There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use • Hacker News Board

Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#411

Post by patcheudor » Tue, Nov 14, 2017, 4:10 PM UTC

yaantc wrote: post #394

patcheudor wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VPN can be a problem, especially on these older devices as those services themselves are vulnerable due to underlying OS issues. In terms of WiFi, keep in mind LTE is effectively broken because of the emergency tower redirection implementation. It's possible for attackers to direct devices to their own OpenLTE tower. https://sourceforge.net/projects/openlte/files/

> keep in mind LTE is effectively broken because of the emergency tower > redirection implementation And it will fails after only a few message, when the phone modem tries to authenticate the network (MME) and fails. LTE and 3G do have mandatory mutual authentication where the device authenticates the network very early on. It's 2G that's the problem: a 2G network does authenticate the device, but not the other way r…

A good talk covering the issue:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDChDM1hEE

Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#412

Post by CaptSpify » Tue, Nov 14, 2017, 4:12 PM UTC

0xfeba wrote: post #379

CaptSpify wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Manufacturers have no incentive now to do so.

They absolutely do. Android is known to be a security nightmare. That means a bad reputation, which also means less sales. I hate Apple and their products, but if someone said that they got an iPhone because it's more secure than Android, I can't really argue that they are wrong.

Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#413

Post by CaptSpify » Tue, Nov 14, 2017, 4:15 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #292

CaptSpify wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I bet most people find digital security too abstract to understand why it’s important, and not bother with updates that didn’t include shiny new features. Also, Generic Phones Inc. don’t see any money in pushing out pure security features — only big players get that benefit, because it’s a type of quality thats a tragedy of the commons thing. I’d change the laws by international treaty to require security patches for…

I'm arguing the opposite: I think people would update if updates didn't break their shit. I have no statistics on this, and would gladly welcome some, but IME people heavily complain that "the last update broke my $x, so I don't want to update again".

If we had 2 different channels of updates: security and feature, then this wouldn't be an issue.

I completely agree with you about the laws and open-sourcing.

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

#414

Post by iainmerrick » Tue, Nov 14, 2017, 4:19 PM UTC

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.

Even if you just target Samsung it's still not the same, unfortunately.

There's a pretty wide range of iOS devices now, but they're all similar, they're all good (or were good when they were released), and you can check your app on them in the Simulator. Just last week I was able to find and fix some bugs in an app that only showed up in certain combinations of screen sizes and iOS 10 or 11, without needing any real devices.

Samsung has many, many more devices; some of them are very good but lots of them are very bad; they do offer some testing infrastructure but it's not as comprehensive or convenient as Xcode; and they frequently make breaking changes to Android without any documentation. A recent example is their "game tuner" which automatically runs games at lower refresh rates and/or screen resolution. Depending which API you use to check the screen dimensions (and Android being Android, there are plenty to choose from) a game can end up displaying at the wrong size.

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

#415

Post by fulafel » Tue, Nov 14, 2017, 4:23 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #73

abritinthebay wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Android device vendors are Linux distribution vendors, and could support their releases for 5-10 years for a given device generation, like many other Linux distribution vendors are doing. (Or outsource it)

Yes of course it's not free and you can save money by leaving users stranded. But it's myopic to claim it's the fault of Linux.

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

#416

Post by Rotareti » Tue, Nov 14, 2017, 4:23 PM UTC

joelthelion wrote: post #361

Rotareti wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last time I tried to install LineageOS on my phone I had to execute a non-reproducible binary of some anonymous haxxor to flash the OS. I remember I could have build my own image from source, but the only documentation was spread over a thread on a message board with a couple hundred pages... and if you screw your build you brick your device.

You never have to do that if you choose your phones well.

How do you flash LineageOS onto a well chosen phone? Don't you need something like TWRP?

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

#417

Post by iainmerrick » Tue, Nov 14, 2017, 4:24 PM UTC

maaaats wrote: post #345

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…

Yeah, I remember when iPhone changed ratio/screen size, and people scrambled to make their apps work. This is something a developer had to handle from day one on all other devices.

This is still a lot more work than it ought to be on iOS. It's possible to write screen-size-agnostic code, but the tools push you towards individually customizing everything for each of the current screen sizes.

For example, in Interface Builder there's a toolbar with buttons to switch between different screen sizes. But it would be a lot easier if they just made the UI freely resizable (in Interface Builder, not necessarily on the device).

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

#418

Post by Bartweiss » Tue, Nov 14, 2017, 4:26 PM UTC

ajnin wrote: post #363

Hey, they used the data that I made available on my website here : https://www.bidouille.org/misc/androidcharts Gathering the old data from archive.org snapshots was a pain, I'm glad I saved someone else the trouble :) One thing that's missing from this data is the actual number of devices in circulation, as said in the article it's only the market share among Android devices, and only those which access the Play Sto…

> only those which access the Play Store

I'll bet this means an enormous number of outdated devices outside the first world are missing. In particular, any area without cheap and reliable data access is probably eschewing the Play Store for some kind of local-area app sharing like Zapya.

Not your fault obviously, these are fascinating stats as is. But I'm also really curious how many smartphones have gone "off the grid" without being retired. Generalizing from Myanmar [1], I suppose Facebook's internal device data would be the best source.

[1] https://craigmod.com/sputnik/smartphones_in_myanmar/

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

#419

Post by iainmerrick » Tue, Nov 14, 2017, 4:27 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #288

dilap wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but it is true that newer updates dramatically slow down older hardware.

I thought this had been tested recently and shown not true? A psychological illusion or something? I’ve never noticed any significant, let alone dramatic, speed change on any given device from iOS 3 on the original iPad onwards.

I thought it was a myth too, but iOS 11 is undeniably much slower for me. And I don't understand why, as it doesn't seem like it adds many features. There's a new filesystem, but shouldn't that be faster, not slower?

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

#420

Post by fulafel » Tue, Nov 14, 2017, 4:27 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #73

abritinthebay wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The official Kernel.org LTS support is 6 years from the Linux devs, some vendors support theirs for longer.