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There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

danluu.com

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Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#171

Post by CaptSpify »

thatswrong0 wrote: post #64
opportune wrote: post #12

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…

Making it easier for users to run software with unpatched vulnerabilities, even accounting for some extra slowness, isn’t a good thing..

Then manufacturers should fix that problem. The reason people don't like security updates, is that they are tied to feature updates. Most people don't like the new feature updates, and would happily take just the security updates. If users were given that option, I'm betting that a lot of the push-back to updates would drop fast.

Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#172

Post by erikbye »

anamexis wrote: post #89
hew wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Side note: "truism" means "A statement that is obviously true and says nothing new or interesting."

Or something that’s very obvious to be self-evidently true.

But, he might have thought of the complaint as so typical it has become a saying, and a truism by argumentum ad populum, but in his eyes false. Besides, most truisms are true only until they are not (a truism example). The Sun is hot. One day it won’t even be (exist).

Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#173

Post by Zenst »

scarface74 wrote: post #114
kuschku wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows has mostly kept a stable driver API. 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 s…

Windows driver API has been far from stable from Windows Vista. One of my computers came with Windows Vista (a 2009 Dell Pentium Dual Core - not the Core 2 Duo I referenced) and it still runs Windows 10. Microsoft provided drivers for the standard PC hardware that was in my 2006 Core Duo Mac Mini and Windows 7 recognized all of my hardware - usb, sound, graphics, Bluetooth, Ethernet etc. Microsoft goes out of its way…

One area in which MS was lackluster upon drivers was some of their own products - for example the force feedback joysticks, still on sale at the time, never got a Vista driver out of MS and became a glorious paper weight overnight.

That and apart from an initial few months of unstable GFX drivers, was utterly solid.

On a side-note, I believe Core Duo2's was the last Intel chips to not include any form of inbuilt `management` silicon and as such,still favoured by some paranoid/security prudent types.

Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#174

Post by johndoe90 »

inetknght wrote: post #61
shp0ngle wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security, basically. If you care about your privacy, you should care about security (can't have one with the other). You need updated phone for that.

On the other hand, if you care about privacy, then not updating your apps often helps too. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I think if you update often enough (at least when some vulnerabilities found), you're more safe than if you don't.

Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#175

Post by crazygringo »

scarface74 wrote: post #86
opportune wrote: post #12

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.

No it doesn't. It only allows you to do that for an app you already installed in the past.

If you want to install an app for the first time, where the current version is incompatible with your OS, you can't.

Believe me, I've tried.

Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#176

Post by erikbye »

Updated my 5s a few days back. Touch ID stopped working and refuse to activate (error message). Spotlight no longer finds the Calculator app. App titles, like Messages, have become larger and hence takes up more space. When I slide an app up to close it, the animation indicating a close triggers, but the app pops back up, so I have to do that gesture twice now to actually close apps. There’s more but I’m typing on my phone and that’s horrible.

Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#177

Post by CaptSpify »

dbcooper wrote: post #162

What do you guys think of Lineage OS and Open GApps? I put them on an old Nexus 7 (2013) tablet, and they run well. How trustworthy are they though?

I'd strongly argue that they are more trustworthy than the crap that comes pre-installed on most phones by the manufacturer nowadays.

Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#178

Post by muzani »

userbinator wrote: post #48

With current and older devices working perfectly well, and new devices being even less serviceable and more user-hostile with greater efforts towards planned obolescence, is it any wonder that people just aren't "upgrading" any more? I don't consider this a problem, but a sign of an ecosystem that is gaining stability. In fact I'd say it's even better, from an e-waste perspective, that the amount of churn has decreas…

I had an older phone with 4 GB space. I could keep about 15 apps running on it. A lot of these apps were important - Waze, WhatsApp, Slack, Uber, camera, etc.

So that left me switching between a budget of about 60 MB for games and unnecessary apps, though I can squeeze in a little more by clearing all the caches.

Now suddenly Samsung bugs me to update to the latest version of Android. The new update would take up hundreds of megabytes. My space was already highly limited.

I eventually gave in to curiosity and updated to Lollipop. The phone became unusable because I didn't have the space to install the apps I needed.

Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#179

Post by ReverseCold »

kelnos wrote: post #147
shp0ngle wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security, basically. If you care about your privacy, you should care about security (can't have one with the other). You need updated phone for that.

That shouldn't be the trade-off, though. I think your average smartphone owner doesn't understand all this anyway. They look at their 3-year-old phone and say "it works fine and does what I need it to do", look at the new ones on the market and say "I don't see anything compelling there to justify that price tag", and so they don't buy a new phone. Most people don't realize that their phone has gaping security holes…

> That shouldn't be the trade-off

Right, but it is the tradeoff.

Of course it shouldn't be, but unfortunately it is.

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