Infographic: HTC explains why your Android updates take so long

This overly-complicated chart demonstrates that a significant part of the delay stems from HTC's and the carriers' insistence on ruining a perfectly good operating system with bloatware.

Yeah, that's most of the problem...and it is also what many people refer to as fragmentation...even on a specific android distro the combination of bloatware makes operating one android significantly different from operating another one from a different company.

There is also the other issue that they only care about the devices that they are currently selling, and not even those sometimes...as well as the issue that they are insanely inefficient. That's why custom distros show up days after the PDK is available to the public, in spite of the carriers having a month or more of lead time...and then a year later there is still no official update for most devices.

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One of the biggest criticisms of Android has been its fragmentation, exemplified by Android 2.3 (which was released in early 2011) still having 24 percent share of the Android market.

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Which is why coding for it is also a major PITA. Google allowing carriers to sell 2.3 devices is akin to Microsoft allowing vendors to ship new PCs with Windows XP.

The amount of 2.3 devices still available is mind-numbing, and the hacks for backward compatibility even more frustrating. Even something as simple as the Actionbar doesn't work properly on older APIs.

Originally posted by SProdigy:

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Quote:

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One of the biggest criticisms of Android has been its fragmentation, exemplified by Android 2.3 (which was released in early 2011) still having 24 percent share of the Android market.

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Which is why coding for it is also a major PITA. Google allowing carriers to sell 2.3 devices is akin to Microsoft allowing vendors to ship new PCs with Windows XP.

The amount of 2.3 devices still available is mind-numbing, and the hacks for backward compatibility even more frustrating. Even something as simple as the Actionbar doesn't work properly on older APIs.

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The fact that people actually HAVE to hack to get "backwards compatibility" for something like Adobe Flash is a problem...not the people doing it.

If they really wanted to fix the fragmentation issue, they have to do two things that they won't even consider:
1.) Actually release the drivers, and include them in new distros, so that you can just install a new distro on any old phone and have everything work, just like you can just install a new linux distro on an old PC and have everything work.
2.) Stop trying to lock everything down just to satisfy the carriers...they don't care that apple doesn't do it, they wouldn't care if Android stopped doing it.

Originally posted by KillerBug:

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Originally posted by SProdigy:

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Quote:

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One of the biggest criticisms of Android has been its fragmentation, exemplified by Android 2.3 (which was released in early 2011) still having 24 percent share of the Android market.

---

Which is why coding for it is also a major PITA. Google allowing carriers to sell 2.3 devices is akin to Microsoft allowing vendors to ship new PCs with Windows XP.

The amount of 2.3 devices still available is mind-numbing, and the hacks for backward compatibility even more frustrating. Even something as simple as the Actionbar doesn't work properly on older APIs.

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The fact that people actually HAVE to hack to get "backwards compatibility" for something like Adobe Flash is a problem...not the people doing it.

If they really wanted to fix the fragmentation issue, they have to do two things that they won't even consider:
1.) Actually release the drivers, and include them in new distros, so that you can just install a new distro on any old phone and have everything work, just like you can just install a new linux distro on an old PC and have everything work.
2.) Stop trying to lock everything down just to satisfy the carriers...they don't care that apple doesn't do it, they wouldn't care if Android stopped doing it.

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I was more or less talking about devs needing to hack versus end users. I think we're up to API 18 now, but I had to backwards support to API 8, which is Android 2.3. That's disgusting. You have to add packages to support Google Play, the new Google Maps API, and even the Actionbar, which was previously unsupported officially by Google, has a package now (before you had to use a third-party workaround.)

As you said, there are better ways to do this. They need to stop allowing vendors to ship subpar phones running old software.