Guest post by “Google may be planning to keep Android 2 and 3 segregated in a long-term split of the platform, according to a ViewSonic source on Monday. The 2.4 update, once thought to be called Ice Cream, is now said to be a continuation of Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) that would simply add backwards compatibility for dual-core apps on single-core phones. Ice Cream, Pocket-lint heard, should be Android 3.1 and would keep the two apart in features and the interface.”
“would simply add backwards compatibility for dual-core apps on single-core phones”? Really?
Personally, I’m more than disappointed in Google. It’s going on two months since ‘Gingerbread’ has been released and I’m still waiting for the 2.3 update on my Nexus One. I could understand the wait if I owned a carrier branded phone, but Google’s own N1? It’s ridiculous, really that I haven’t received my OTA update yet. My feeling is that Google got roped into some sort of exclusivity agreement with one or more carriers and is purposely withholding the 2.3 update from its own loyal customers who went out on a limb and purchased one of their phones. I hope Nexus S users are paying attention. The minute its successor arrives, I suspect they too will find themselves abandoned. I guess I’ll wait patiently for CyanogenMod to beat Google to the punch.
And here I was complaining about minor performance issues on my iPhone 3G…
Seriously Google, I really want my next phone to be an Android, but I also want my phones to last 2 years, and still being supported!
What makes you think older versions of the OS are unsupported? They aren’t, and they still get updated software, even OS software like Market and Maps.
Android 1.6 is the oldest supported version to get any of the new updates, like the Android Market updates.
Yet you can still buy phones with Android 1.5 installed, without any (official) way to upgrade them to anything newer (like my wife’s 6-month old LG Eve).
It’s almost time to consider rooting the phone and installing a custom ROM like OpenEtna.
On the other hand, according to the stats on wikipedia, only less than 5% of Android devices run Android 1.5…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#Usage_share
Maybe lots of people have rooted theirs, or maybe the stats are faulty, don’t know.
EDIT : In the specific case of the LG Eve GW620, LG has released a 2.2 firmware apparently : http://forum.openetna.com/index.php?topic=482.0
Edited 2011-02-08 21:12 UTC
Thanks for the link. Wonder if that will be available for Rogers version of the Eve. Will have to check what’s in the update tool.
One more option in the toolbox …
I’m in the same boat, but I am starting to wonder if they released 2.3 like they did with 2.0. One phone only and optimised for that phone. While everyone else just jumped to the next appropriate version.
I was wondering about the OTA update on my phone, an HTC Desire, too. And I naively thought Nexus One devices had already been updated…
There may have been some 2.3 exclusivity agreement between Samsung and Google but then again maybe there wasn’t. How do you know Google isn’t working hard to port this to the N1?
Cyanogen has a team of people trying to get CM7 (2.3 based) stable on other phones including the N1 and they’re still not there yet. Not even RC. I’m currently running a nightly on my G2 and there are problems.
What Google does with their Nexus line is have all their developers target that phone and that phone only. So when 2.3 was released, it was ready for prime time on the Nexus S only. Its not like Google has 2.3 working flawlessly on a N1 in the back room waiting for some time period to expire. The’re likely working through the same problems the Cyanogenmod team are working through.
…in the text of the news item.
Fixed
I have an HTC T-Mobile G1. Yes, the original, ugly, quirky Android phone with a slow processor and hardly any RAM. And I’m running Gingerbread on it, works great. But that’s only thanks to some really smart devs on xda-developers. This really shows the need for some sort of good update mechanism from Google so we don’t all have to depend on 3rd party ROMs.
How can the company that did so well on the update mechanism of Chrome do so badly on the update mechanism of Android?
On Chrome almost everyone around the world will always use the newest version just a few days after it is available without any breakage so far.
On Android every manufacturer (and their customer) is left to its own update-mechanism severely hindering advancements and making an enormously big parts of the phones “rooted and custom modded”.
And even the techforums can’t seem to agree about what way Android is going in the next versions. Will the “2” branch be for phones only and the “3” branch for tablets only? Will 2.4 be just a minor update? When will 2.4 and 3.0 be out and what about 3.1 and who will get it and who won’t?
Android should be much more like a basic layer (OS) that other manufacters can put customisations on top (apps, shells, themes). But it seems to go the way of ‘1000 Linux distributions that all need to do their own testing and adopting of new versions’