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Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

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Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#211

Post by DannyBee »

pjmlp wrote: post #174
cobookman wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has broken out GMS from android core so that they can do OTA updates w/o updating the OS itself. I do agree this needs to be better, however its also a non-trivial problem to solve.

How is signing a contract, with the respective legal consequences for breach of contract, a non-trivial problem to solve?

Because suing customers is sure to improve things! That's definitely the path to greater cooperation and goodness. Do you really believe any of these companies would sign that instead of going with whatever plan b is? If so, I guess n-gate is right.

But let's follow this silly thread anyway. On average, the lawsuit would take three to seven years to resolve.

Assume they win: great, they get some small amount of damages and everyone stops using Android. They can't and won't ever get the remedy of forcing security updates. It's not even something available.

Assume they lose: great, they get nothing and everyone stops using Android.

...

What did this solve again?

Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#212

Post by fixermark »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #161
fixermark wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I recall, Google tried a laxer approach early in Android's history, and the quality results were pretty disastrous. Why do we fault the company for taking steps to pull Android as a brand together?

I actually really loved the choice and freedom we used to have and Android, and thought it was a valuable trade off for platform unity. Now we have a very homogenous platform that is still horribly insecure... The worst of both worlds. Google uses their agreements with OEMs to force them to bundle apps and including Google's branding, and protect their business, but refuses to use those agreements to ensure even basi…

I don't think I follow. In what sense is Android horribly insecure? More interestingly: in what sense is it horribly insecure that it wouldn't be if we lived in a world where Google didn't have the market agreements to, say, force security patches for pieces of the Android OS core that were broken?

Because we already lived in that world, and it was less secure than the one we live in now, to my memory. Security issue in one of the Android libraries that are now part of Play Services? Good luck; wait for your OEM to update your OS.

Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#213

Post by floatboth »

digi_owl wrote: post #206
narrator wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to play devil's advocate: Windows became the dominant platform when it had terrible security. Android became the dominant platform when it had terrible security. Maybe people don't care that much about security vs other features. At it's low point, Windows security was a lot worse than Android security. At one point, a fresh Windows XP machine plugged into the Internet would be compromised within a couple of min…

Seems to me that Android had better security from the outset than (consumer) Windows had. It was not until XP that most home computers even had a notion of multiple users in any real sense, thanks to the NT core. And i don't think the problem is so much that people do not value security, but that they approach a computer like it is an appliance. Meaning that they do not internalize that it can do things without them…

> i find it unnerving that Windows 10 can apparently bring a laptop out of shutdown to do updates in the middle of the night

Heh, I remember when Apple used that as a feature. Instead of updates, it downloaded your email and other things you'd want to have already available when you open your laptop.

Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#214

Post by digi_owl »

narrator wrote: post #170
technofiend wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that even google-sourced devices have a very short lifecycle for OS and security updates. Google seem to be running under the assumption any phone over 12 months old is reaching the end of its usable life.

Google has a engineering philosophy of constantly deprecating old stuff. They largely ignore backward compatibility and stop supporting stuff all the time. Their SOAP API for AdWords would break if it wasn't updated every 3 months and this is an API for paying Google money! They are trying to do this in the consumer space, but I don't think this is going to work for things like Nest where people don't want to have to…

Nothing unique to Google. I have taken to consider it the Web-Dev/push-To-Prod mentality. This because on the web a change is a page reload away.

And this mentality is eating its way into all corners of IT as there is a generational changing of the guards. More and more Linus Torvalds (Linux) and Daniel Stenberg (cURL) staying with a project for decades are massive outliers rather than a norm.

Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#215

Post by lspears »

JBReefer wrote: post #2

On one hand, this is a truly incredible accomplishment for Google, and in so little time! On the other, it's sort of amazing this hadn't happened already - so, so many people in the developing world are entirely reliant on mobile, and mostly use low-end Android phones. I use a Moto G4 and the experience is shockingly good for a device that costs less than a bar tab. It's no wonder that low-end Android's are winning,…

"the experience is shockingly good for a device that costs less than a bar tab"

Glad to see someone else lives it up at the bar

Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#216

Post by rkirkendall »

lspears wrote: post #215
JBReefer wrote: post #2

On one hand, this is a truly incredible accomplishment for Google, and in so little time! On the other, it's sort of amazing this hadn't happened already - so, so many people in the developing world are entirely reliant on mobile, and mostly use low-end Android phones. I use a Moto G4 and the experience is shockingly good for a device that costs less than a bar tab. It's no wonder that low-end Android's are winning,…

