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There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

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Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#421

Post by iainmerrick »

mgkimsal wrote: post #373
ben_w wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Size is not speed.

True, but... Older hardware has older chips (and possibly slower memory) so... a larger size alone would still likely have an actual processing speed impact, no? The newer OS and app versions are developed with chip/memory speed "XYZ" in mind, and that's the target they aim for. That the OS does run on older hardware is great, but if your memory size goes up 2-3 times for apps, I can not imagine that there's 0 speed…

Aren't you confusing apps and the OS here?

Apps are definitely bigger and slower, but that's separate from whether the OS is faster or slower.

Anecdotally (and I agree) iOS 11 is slower than 10 for many of the same tasks -- things like switching apps, opening the camera, opening the keyboard.

Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#422

Post by Paianni »

gonzo41 wrote: post #150
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.

Not having a smart phone is probably up there with being serious about security.

I think you mean not using mobile internet through cellular or Wi-Fi networks is being serious about security.

Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#423

Post by mrguyorama »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #21

> If we look at the newest Android release (8.0, 8/2017), it looks like you’re quite lucky if you have a two year old device that will get the latest update. The oldest “Google” phone supported is the Nexus 6P (9/2015), giving it just under two years of support. And 2 years is the best-case scenario. Compare to nearly 5 years for iOS devices (which, as far as I can tell was prompted only by a move to 64-bit SoC). It'…

I bought a flagship device, a Motorola Droid Turbo (1). They finally got android 6 on it a few months ago. Even better is it's so locked down that I have no choice. This is a $1000 phone, why can't I install what I want on it?

Re: There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

#425

Post by Bartweiss »

viraptor wrote: post #348
adrianN wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only security updates were unbundled from feature updates one could update with fewer worries.

Multiple release breaches are a pain for many reasons. It's very unlikely that companies would spend time doing that, even if they were given a chance to do so.

I can certainly see why multiple branches aren't popular - device fragmentation is bad enough without trying to identify which update branches are affected by some new security bug.

That said, I think companies that require up-to-date devices for security fixes deserve less leeway about the contents of their non-security releases. I've gotten multiple smartphone updates which I considered entirely harmful - they traded cosmetic or vendor-friendly changes against worse battery/performance/usability - and I think "let us break your device or you can't have security" is an unacceptable proposition.

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

#426

Post by Bartweiss »

muzani wrote: post #178
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 hun…

Samsung deserves a special shout-out for making their impossible-to-remove apps also impossible to move to remote storage, so their useless garbage takes up a solid amount of device storage even while disabled. It's frustrating how often smartphone customization/upgrading feels like an actively hostile process.

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

#427

Post by mindslight »

nindalf wrote: post #308
mindslight wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one's "identity" is so bland that it can be trivially "stolen", then perhaps it's not much of an identity after all.

For people living in America an identity is a name, date of birth, mother's maiden name and SSN. If you lose these, you could be the victim of fraud. But you already knew that didn't you? You deliberately misinterpreted what he meant by identity theft.

Mexico and Brazil use SSNs?

I am a USian. The nonsensical concept of "identity theft" has been promulgated by the surveillance industry to avoid responsibility for their own negligence. A person cannot become a "victim of fraud" in the way you describe. The banks are the only parties that stand to be defrauded, and they could avoid this by stopping to pretend that a few bits of semi-public information is enough to identify a person. So far it has been more profitable to keep the gravy train of easy credit rolling, which is fine. But that doesn't mean we should bear the burden for them!

When someone earnest talks about their "identity being stolen", I prefer to think of them as complaining that one of their friends bought the same pair of red Nikes or whatever.

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

#428

Post by kuschku »

fulafel wrote: post #415
kuschku wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s not really possible.

Let’s imagine you try to build a phone.

You buy an SoC, and you get a single kernel build. If you’re lucky, you get a few binary kernel modules.

These will never be updated.

You will always be stuck on that kernel version.

No manufacturer of ARM SoCs for phones currently provides ever updates for these.

Linux LTS Kernels get 2 years of support.

Now, tell me, how do you support a kernel that was dropped by upstream, with proprietary drivers that you can’t do anything about? I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried porting a custom ROM to such a device, I have. By the time Android was on the 3.11 kernel, I had a device still using kernel 2.6. It was insanity, half the functionality wasn’t working, we were reverse engineering and hacking together the rest, and still barely got anything working. It’s impossible to use a decade-old kernel with modern Android userland, yet that’s what you ask for.

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

#429

Post by kuschku »

fulafel wrote: post #420
kuschku wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Kernel.org LTS support was 2 years until a few weeks ago.

Due to Google’s pressure, it’s now 6 years.

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

#430

Post by theandrewbailey »

mtgx wrote: post #365
muzani wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hun…

This is where Google should have a little foresight and mandate that new Android devices will need to have at least 32GB of on-board storage, for instance. I remember hating HTC for making phones with only 200 MB of free storage in the early days, while giving you an additional 2GB microSD card on which you couldn't install apps anyway. That hatred could have been avoided if either Google mandated a reasonable amount…

If that happened, I wonder how soon apps will fill to expand the space. "Well, the user has at least 32GB on their phone, so we can take 30 of those, right?"
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