Updates for Android devices are always rolled by the gadget manufacturer, so every time Google introduces a new update we have to wait till the manufacturer of the device decides to roll it out, this obviously takes a lot of time and puts Android at a disadvantage against Apple and Microsoft.
For a Windows device irrespective of the manufacturer if Microsoft rolls out an update all can avail of that update through windows update. Android also being an open platform like Windows should be able to do the same.
If I have a software CD of Windows 7 I can install the software in any manufacturers PC and use it. I may just need to do some additional driver installation if required.
Why can't Android develop their platform to function in a similar manner so that once a new version of Android is released I can install it it any device and o fcourse put in the specific drivers to make it work if required.
With the approach of Microsoft looking very prominent now for both Smartphones and Tablets, this may just be a warning bell for Android, I hope they have their eyes and ears open.
Would be nice to know the views of others. As an Android user do you feel this would be a good step for Google?
kaus1108 said:
I may just need to do some additional driver installation if required.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The above is the key sentence in your post. The problem is that without the correct hardware drivers for your specific phone the OS may not be able to boot at all and will certainly have limited functionality - just look at the issues there are with trying to run leaded ICS / JB ROMs on phones that don't have an official version of the ROM available with the correct drivers yet.
The reason that Microsoft is able to push out a new OS and have it (mostly) work on any manufacturers PC, with any hardware, is that all the hardware manufacturers are given alpha/beta copies of Windows to test their hardware on and to allow them to build the drivers well in advance of the OS being released by the guys in Redmond.
Google don't do that. They release the OS immediately they have hardware support and compatibility for their devices - and let everybody else deal with the aftermath
windows is the opposite from open platform!
android is an open platform.
the phone makers are free to use android as they wish, they can decide if to upgrade or not.
google only realeses the source code.
XDA is there for providing the latest update.
My phone was supported by Samsung till Gingerbread. But I got jelly bean from XDA devs just after a week after the source code release.
But it does have some bugs which cannot be solved without Samsung's help.
But if you wanted the fastest OEM updates, buy a Nexus.
But 50% of the people are normal users who do not care about updates and new android versions.
Sent from my GT-S5830 using Tapatalk 2
SimonTS said:
The above is the key sentence in your post. The problem is that without the correct hardware drivers for your specific phone the OS may not be able to boot at all and will certainly have limited functionality - just look at the issues there are with trying to run leaded ICS / JB ROMs on phones that don't have an official version of the ROM available with the correct drivers yet.
The reason that Microsoft is able to push out a new OS and have it (mostly) work on any manufacturers PC, with any hardware, is that all the hardware manufacturers are given alpha/beta copies of Windows to test their hardware on and to allow them to build the drivers well in advance of the OS being released by the guys in Redmond.
Google don't do that. They release the OS immediately they have hardware support and compatibility for their devices - and let everybody else deal with the aftermath
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you for the response and I do agree with what you say and the key to it is that there are certain things that Microsoft do and Google don't and how it is going to impact users in the future.
I remember when I moved from Windows Vista to Windows 7 all the Vista drivers were functioning allright after installing Windows 7 and I have also faced situations where I did not have certain drivers but the PC still functioned on generic drivers provided in the Windows software.
Don't you feel it would be much better if Google just released a Jelly Bean OS and left it to us to install it and I am sure that based on devices already in the market those drivers can always be included in the OS and each phone would pick its own based on its hardware. Only the new devices would need new ones which Google may not be able to provide. If this were true today I would be installing JB in my Galaxy S3 and not have to wait for Sammy.
djbijo said:
windows is the opposite from open platform!
android is an open platform.
the phone makers are free to use android as they wish, they can decide if to upgrade or not.
google only realeses the source code.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No, Windows is quite open. Apple is the closed one.
Sent from my MB508 using xda premium
Related
i know much fuss is always made about devices getting or not getting updates to newer versions of android. but i don't understand why it's as big of a (technical) issue as it is.
android is based on linux, correct? anyone with a linux-based desktop regularly updates the kernel and various system packages without thinking twice. and the devices continue to work fine. i can run any version of ubuntu i want on my laptop, and they all work fine.
the problem with building the android osp for an arbitrary device is drivers, correct? is it because manufacturers don't release the source code for drivers? i can understand it isn't possible to reverse engineer or transfer a binary blob from one system to another.
but, manufacturers have these drivers (of course); why is it so difficult to package their drivers with newer versions of android? the kernel can't change so much that drivers need to be re-written with every version, or it would have died a long time ago.
this isn't meant to inspire flaming, i'm just curious what it really takes to build android for a device (and have it 100% working). if a device existed with 100% open source drivers, would it be trivial to build android for that device? how many proprietary drivers does an average device have? are they standardized at all beyond the ARM ISA?