"the experience is shockingly good for a device that costs less than a bar tab" Glad to see someone else lives it up at the bar

See you at the Bungalow

Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#217

Post by [deleted] »

Shank wrote: post #185
narrator wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to play devil's advocate: Windows became the dominant platform when it had terrible security. Android became the dominant platform when it had terrible security. Maybe people don't care that much about security vs other features. At it's low point, Windows security was a lot worse than Android security. At one point, a fresh Windows XP machine plugged into the Internet would be compromised within a couple of min…

I don't really understand this metric at all. I've heard it colloquially, but I highly doubt anyone was scanning IP address ranges so often that you could be passively attacked on the internet without any interaction by two minutes in. Even more so, people are often behind NAT, which acts as a good firewall on its own. Maybe it's related to browsing habits? IE? I mean, you aren't going to get hit by a drive-by attack…

[deleted]

Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#218

Post by digi_owl »

_0w8t wrote: post #133
technofiend wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that even google-sourced devices have a very short lifecycle for OS and security updates. Google seem to be running under the assumption any phone over 12 months old is reaching the end of its usable life.

An ARM Chromebook that I bought more than 4 years ago still receives updates.

Yes and no. While Google will backport security fixes, and change the Chrome related layer, the kernel version you are running is likely the very same one your Chromebook shipped with.

This is why they can claim that anything shipped from 2017 onwards will support Android apps, but maintain a list of potential devices from before that. Because said support need various container related features only found in newer kernels to work.

Effectively Google has further masked but not really fixed the issues that makes major updates to Android devices such a hassle.

Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#219

Post by temac »

hermitdev wrote: post #191
fridsun wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you break those PC models open what's really different? The hardware interfaces of PC has almost always been stable since the age of IBM PC clones. It might not be a monoculture in terms of all the RGB lightings you can put on your machine, but you definitely don't need to worry about different protocols. All the while Android phones can have the weirdest SoC's on the planet in them.

I admittedly have zero experience with configuring HW with ARM. However, to say that HW interfaces on the PC have been stable since the age of IBM PC clones is a joke. In the DOS days, users manually had to manually set IO memory addresses and IRQ levels. Early Windows sat on top of DOS, so still had to do it there. Plug'n'Play didn't show up until Windows 95, and even then it was hit and miss. Some devices worked, o…

Let's ignore the historical legacy non-PNP ISA config nightmare, because they do not bring anything of value in this discussion.

The core system of PC is highly compatible with OSes in pretty much all directions. (Well now even if I don't ignore the non-PNP ISA configurations stuffs, it does not really change the situation: those were not for core system stuffs)

Then you have drivers for various bus controllers and peripheral, some of which are crucial for using your PC in practice, but as soon as the necessary driver exists, loaded by the kernel way after the core boot, and highly abstracted on all modern OSes (it only access the HW through functions abstracted by the OS)

For non-ancient PC, you even have with ACPI some abstracted functions, provided by the HW, and used at the runtime by the OS. It's to be considered as part of the core plateform, as if it was a pure HW interface, given what we are discussing about. The NT HAL, btw, is a vestigial of early NT years, and is of zero interest for the purpose of PC compatibility today (there is only one HAL that is in use on modern PCs, and IIRC switching the HAL was not even enough when multiple were in use IIRC, other MS binaries still needed to be recompiled -- so the NT HAL is merely an internal detail that bring no consequence in backward or fw compat as far as decoupling of binaries and their update of a partial subset in a system is concerned)

Now the situation for ARM SoC for Android is NOT the same. You just don't boot a generic ARM Linux kernel to driver your random ARM SoC of your random phone. Because even what could constitute an equivalent core system as what exists for PC, follows no standard.

Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#220

Post by ezoe »

When I was a kid, I was frustrated for most of the adults can't use the computer so our society is very inefficient at daily life.

I was thinking, since our generation has affordable personal computers, when our generation become adults, the world will finally embrace the efficiency of computer where everything is computer-friendly and everyone can write code.

I was wrong.

The birth of so called "smartphone" made everyone dumb. The smartphone does not encourage its user to write code or text. They mostly consume the information provided by a handful of people who can use efficient input device, the keyboard.

My generation and the next generation were infected by the smartphone. Those hand-sized, touch-screen pathetic computer is the only computer most people ever use nowadays.

I refuse to own a smartphone. Since our society become so smartphone-friendly, not owning a smartphone makes me really inefficient at daily life. But I don't want to own a computer which tried so hard to prevent me to replace OS, modify the software, writing code and text.

What a dystopian world I live.

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