questionable as that one, well to be honest eventually they will release Lollipop version to their phone, maybe even before Google will show off next version during I/O 2015 or approximately 6 month after Google released original 5.0. However they usually pretty good on support of security patches, so at least from that side of things you could trust them and I still think that they are the best custom ROM our there and in some cases I like what they've done to Android much better than what Google did, at the end of the day Google's main business is advertisement and that drives their motions.
Truth is if you want secured phone without worrying about how to fix those vulnerabilities then with a lot of choices of similar hardware you really have a single choice with Android OS it's Nexus phone, and that's not going to change until those hardware vendors like Samsung, LG and others will get that "Hardware no longer matters, software is".
When it all started Google needed to get hardware vendors on board, so they gave a lot of lea way to them and that actually what I think is killing ecosystem today. Think about it, on a daily basis I see new phones coming out from a different hardware vendors, for them it is a race for money. They are supported by big carriers to whom it a business sell us new devices and sooner you update your phone the more money they will make on it. All of them burning a lot of advertisement dollars trying to prove that 13 MP camera is 20 times better than 12.5 MP or that 1.5Ghz processor in their new phone 100 times faster than 1.4Ghz in a phone I bought 3 month ago. You should probably ask how those vendors support OS updates, well simplified version of the answer is that they don't. That created huge fragmentation in Android ecosystem, and it is a headache, I'd even go as far as saying that it is major headache for application developers to support all those outdated OS versions.
On the other side of the spectrum we have Apple with their iPhone which in general supports all updates of OS that hardware of particular version supports, so buying iPhone people could go through several iterations of OS before their device would become too old for new upgrade.
Why am I think that regular OS updates are very important. Unfortunately last year we saw a lot of vulnerabilities like Heartbleed, POODLE, GHOST those which has surfaced and what those revealed was scary. Now if we go back to Android OS how many of those shiny devices which has never updated are vulnerable to new threats, simple answer going to be a lot.
In today's world there is only one truly device with Android OS, well it's actually series of devices, I am talking about Nexus devices, Google doing a great job updating those devices unlike all other manufacturers. One other attempt to bring latest and greatest was Cyanogenmod, I wrote before on how to install Cyanogenmod on Samsung Captivate, which was awesome to get latest at the time Android on 4 years old phone. However Cyanogen's struggle as a company to bring Lollipop to OnePlus One make future updates as questionable as that one, well to be honest eventually they will release Lollipop version to their phone, maybe even before Google will show off next version during I/O 2015 or approximately 6 month after Google released original 5.0. However they usually pretty good on support of security patches, so at least from that side of things you could trust them and I still think that they are the best custom ROM our there and in some cases I like what they've done to Android much better than what Google did, at the end of the day Google's main business is advertisement and that drives their motions.
Truth is if you want secured phone without worrying about how to fix those vulnerabilities then with a lot of choices of similar hardware you really have a single choice with Android OS it's Nexus phone, and that's not going to change until those hardware vendors like Samsung, LG and others will get that "Hardware no longer matters, software is".
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