I am not a developer so I don't understand why it is so hard to receive updates on some android devices.
Today, particularly I am concerned with the ICS update . Why is it that even though TF meets all the hardware requirements it still can't receive ICS?
To a n average user like me this is like saying "we both have similar computers but Windows 7 won't work on yours and it's nothing do do with hardware".......
it is not the same at all. For windows computers all of the components are supported by their respective manufactures and all of those manufactures write the drivers for the operating system. By doing this you can install windows (or linux) on most platforms because of the cumulative support. In android there are many more steps. Most drivers have to be written by a single manufacturer which may get hardware from other manufactures but they do not provide software support for that hardware. writing those drivers takes some time and implementing them into each release of android as it changes the parameters it accepts ect. then each device has to be tested rather than just testing one part to make sure everything is in order then it goes through google who do even more checks to make sure that it is near perfect before it is released to the general public
Which smartphone has the source for the drivers availbale at the moment?
To know what to choose in case i want to port tizen to it...
frullewulle said:
Which smartphone has the source for the drivers availbale at the moment?
To know what to choose in case i want to port tizen to it...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just wanted to post a new thread with the same question.
Also, which are the phones with the best reverse-engineered drivers? And is there much difference between this and open drivers?
If you have open drivers you should pretty easily be able to port every system to it that supports the same specs as screen resolution, etc, right?
Unrelashade said:
I just wanted to post a new thread with the same question.
Also, which are the phones with the best reverse-engineered drivers? And is there much difference between this and open drivers?
If you have open drivers you should pretty easily be able to port every system to it that supports the same specs as screen resolution, etc, right?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Although it would be reasonable for you to think so, you would also be incorrect. The reason why this isn't the case is because hardware manufacturers each have their own different firmware that they use, which causes a lot of the bifurcation of the Android ecosystem. Just because you have two phones that are identical in every hardware fashion doesn't mean that their firmware is the same, so there is no guarantee that one set of drivers would work on different devices.
syung said:
Although it would be reasonable for you to think so, you would also be incorrect. The reason why this isn't the case is because hardware manufacturers each have their own different firmware that they use, which causes a lot of the bifurcation of the Android ecosystem. Just because you have two phones that are identical in every hardware fashion doesn't mean that their firmware is the same, so there is no guarantee that one set of drivers would work on different devices.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ooohh, so underneath android and its Linux kernel lies a firmware that handles communication between the kernel/ Android and the drivers/ hardware? So I'd need open drivers and open firmware to be able to port anything with ease to this device (at least theoretically)?
Unrelashade said:
Ooohh, so underneath android and its Linux kernel lies a firmware that handles communication between the kernel/ Android and the drivers/ hardware? So I'd need open drivers and open firmware to be able to port anything with ease to this device (at least theoretically)?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, but practically this is impossible as firmware comes straight from the manufacturer, so even if you could develop some sort of open firmware (basically you would be making an open BIOS), you would have no way to install it onto the actual device, since they are hard coded into the chip. You would need specialized tools in order modify on that level.
syung said:
Yes, but practically this is impossible as firmware comes straight from the manufacturer, so even if you could develop some sort of open firmware (basically you would be making an open BIOS), you would have no way to install it onto the actual device, since they are hard coded into the chip. You would need specialized tools in order modify on that level.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Awesome, I'm finally learning what I want to know!
So if there was a manufacturer who gave this firmware/ BIOS code away (because it's an old model or they have been convinced by the community or it's a dedicated device for developers or whatever) then it would be finally easy to port every system to it (that supports the hardware)?
And how come it is possible to port e.g. Linux to Android devices without having the sourcecode of the firmware/ BIOS? Because they reverse engineered it? And if you have a device with closed drivers you have to reverse engineer the drivers *and* the firmware/ BIOS? How come no manufacturer tried to build a developer device with open firmware/ BIOS since it would give them a lot of support from developers?
