Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 474 posts

Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#381

Post by colejohnson66 »

kuschku wrote: post #296
khedoros1 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they pull the stuff Nvidia does: write an interface kernel module, then have the driver itself in a library that the module loads. Since the actual driver is never part of the kernel tree...

It's much simpler. The OEM never releases the source. And courts have decided that it's not enough if you have some contributions to the kernel yourself or are a user to force them to release it, you have to have made significant contributions to force them to release it via the courts. And Torvalds and the major kernel maintainers all refuse to enforce the GPL, and actively campaign against doing so.

> And Torvalds and the major kernel maintainers all refuse to enforce the GPL, and actively campaign against doing so.

Two questions: why? and why use the GPL if you’re not going to enforce it?

Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#382

Post by draw_down »

erikb wrote: post #241
gumballhead wrote: post #214

I often get sympathetic comments for being an Android developer because of this. It's honestly not that bad. Android provides backwards compatible support libraries for whatever SDK you're supporting, and was designed from the beginning to handle diverse screen sizes and hardware. By far a bigger problem is manufacturers shipping their own version of Android that is sometimes incompatible with the SDK. I've had to im…

Why not see it the other way around? You can totally go and develop an app that just runs on Samsung Galaxy S8 and nothing else. But with the Android SDK you get the option to support a range of other devices as well with a little overhead. That's far better than with IOS where you only get to support one device type, just maybe different versions of it.

Yeah, because Apple doesn’t want a tablet to just run a phone app, but bigger. Or even worse, vice versa.

Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#383

Post by vetinari »

scarface74 wrote: post #85
kuschku wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your PC, including your Mac Mini, has BIOS/UEFI/other firmware with both boot-time and run-time services. Additionally, it has a hardware, whose sole purpose is to detect and enumerate all the other hardware.

Mobile phones and other embedded devices have none of this.

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

#384

Post by inetknght »

BEEdwards wrote: post #185
fian wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except many times the update will ask to expand its access to information in your phone it shouldn't need. So you choose between explicitly granting permission for unnecessary data access or don't update and hope you don't get owned via a vulnerability in that app.

So instead of finding someway to block or spoof a developer telling you they need different permissions, you'll wait around until some hacker breaks into your shit feeling like you beat the system?

In an imperfect system, you end up with imperfect solutions.

This is a tradeoff. Do I accept the developer demanding access they do not truly need, or do I accept the risk of a hacker gaining access to my phone through the developer's application?

If a hacker gains access to my phone through the developer's application, what do they gain access to? At the maximum (hopefully! unless they springboard to another hack and pwn your whole phone or other applications) they have what the application has access to.

Attack surface management is a lot more complex than just "always stay on the most latest shitware that the developer can shove down your throat"

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

#385

Post by vetinari »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #105
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…

> Also, be aware that ARM has nothing to enumerate devices, ... Isn’t that the purpose of a device tree?

Your kernel brings in the device tree with itself.

It is primarily to allow the drivers linked in the kernel to detect whether they should load and try to talk to hardware. It doesn't replace bus enumeration when running on totally unknown hardware.

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

#386

Post by Feniks »

_ea1k wrote: post #131
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.

Security isn't as big of an issue with many of these devices as you might think. Unless it is years out of date, Play Services still gets updates, the system web view still gets updated, Chrome still gets updates, and in many cases the vendor will still roll out an emergency patch if there is something serious.

Whether or not security is important depends on what you do with your phone.

I don't use my phone for banking or payments and there are no compromising pictures or dangerous files on it. I don't have a pressing need for Android's latest security update.

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

#387

Post by vetinari »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #371
scarface74 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The carrier doesn't lock down iOS. Every iOS user worldwide can update to iOS the day it is released if the phone is compatible.

Also true for Windows 10 Mobile. (My phone gets an update today, why doesn't yours?) Android is the only smart phone platform that carriers still have a say in.

That was not true for Windows 10 Mobile. Some devices never received the update.

What was indeed the insult on top of the injury - the WM devices were all Qualcomm Snapdragon devices. They were never so varied as Android devices are.

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

#389

Post by vetinari »

scarface74 wrote: post #116
goialoq wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's the carrier's fault. The carrier locks down your OS.

The carrier doesn't lock down iOS. Every iOS user worldwide can update to iOS the day it is released if the phone is compatible.

This is a function of market share and customer loyalty, and thus Apples ability to tell carriers to f-off. iPhones will sell regardless whether the given carrier does sell them or not.

On the other hand, iOS updates do cause problems and then it's the carriers, who scramble to modify their networks to make iPhones work (remember when Brits didn't have mobile data for a few days after an update?). They would not do it for Xiaomi or Sony.

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

#390

Post by ihaveahadron »

Oh yeah ur smart future people graduated graduate school and have a very Shakey understanding of the concept of software and hardware, if any concept to speak of at all. In many cases I'm genuinely left wondering if most of you have ever even HEARD THAT WORD.

I am angry and I'm getting it out through words, also though expressing a valid thing. It's called "killing two birds with one stone" for the "american literary geniuses"

The heard that word thing in this thought jot being meant towards graduate school graduates. What I mean is that if I'm right and most of them haven't even registered the word "software" there's a big problem, and I don't mean that in a funny way.

Post reply on HN