91–100 of 474 posts
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Hosted on a dubious server with no guarantee at all there is no malware in it.
Well, you’re free to compile the code yourself…
Both Android and iOS have made awesome progress on all fronts, from security to stuff like AR and ML.
You can now have a supercomputer in your pocket - just using it for phone/texts is such a waste.
The flipside of this is that developers are forced to support versions of their apps that are compatible with previous operating systems. That's bad for developers, but good for consumers. iPhones shove updates down your throat as a user. They're so persistent that inevitably most people will accept the new update - and even if you're stubborn like me, eventually your apps will no longer be supported under the newer…
> The problem is that the OS upgrades invariably slow down older phones, so even if you're perfectly happy with your iPhone to begin with, it starts to act slow as it gets the newer OS's. This is a truism and from my experience it rings false. I ran an iPhone 5 for four years without feeling degraded. FWIW, as background, I'm an ex-overclocking PC enthusiast and I consider myself very sensitive to any sorts of perfor…
But yeah, android was a total resource hog when it got started because of Java, and it's gotten worse and worse.
For most users, the phone works and they don't care. For everyone in my family, iOS updates are just an annoyance.
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Even if this were true (it's not) that was a conscious choice by Google to capture market share. This issue was predicted (and observed) years ago, almost since the release of Android in fact, and is only getting worse. That is all due to Google's own choices.
The real problem with it is Linux. Here's a few facts: The Kernel has no stable ABI for drivers. Manufacturers only ever develop a driver for their chips once, and then send that to the OEM. They never update. The Linux Kernel LTS gets 2 years of updates, Google's fork about 4. From the day a Kernel is released, to the day it ships in a phone, usually 2 years are spent integrating the blobs and code drops from the ch…
Whenever a security issue or design change happened, their driver would also get updated and fixed with the rest of the kernel.
What the hardware manufacturers SHOULD do is create hardware with a well defined control interface that they CAN make public. Any 'secret sauce', uploaded firmware blobs, etc, should be free to re-distribute since they were too cheep to ship a ROM or EEPROM with the firmware for their device with the device.
The flipside of this is that developers are forced to support versions of their apps that are compatible with previous operating systems. That's bad for developers, but good for consumers. iPhones shove updates down your throat as a user. They're so persistent that inevitably most people will accept the new update - and even if you're stubborn like me, eventually your apps will no longer be supported under the newer…
Apple has allowed you to download the last compatible version for years - that ability goes as far back as at least iOS 5 that came out in 2012.
I don't think that the two are linearly proportional at all unless individuals or groups are being specifically targeted.
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Well, that's not a real issue, is it? It's purely a decision from the manufacturers to be assholes to their customers. There is no technical need that'd prevent them from creating updates. Especially Samsung (which also produces the SoC in-house for all relevant markets).
Hmm. It's all Google's fault. I don't have to wait for the manufacturer to update my Windows PC. Heck I was able to install Windows 7 on a Mac Mini without any support from Apple. Not to mention I updated a 9 year old Dell Core 2 Duo to Windows 10.
And whenever they broke that API, that actually happened — suddenly updates stopped being usable by your system.
Also, be aware that ARM has nothing to enumerate devices, has no BISO or UEFI. An OS image will only ever work on a single device.
As I detailed in another comment in this thread, the issue is this collision of the Linux concept of mainlining everything, short support windows, manufacturers that can't update drivers for every microchip they sell all the time, and Google and OEMs somewhere in there.
It's always been a clusterfuck, Google didn't create it, but they sure made it worse.
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> I've got a 7 or 8 year old Google Nexus phone. There's probably an Android O ROM out there that someone on XDA has compiled for your device.
Hosted on a dubious server with no guarantee at all there is no malware in it.
95% of the posts are in barely comprehensible English. Seemingly every guide tells you to run a random binary from a file sharing host or generic domain.
As a rule, source code is non-existent. Downloads are attributable to a forum handle in the best case. Oh and you have to run it with elevated privileges to both your host computer and the device. Even the shadier warez communities have more accountability and trust.
In my opinion Google has really done a huge disservice by dropping support for their devices so rapidly and condoning planned obsolescence by handset manufacturers. They are directly responsible for channeling a significant fraction of Android users into this mess.