Theoretically yes, but then you would still face the issue of how you are going to interface with the hardware, as the chips were not designed to be interfaced with via usb devices. They tend to be programmed at production then never altered again.
Android is linux-based, so it would stand to reason that you could port a stripped-down version of linux onto the device. Using other tools, you can create a VM on the Android device to have a fully functioning version of linux, but this is all software-level, not physical level. And the reason why they don't make open BIOS is for the same reason textbook manufacturers keep making new versions of textbook that are almost exactly the same.
Hi guys, is there a clean generic windows phone 7 os? just like desktops were we get a retail os, is there one for phones? and is it flash-able with all phone?
No
No.
It would certainly be interesting to get hold of the OS as Microsoft delivers it to OEMs to begin the process of adapting it to a certain phone model, writing or modifying device drivers, etc., but it seems nothing like that was ever leaked.
WP is closed, as is iOS; for the reasonably open Android there is of course something like a "generic" version; you could even compile and produce one yourself.
There isn't really any such thing as a "clean generic" phone OS, anyhow. Unlike desktop OSes, phone OSes don't ship with support for the massive array of hardware configurations that are found in the wild. Instead, phone OSes rely on a Board Support Package, commonly simply called the firmware, which has the various drivers needed to interface with that specific model's hardware. This is why, for example, even though the source code is available for the Android Open Source Project upon which CyanogenMod is based, it still takes a long time to get fully functional CM ports to each individual device. On things like WP7, where the source code isn't available (except for the kernel and some core libraries), it's even harder.
However, if what you really mean is you want a "clean" ROM that has no carrier customizations in it, there are "open market" ROMs available for many WP7 devices. These ROMs are still specific to the device whose BSP they contain, but are not specific to any mobile operator and usually not to any region.
thanks for the info guys, but it looks like there are no open market roms for the omnia w yet, well, not yet anyway, will keep an eye out now that i know what to look for,
thanks again guys
Answer is yes and no. No oem device created by Microsoft, but there is Nokia. As you know Nokia is part of Microsoft Windows Phone hardware partner. More options etc has Nokia.
Sent from my Lumia 900 using Board Express
Don't you think its about time that google implemented a "Windows Update" style updater for Android if only for the security updates?
I think that in the long term Google should look into developing a system which should allow them to send out the updates (eg: from ICS to JB) to all devices, by simply having a three layer system:
Layer 1: Kernel
Layer 2: OS
Layer 3: OEM Skin, apps, etc...
that should enable them to update everyone immediately and if the OEM's skin needs updating to support one or two features of the new update, then Google could easilly email them during development of the update, and if the OEM doesn't support the update, either don't allow the update to go out the their devices, or if its something small (eg: the moving widgets in JB) allow the update to go out and the OEM can support the updates in their skin in their own time.
as for the hw, if the update only works with ARMv7 CPU's it shouldn't be that difficult for them to tell the update SW that the latest update won't work with that ARMv6 device...
or if it needs slightly different drivers for different devices, it shouldn't be too difficult to install a drivers pack along with the update.
what are your thoughts on this?.
The problem is Windows updates are different from Android ones. First off they are security updates most of the time and not OS updates. It would be possible for Google to do universal security updates for all Android devices, wouldn't be a bad idea. OS updates would be another story. Windows is easy to update because all computers support a minimum hardware configuration going back to the IBM-PC days. This allows you to boot into Windows even with minimal driver support. From there you can install drivers and generally hardware OEMs will provide driver support for newer versions unless the hardware gets old. Android on the other hand needs drivers integrated into the kernel IIRC.
spunker88 said:
The problem is Windows updates are different from Android ones. First off they are security updates most of the time and not OS updates. It would be possible for Google to do universal security updates for all Android devices, wouldn't be a bad idea. OS updates would be another story. Windows is easy to update because all computers support a minimum hardware configuration going back to the IBM-PC days. This allows you to boot into Windows even with minimal driver support. From there you can install drivers and generally hardware OEMs will provide driver support for newer versions unless the hardware gets old. Android on the other hand needs drivers integrated into the kernel IIRC.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'd say it is not about the drivers only. Most of thel vendors supply their devices with slightly modified versions of Android. Google just incapable of controlling and updating those new versions of Android. It is a job for vendors, not for Google.
But idea is definitely good.